
Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web? - agluszak
https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html
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jfengel
What happened to the Semantic Web was Machine Learning and NoSql databases.
Even if the Semantic Web had been a good idea, it took a lot of work to get
any benefits. Machine learning produced Big Wins For Free, or at least
Comparatively Cheap. And they produced them from big piles of unformatted data
requiring no standards meetings or agreements beforehand.

I felt (and said at the time) that the Semantic Web wasn't sufficient to
achieve its own goals. The language they chose wasn't powerful enough to
express sufficient semantics to enable the kind of data integration and
integrity that they wanted. The result was ontologies that still required a
lot of negotiation before you could start working -- and then provided little
benefit.

So the semi-structured world instead picked NoSql databases, which promptly
became full of impossible crap, but at least you could Move Fast And Break
Things. And people took all that crap and ML'd it to get something -- what,
exactly, is unclear, but it was a thing.

I'll note that I pursued ontologies with a more rigorous standard, and I
couldn't get any traction, either. The up-front expense was too high, and I
never managed to convey the story about how much good it would do you in the
five-to-ten year time horizon. Nobody wanted to hear that. I still think it
was a better approach than the Semantic Web, but in the end people chose
flexibility over interoprability.

Semantic Web failed because it was neither Semantic nor Web. It wasn't smart
enough to be Semantic, nor agile enough to be Web.

------
brudgers
a lively past discussion,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18023408](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18023408)

