Semantic Web, We Hardly Knew Ye
Meaningless buzzwords last a few years at best before they lose their cachet with the digirati. So it is with the too-clever-by-half coinage “Web 2.0″, which after over three years of wide usage has overstayed its welcome. Obviously it must be replaced, and just as obviously, the replacement must be “Web 3.0″. Duh. The only problem left, really, is just determining what Web 3.0 means — details perhaps, but important. Some have taken it upon themselves to supply definitions, sometimes self-serving, sometimes vague to the point of meaninglessness, but all just armchair futurism.
Nevertheless, some themes keep cropping up. Mobile, for one. The Semantic Web, for another. It seems that in casting around for new buzzwords, it’s been a no-brainer to simply grab hold of one that’s been around a while but never materialized, even though intelligent people kept insisting it was just around the corner (kinda like AI).
I’ve long been of the opinion that the Semantic Web — herein “SW” — was clever, ambitious, and doomed to fail. It imposes structure on information rather than deriving structure from information. There’s a reason why we no longer use web directories and switched to search engines instead. Remember the original Yahoo directory? Yeah. Didn’t think so.
Even if it was feasible to impose this structure, who exactly do we expect to do it (and do it well) and then maintain it? The internet is organic and large because there’s a low barrier to entry; do we really expect every site out there to start layering a (very complex and difficult) new set of concepts and standards on top of what they already have — and everything they introduce in the future — which in many (or, likely, most) cases is completely secondary to the things they actually care about? And if they do, who’s going to get all these domain-specific ontologies (the schemas, if you will, of the SW “databases”) to interoperate — since, realistically, most sites which were at all innovative would end up with their own domain-specific ontology? The two biggest browsers on the planet can’t even get HTML and JavaScript to work consistently with one another, and getting diverse ontologies to integrate is a hell of a lot more difficult — and has to be solved many times, not once. In computer-science terms, it’s an O(N^2) problem, while getting HTML right isn’t even O(N): it’s O(1). So I’ll believe it when I see it.
Which brings up the main point of this post: I haven’t seen it. The underlying technologies and ideas are used here and there within enterprises and single applications, using rdf and ontologies to structure information internally. And that’s great; I don’t doubt that they could continue to flourish in many such niches, and provide structure that is sorely lacking today. What I haven’t seen is the emergent thing that everybody talks about: the pieces of that cohesive SW itself; actually using this stuff to expose and connect information.
But it’s not just me. Despite the futurists throwing the term around because it sounds so Next Generation, interest in the technologies themselves has been steadily declining. The graph below shows Google trends for a few SW-related keywords (ontology, rdf, and “semantic web” itself, picked for diversity: ontology is a concept, rdf is a concrete technology). Obviously this means little about the inherent worth of the technology, but search trends these days tend to correlate reasonably well with how much interest there is and, more significantly, how much a technology is actually being used.
Lo and behold, they’ve all declined pretty steadily for the last three years now (which is as much trend data as Google provides). And they’ve all declined at a pretty similar rate, suggesting that this is a real trend and not just a bias in one of the terms.
Ontology and rdf are higher than semantic web, which makes sense — they’re real technologies in (limited) use today, and do have a purpose outside of the high-concept SW.
There’s some noise, of course (for instance, a spike in the rdf curve in July 2007 correlates to news stories about the Rwandan Defense Force). There was a lot more noise when I tried to search for the Web Ontology Language, “owl”, for obvious reasons. These three terms seem to match the intended targets pretty closely, though.
Web 3.0 may be about Seth Godin’s “Web4″, or Marc Andreesen’s Level 3 Platforms, or location-aware / mobile, or who knows, maybe we’ll finally even get that 3D web when virtual worlds meet social networks. Hell, maybe it means killing off the browser as we know it altogether. Most likely we won’t know it ’till we see it. Sorry, Tim, you got Web 1.0; let somebody else have a turn.
I’d love to hear rebuttals (I’m fully expecting them from some corners). ‘Cause, you know, sometimes I’m wrong.