Re: What Happened to the Semantic Web?

On 11 November 2015 at 23:56, Wouter Beek <w.g.j.beek@vu.nl> wrote:

> ​Hi Ruben, Kingsley, others,
> ​
> On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 9:49 PM, Ruben Verborgh <ruben.verborgh@ugent.be>
> wrote:
>
>> Of course—but the emphasis in the community has mostly been on servers,
>>
> ​The emphasis has been on servers and, as of late, on Web Services.
> ​
>
>> whereas the SemWeb vision started from agents (clients) that would do
>> things (using those servers).
>>
> ​Today we are nowhere near this vision.  In fact, we may be further
> removed from it today than we were in 2001.  If you look at the last ISWC
> there was particularly little work on (Web) agents.
>

I think this may be more a reflection on ISWC than the semantic web.  It's
hard to make a useful client side app that is original, because normally
the same functionality exists somewhere on some server.  So at that point
it probably will struggle to qualify as original research.


>
> Now, the Semantic Web is mostly a server thing, which the Google/CSE
>> example also shows.
>>
> With the LOD Laundromat <http://lodlaundromat.org/> we had the experience
> that people really like it when we make publishing and consuming data very
> easy for them.  People generally find it easier to publish their data
> through a Web Service rather than having to use more capable data
> publishing software they have to configure locally.  We ended up with a
> highly centralized approach that works for many use cases.  It would have
> been much more difficult the build the same thing in a distributed fashion.
>
> I find it difficult to see why centralization will not be the end game for
> the SW as it has been for so many other aspects of computing (search,
> email, social networking, even simple things like text chat).  The WWW
> shows that the 'soft benefits' of privacy, democratic potential, and data
> ownership are not enough to make distributed solutions succeed.
>
> However, I believe that there are other benefits to decentralization that
> have not been articulated yet and that are to be found within the semantic
> realm.  An agent calculus is fundamentally different from a traditional
> model theory.
>
> ---
> Best regards,
> Wouter Beek.
>
> Email: w.g.j.beek@vu.nl
> WWW: wouterbeek.com
> Tel: +31647674624
>