The Semantic Web has often been hailed as one of the biggest revolutions in networking, the creation of well defined organizational links between media, information and other things between networked media. However, as promised as thei technology has been, it has yet to truely take off. Initially posted in Slashdot, Stephen Downes’s inflamatory post on the Semantic Web has raised many good questions. As he points out, business is cruical to allowing Web 3.o, or the Semantic Web, to succeed. Without business support, it is inevitable that the wave or proprietary formats will swamp the web and then fight until the user loses. This has been the case not only with new technologies now, but in the past as well. With Web 2.0 we saw the rise of ATOM versus RSS, with DRM schemes the Windows Media versus Apple’s FairPlay. Now, with more integration on the way, what evidence do we see otherwise. True, Google is considered to be one of the world’s most advanced and interesting companies. Yet even their front page does not conform to W3C standards for HTML. For an industry wide standard to come into being, more widespread connections between corporate R&D is required. It’s slightly fitting that to define the new wave of standards for links and edges between nodes will require the very same thing, though not neccesarily through technology, but through interpersonal communication between policy makers and implementors. And at the moment, the implementors are threatening to leave the negotiating table. As pointed out, Yahoo!, MySpace, the large companies are leaving the table from industry wide standards on interconnection to move to a more localized network. While this potentially could offer large profits toward the proprietary technology licensees, this requires that they be in the centralized, so-called “large group”, otherwise they risk losing everything. Perhaps Mr. Downes is right, maybe the Semantic Web will fail, if this does not change.

Slashdot Discussion: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/21/0235208

Blog Post: http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2007/03/why-semantic-web-will-fail.html