I hate these kinds of questions, because I have such a hard time divorcing the things I <i>think</i> will happen, from the things I <i>want</i> to happen.  That and I am probably too enamored with the belief that &quot;making predictions is hard, especially about the future&quot;.<p>There&#x27;s another saying as well, which I think <i>might</i> be a billg thing (but don&#x27;t quote me on that) which goes something like this (paraphrased a bit probably) &quot;People tend to overestimate the magnitude of technological change in the short-term (2-3 years out) and under-estimate the magnitude of technological change in the long-term (say, 10+ years)&quot;.<p>I find that&#x27;s largely true.  Next year, most things will be mostly like they were this year, just incrementally different.  2017 will be mostly like 2016, and so on.   But somehow these amazing things tend to sneak in there just the same...<p>I guess I still didn&#x27;t actually make any predictions, did I?  OK, find, you twisted my arm. I&#x27;ll take a stab at some:<p>1. Wikidata will continue to grow in maturity and scope and will be a terrifically import piece of the Semantic Web as it continues to grow.<p>2.  People will continue to insist that the Semantic Web is dead, and you&#x27;ll see  a continuation of something like an analog to the old saying &quot;once it works, people stop calling it AI&quot;. Nobody will ever say that the Semantic Web has arrived, but we&#x27;ll be using Linked Data and related technologies (although perhaps not the RDF&#x2F;SPARQL stack)<p>3. I&#x27;ll predict that at least one new (or new&#x27;ish) probabilistic programming language will gain some major traction in 2016.<p>4. Hadoop &#x2F; Spark &#x2F; etc. will continue to grow in the enterprise and start to move beyond POC&#x27;s and demos.<p>4.5 - but most businesses are still just spitting in the wind, stumbling in the dark, etc. when it comes to <i>actually</i> becoming more scientific &#x2F; data-driven.  But you&#x27;ll see more &quot;stuff&quot; (tools, technology, methodologies) etc. promoting the use of scientific thinking, analysis, etc. in business decision making.<p>5. Zeppelin will grow in popularity as people write additional integrations &#x2F; interpreters for it.<p>6. MOOCs will continue to eat the foundation out from underneath traditional education.  It&#x27;s arguably already the case for programmers and people like us that a traditional university degree isn&#x27;t all that important for many jobs; and  more employers will start really looking at certificates from things like Coursera classes and hiring people without those traditional degrees.