Clay Shirky nailed in in 2003: https://deathray.us/no_crawl/others/semantic-web.html https://deathray.us/no_crawl/others/semantic-web.html I'll just excerpt t

Clay Shirky nailed in in 2003: https://deathray.us/no_crawl/others/semantic-web.html https://deathray.us/no_crawl/others/semantic-web.html I'll just excerpt the conclusion: ``` The systems that have succeeded at scale have made simple implementation the core virtue, up the stack from Ethernet over Token Ring to the web over gopher and WAIS. The most widely adopted digital descriptor in history, the URL, regards semantics as a side conversation between consenting adults, and makes no requirements in this regard whatsoever: sports.yahoo.com/nfl/ is a valid URL, but so is 12.0.0.1/ftrjjk.ppq. The fact that a URL itself doesn’t have to mean anything is essential – the Web succeeded in part because it does not try to make any assertions about the meaning of the documents it contained, only about their location. There is a list of technologies that are actually political philosophy masquerading as code, a list that includes Xanadu, Freenet, and now the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web’s philosophical argument – the world should make more sense than it does – is hard to argue with. The Semantic Web, with its neat ontologies and its syllogistic logic, is a nice vision. However, like many visions that project future benefits but ignore present costs, it requires too much coordination and too much energy to effect in the real world, where deductive logic is less effective and shared worldview is harder to create than we often want to admit. Much of the proposed value of the Semantic Web is coming, but it is not coming because of the Semantic Web. The amount of meta-data we generate is increasing dramatically, and it is being exposed for consumption by machines as well as, or instead of, people. But it is being designed a bit at a time, out of self-interest and without regard for global ontology. It is also being adopted piecemeal, and it will bring with it with all the incompatibilities and complexities that implies. There are significant disadvantages to this process relative to the shining vision of the Semantic Web, but the big advantage of this bottom-up design and adoption is that it is actually working now. ```