Ah yes, the semantic web. Remember when that was going to change everything? All it required was for everyone on the web to meticulously format their data into

Ah yes, the semantic web. Remember when that was going to change everything? All it required was for everyone on the web to meticulously format their data into carefully structured databases. I can't imagine why it never gained much traction. As an interesting side note, part of the reason of the success of google is that through the page rank algorithm they were able to extract highly important implicit data on the relative popularity, authoritativeness, and context of links rather than being forced to rely only on explicit data. I will make the claim that in the future devices and systems which work on implicit context and metadata are going to be more successful at these sorts of high level pseudo-cognitive capabilities than anything which is dependent on people changing the way they do everything.