What's our Future in 2025? - Semantic Web: Past, Present, and Future

Dear Semantic Web community

As the year ends, the question remains: How will the Semantic Web look 
in 2025?

Together with Katja Hose, Maria-Esther Vidal, Gerd Groener, and Petr 
Škoda, we contributed this year an article titled "Semantic Web: Past, 
Present, and Future", see 
https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/TGDK.2.1.3 to the 
new Diamond Open Access journal on Transactions on Graph Data and 
Knowledge (TGDK, https://tgdk.org/). This primer has been a living 
document for 13 years; see the link for details!

As many of us cannot resist checking emails over the break, I ask you to 
consider the question: What is our future in 2025?

Many "classical" Semantic Web researchers have witnessed the rise of 
Linked Open Data, Freebase being bought by Google (largely seen as a big 
win), and the beginning and success of the Knowledge Graph era. Many of 
us have moved on to or added topics like graph representation learning, 
graph neural networks, language models, etc., to our research portfolio. 
So, how much of the classical topics are left? How much will come back? 
Should we work more on knowledge graph embeddings obeying OWL axioms? 
Shall we have federated queries not only over multiple data sources but 
also include hybrid queries using similarities in graph embeddings?

In the current 2024 version of the primer, we include the latest W3C 
standards developed by the Semantic Web community. But we also explain 
the journey from the famous Linked Data principles via Knowledge Graphs 
to the hot topic of machine learning on graphs!

*The article linked above is an invitation to contribute. Contact me if 
you are interested!* It will be updated from time to time. We like to 
receive your feedback, and perhaps you would like to contribute to a 
future version.

Best wishes and happy holidays,

Ansgar

PS: For 2025, there is a plan to update the German version of the 
article in an introductory textbook on artificial intelligence. It will 
add Shallow Graph Embeddings, Graph Neural Networks, and the interplay 
of Knowledge Graphs and Language Models. Once ready, I plan to ping this 
back to the English version.

Received on Monday, 23 December 2024 20:42:11 UTC