Valentin's Blog

The Semantic Web, by whatever name it comes to be called, is inevitable.

This is Michael K. Bergman statement in the article "Structure Paves the Way to the Semantic Web".  And I'm only using his statement as an easily accessible example here - similar statements have been repeated thousands of times. So - is this so? Is the Semantic Web inevitable?

Well,  its easy to be certain, if only you are sufficiently vague. In general people making this statement do not give a definition for the Semantic Web - Michael K. Bergman being no exception. This way they can generalize the term until its almost without meaning and are not really making any prediction(s). Humankind is going to continue to develop better tools to organize information and these tools will be somehow grow on/out of the current Internet? Well, duh, I'm not going to argue with that.

But: isn't it part of the Semantic Web vision that this will be achieved by publishing machine understandable data in a distributed fashion similar to the current WWW? Still a very vague statement, but one that allows for alternative visions: we could also see better information organization based on natural language processing technologies or on a centralized everything-is-stored-at-Google model. So, no; this Semantic Web seems likely, but is not inevitable.

And the traditional uppercase Semantic Web vision even states that this will be achieved by building one distributed global knowledge based systems (kbs) based on traditional knowledge representation techniques - by far eclipsing all previous kbs's in scale and diversity of content. Stated this way the only thing inevitable about the Semantic Web is its failure.

So then, is the Semantic Web inevitable? Depends, please define Semantic Web ;)

Labels: SemanticWeb