The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web
The reason why the semantic web is even more fundamental: You can&#x27;t get everyone to agree on one schema. Period. Even if everyone is motivated to, they can&#x27;t agree, and if there is even a hint of a reason to try to distinguish oneself or strategically fail to label data or label it incorrectly, it becomes even more impossible.<p>(I mean, the &quot;semantic web&quot; has foundered so completely and utterly on the problem of even barely working at all that it hasn&#x27;t hardly had to face up to the simplest spam attacks of the early 2000s, and it&#x27;s not even remotely capable of playing in the 2022 space.)<p>Agreement here includes not just abstract agreement in a meeting about what a schema is, but complete agreement when the rubber hits the road such that one can rely on the data coming from multiple providers as if they all came from one.<p>Nothing else matters. It doesn&#x27;t matter what the serialization of the schema that can&#x27;t exist is. It doesn&#x27;t matter what inference you can do on the data that doesn&#x27;t exist. It doesn&#x27;t matter what constraints the schema that can&#x27;t exist specifies. None of that matters.<p>Next in line would be the economic impracticality of expecting everyone to label their data out of the goodness of their hearts with this perfectly-agreed-upon schema, but the Semantic Web can&#x27;t even get far enough for this to be its biggest problem!<p>Semantic web is a whole bunch of clouds and wishes and dreams built on a foundation that not only <i>does</i> not exist, but <i>can</i> not exist. If you want to rehabilitate it, go get people to agree (even in principle!) on a single schema. You won&#x27;t rehabilitate it. But you&#x27;ll understand what I&#x27;m saying a lot more. And you&#x27;ll get to save all the time you were planning on spending building up the higher levels.