Re: Keeping the Faith

You  may find solace in knowing that big names are willing to fund projects that could jump start and accelerate semantic web technologies.See: <http://allenai.org/semantic-scholar/>, the Semantic Scholar project funded by the Allen Institute for  AI.
My prediction is that the semantic web will get a major accelerator effect and push once science publishers, eHealth, mHealth, projects like Watson find common ground applications, and when the global initiative to bring science to the masses, like the March for Science Initiative and the UN Sustainable Development Goals get their big data footing in solid new data mining and semantic content generation technologies.
Open and inclusive science fosters open and inclusive science publishing, which will in turn drive new technologies for (search on) linked data on the Internet.
And I haven't even factored in the advent of all semantic web technologies being created for overlay structures for the Internet of Things.
 Milton Ponson
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PO Box 1154, Oranjestad
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Project Paradigm: A structured approach to bringing the tools for sustainable development to all stakeholders worldwide through collaborative research on applied mathematics, advanced modeling and creating ICT tools for development

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    On Sunday, April 30, 2017 11:41 AM, John Flynn <jflynn12@verizon.net> wrote:
 

 Brent,

There have been some excellent discussions in response to your email. As the integration program manager for the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML)I became a true believer. The DAML project started with RDF and extended the concept to allow significant representation capabilities based on descriptive logic principles, resulting originally in DAML, which eventually evolved into the Web Ontology Language (OWL). I believed the representation capabilities of OWL were adequate, and attractive enough, to allow communities of interest to develop semantic representations of their specific domains in a way that would interact with each other, eventually providing a standard semantic representation of most of the important information on the web. That didn't happen. One underlying issue was tension between the idea of migrating HTML web page information into a semantic representation and the idea of providing semantic representation of large raw data sources instead of HTML data. Of course, ideally you could do both, but they require different approaches and dilute the technical research capabilities available to find viable solutions. Another issue is the tendency to develop competing technical solutions, sometimes based on the desire for companies to own a proprietary solution, and sometimes based on the natural desire to build a better mousetrap. This is reminiscent of the history of the ADA programming language. At the time there were true believers that ADA could become the universal standard for large-scale computer programming - providing huge benefits in reusable code and friendly interactions between independently developed applications. The same sort of tensions pulled on the concept of ADA. Companies wanted proprietary solutions and researches made valid points that no single language could cover all their individual needs.  

So, where does that leave us. Research and development will continue on aspects of the semantic web concept. Actual implementations of specific successful solutions within specific domains will continue to occur. A globally accepted single approach to semantic representation in the spirit of the success of the original HTML Web will probably eventually occur. The promise, and scope, of benefits are compelling and I am keeping the faith. However, my expectation for the time of redemption has been extended significantly. 

John Flynn 
http://semanticsimulations.com 

-----Original Message-----
From: Brent Shambaugh [mailto:brent.shambaugh@gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, April 28, 2017 7:12 PM
To: semantic-web@w3.org
Subject: Keeping the Faith

General Question:

How do you keep the faith or vision with respect to semantic web and linked data? I'm also in an area where there is not a lot of venture capital (well some) nor (many) people having a lot of understanding of the area. At least it does not score you a talk. Is the field of dreams mentality of "if you build it, he will come"?

-Brent Shambaugh

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