RE: What Happened to the Semantic Web?

  *   > Yes, lots of research ... but only in private companies.
> They are surging ahead.

Certainly on the Big-Data front, yes. But still quite a bit of academic research as well!

Personally I am quite happy for industry to be catching on – for a while there was a sad trend of Semantic Web researchers disconnecting with technology and the Web – somehow being stuck on the S of SW, often not even putting their “Semantic Web” data on the web.

During this decade I think this has luckily converged back, thanks to efforts like Schema.org and industry uptake. We might have lost a few in S-land, but they’ll survive. (Be aware of papers with not a single URI inside!)

You may want to have a look at the ISWC2017 programme – conference starts in two weeks time, but the papers are freely available online (although in PDF format). You may particularly want to have a look at the more pragmatic “Resource” and “In-Use” tracks.

https://iswc2017.semanticweb.org/program/accepted-papers/



{ Rant of the day:

Still waiting for Semantic Web researchers and venues to eat-your-own-dog-food – see for instance https://www2018.thewebconf.org/ which for some reasons only accepts “Web” papers as PDFs in ACM layout. Why?

Somehow publishing in Computer Science have hardly changed format at all since the golden years – unlike other domains we’re still worshiping the style of a by-gone era, as in this (I admit beautiful) ALGOL paper I found on a colleague’s desk the other day https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1002164 -- except for the front pages you couldn’t tell it is from 1964!
}

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Stian Soiland-Reyes, eScience Lab
School of Computer Science, The University of Manchester
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9842-9718