Re: What Happened to the Semantic Web?

Wouter,

could you elaborate on the agent calculus bit?


Martynas
graphityhq.com

On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 11:56 PM, 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.
>
>> Now, the Semantic Web is mostly a server thing, which the Google/CSE
>> example also shows.
>
> With the LOD Laundromat 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

Received on Wednesday, 11 November 2015 23:11:08 UTC