> I'm talking about how Google now knows business hours and addresses and other such things about local businesses. It isn't because local businesses went in an

> I'm talking about how Google now knows business hours and addresses and other such things about local businesses. It isn't because local businesses went in and labeled their HTML semantically. Consider, though, that this is in part because there already are conventions for this kind of data that make it easier for people (or machines) to pull that data out of the page. The semantic signifiers aren't markup, which moves the problem out of the trivial realm, but they're notable enough it's not even particularly necessary to use machine learning to find them. Addresses and hours are actually examples of the utility of semantic conventions, even if they're not part of a markup spec. > I'm not just using the Semantic Web in a vague way. I'm using it in the way in which the term was used ~2005 (and a few years in each direction), when the religiousity around declarative CSS and such was at its fever pitch. Speaking of religiousity, the religious world has fundamentalists who see their texts claim a flood covered the whole earth and believe the only way to read that is absolutely and literally. There are atheists who agree that's the correct way to read those texts and so obviously they're ridiculous and consequently without value. It's interesting how often the anti-religious and the fundamentalists agree on premises if not conclusions. There was a movement of true believers in a specific vision of the semantic web. What you're talking about may be the only thing those people mean by the semantic web, but it isn't the only thing that people have meant when invoking concerns about semantic markup. Perhaps it is silly to get bogged down in a discussion of the semantics of the phrases like "The Semantic Web." Perhaps instead it would be helpful if we could introduce some distinctions through the increased structure of formal terminology?