Valentin's Blog

This post makes a pretty weak argument why the Semantic Web will fail. One of its main arguments is that it relies on the cooperation between business that just isn't going to happen. Other have already pointed out that this statement is clearly false (here and here) and I just wanted to point to RSS, ATOM, iCal and Sitemap as examples for data standards jointly supported by different companies - there's just no reason to assume that this list cannot grow.

However, I do agree that the Semantic Web community too often just naively assumes that everyone "wants to share"; that it ignores the business cases. For example there is no major work on the question of how I can monetize an investment in ontology building - even though everyone agrees that a formal ontology is difficult and expensive to build. Wikipedia like approaches are only getting as so far - most metadata will only get created if the creator sees a monetary advantage in doing so. Finding that advantage is more difficult on the Semantic Web because the data will most probably by used by a computer agent - so I can't fund the data's creation by placing ads at its side.

So - what is the equivalent funding mechanism to ads that works for the Semantic Web? Or - alternatively - how can we place ads on the Semantic Web?

Readers interested in this questions may also want to look at my Semantic Announcement Sharing paper from 2004. There we take a holistic look at the factors that made RSS a success - including the motivation of people to contribute the data. We then use this factors to identify a different domain and to create a metadata standard for it (the sharing of information of events). Back then I lacked the time to follow through and actually promote this standard - but its still the best standard for metadata about events and events are still a great domain for Semantic Web technologies :)

Labels: SemanticWeb