
Ask HN: Why Did the Semantic Web Fail? - ianthor
We were promised utopia but it never gained any traction.
======
rococode
I think it was probably just too much extra work to expect wide adoption of
the standards. It could never be strictly enforced by the time it was laid
out, and the lack of enforcement meant it was a classic chicken-and-egg
problem where you couldn't expect people to spend a ton of effort setting
something up when no one else was doing it.

It turns out though, that improvements in NLP mean there is still hope for a
slightly different incarnation of the Semantic Web. There are a lot of
companies out there now, like Diffbot [1] or Google [2], that are providing
semantic searching of web data with structured results. It's not exactly the
same as the concept of the Semantic Web, which would've required content
publishers to tag their own data, but it does move towards the Semantic Web
goal of making web data processable by machines.

[1] [https://www.diffbot.com/](https://www.diffbot.com/)

[2] [https://developers.google.com/knowledge-
graph/](https://developers.google.com/knowledge-graph/)

~~~
Bucephalus355
This seems very true. Also I think the standard was just too ahead of the
tools available at the time. Within the last 18 months it seems CI/CD has
taken off, and obviously that is just anecdotal evidence from my life bubble
that doesn’t reflect what ppl around the world have been doing for years, but
that is something I would attribute to “the tools were finally good enough”.
Especially when you consider that CI at least as a concept dates back to the
late 1990’s with XP.

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tannhaeuser
I wouldn't go so far as saying it has outright failed - it has made inroads in
some areas, such as biblio databases and metadata in academic publishing in
general. HTML metadata, microformats, and schema.org sees lots of use in SEO.
Its applications weren't just as wide as initially envisioned, simply because
giving away your data in an open format isn't a money-maker, in contrast to
putting up a website displaying data along with ads and tracking.

> _We were promised utopia_

That sentence reveals another aspect (a misunderstanding IMHO): that "semantic
web" and XML was shovelled onto you by a clueless academic ivory-tower elite,
an anti-establishment narrative instrumental in the rise of HTML5, WHATWG and
the post-standards world we live in today.

What kindof sucks with W3C's semantic web tech stack is that it captured a
lot, yet was impractical, incomplete, and delivered very little. Even TBL's
SOLID stack for the dweb uses semweb "creatively" for discovering graph URLs
offered by a remote website for replication, by enumerating files/URLs with
regexp filtering and similar mechanisms. Semweb has for a long time captured
logic programming and description logic; only recently are Prolog and Datalog
re-discovered as much more practical means for implementing graph and logic
databases.

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diehunde
I studied semantic web for a semester during college and I found it was too
complicated and confusing. I remember stuff like RDF, Owl, ontologies, sparql,
triple stores and others. But I never truly understood how was all connected.
Besides, from what I remember, these tools were never production-ready since
they came from academia. Although graph databases are gaining a lot of
traction these days so there still might be some space for semantic meaning in
some projects.

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dangrossman
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18023408](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18023408)

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sent00001
A few years ago I got really deep into semantic web. As a software engineer I
had major issues understanding all the standards, jargon, and even value
proposition. Complexity is not necessarily the issue here, but on top of that
I found it difficult to provide a reasonable business justification to my
manager.

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bryanrasmussen
When rococode says 'It turns out though, that improvements in NLP mean there
is still hope for a slightly different incarnation of the Semantic Web.' maybe
the reason it failed is just another example of metacrap
[https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm](https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm)

aside from that my take is that it failed at two different points - first
point original RDF specs and push to add RDF, second point SPARQL.

First point reasons for failure (in no particular order) -

1\. The RDF community were sort of jerks - I can't count how many times people
came on XML-DEV or other communities talking about the difficulties of
representing RDF in XML and were dismissed with haughty versions of you don't
need XML to represent RDF. This was not the most winning attitude to get new
people onboard.

2\. RDF is hard to represent in XML and almost every tutorial that showed you
how to work with RDF did it in context of XML. At the time XML was the runaway
train of standards success, and it seemed like the idea was to attach the RDF
car to it in any way they could. But the two things did not really attach
well.

3\. Web development then, as now, has been about having to deal with lots of
changes all the time, anything that requires a steep learning curve, has no
immediate benefit, and is hard to do right is at a significant disadvantage.

4\. About the syntax and mapping of RDF to XML, at the time I was building a
product that was supposed to handle media transformations between many XML
inputs and RDF was a problem for me. I remember another of the commonly said
things at the time was you don't need to worry about writing RDF because your
tools will do all that for you, well I was writing the tools and I hated it.

So for these various reasons, and the metacrap one, RDF did not take off.

SPARQL not succeeding was actually somewhat surprising to me, when it first
came out I thought it had potential, but I did think it was going against some
things that had quite the traction at the time -

1\. I would often see tutorials with these Sparql/Linked Data URIS had all the
search query in them and looked awful, this was when everyone was very excited
about REST and making theirs urls meaningful to humans - the examples given
just looked bad in relation to the aesthetic current at the time.

2\. RDF was already thought of as a failed technology - once a technology
fails it is really hard to get management to invest in a second coming.

3\. The bloom was off the rose for W3C at the time, this was when WHATWG was
being formed, another strike against from a managerial standpoint I'd think.

4\. Maybe the strains of Web Development are such that it cannot handle more
than one big standard arriving at a time - this is just a feeling on my part
but SPARQL and HTML5 were coming at about the same time (or is my recollection
off - I think both started in 2008-9) maybe there's just too much work for
people to do that.

Ok, these are of course various expressions of my personal feelings as to why
it didn't work, but given our inability to really test the issue I suppose the
same will apply to anyone else's ideas on the matter.

------
nellypat
This is a good write-up on this exact question:
[https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-
web.html](https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html)

