What happened to the Semantic Web? (2017) [pdf]
I was replying to another commenter, but they deleted their post. I still think my response is legitimate, and I&#x27;d like to discuss. I&#x27;m including the post and my response to it:<p>&gt; This might be an unpopular opinion, but the Semantic Web was yet another idea that only could&#x27;ve come from Architecture Astronauts. Neither web developers nor web users wanted or needed it, but the Astronauts just kept pushing forward, with no support whatsoever, until people with actual skin in the game of the future of the Web got fed up and sidelined the W3C in favor of WHATWG&#x2F;HTML5.<p>&gt; When the Architecture Astronauts produce a product no one wants&#x2F;needs at a big megacorp like Microsoft, it&#x27;s easy to make fun of them, but for whatever reason when it happens in an open-source environment or in academia, people are a lot more likely to lament &quot;Oh, why couldn&#x27;t they understand?&quot;, which has it backwards: it&#x27;s your job to understand them, and in your arrogance you deliberately didn&#x27;t do that.<p>The Semantic Web flew in the face of enterprises like Google. It posited to put all information into a queryable ontology. With a rich and expressive grammar, who needs Google&#x27;s algorithms to rank anything? All you need to do is ingest and you can weight the edges based on who else consumes them.<p>Google actually <i>knee-capped</i> the web with the WHATWG&#x27;s focus on less semantic documents. The platforms with their army of engineers are what did the technology in.<p>If the Semantic Web had a chance to grow before the giants of tech emerged, we might be looking at a vastly superior internet today.