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Comment by kator | Hacker News Reader

We've all been talking about "The Semantic Web" for a very long time. I would love to be proven wrong but it all reminds me of EDI[1] which for more then 30 years has tried to develop standards around data formats. I think all of these efforts so far have been doomed to die a horrible death because they don't have an obvious benefit for those involved in the massive investment required to get it right. I think theoretically it's wonderful to imagine a world of infinitely parseable machine consumable information. If anything the robots will appreciate it when they take over the world. Meanwhile I'm not convinced that Humans can attach enough value to the effort to make it worthwhile. But I could be wrong, this wouldn't be the first time and I hope not the last time. :-)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_data_interchange

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Worst of all, for most businesses there is no benefit in sharing their data. And if there is, only consumers of data care about standardized schemas and methods of access. For producers, standardization means customers can more easily switch to competitors. Also, deviation from standards should be expected because producers of data want to have unique selling points. The schema.org stuff is useful, it lets companies use their web site as a decentralized phone book by adding metadata for Google (Maps), e.g. phone numbers, addresses and the like. It's the Semantic Web of opening hours.

From a product standpoint, schemas are small technical details with relatively low influence on the outcome: it just needs to work. Unless you're operating at extreme scale, you should put much more work into whatever you actually do with the data.

Semantic Web people talk about the Semantic Web because it's what they do. They don't just build X, they create an ontology to build X, which somehow makes X better. And, most likely, slower.

I believe any "universal ontology" like this is theoretically impossible in the same way that finding an isomorphism between integers and reals is impossible. I am also struck by how appealing everyone finds such classifications.

But then i am something of an existentialist and doubt the transcendent reality of logic and reason.

While having nothing to do with "existentialism", you might appreciate this. It's the introduction to a book originally published in France in the late 70s, but that might just serve as a world wide web manifesto...

http://interconnected.org/home/more/2005/06/1000Plateaus00Rh...

(You seem philosophically-minded)

The Semantic Web should remind you of every schema and interchange format you have ever seen. That's its purpose. The graph is a very versatile data structure conceptually.

The Semantic Web cannot die because it is multiple concepts and no single concept at all. The Semantic Web is ideas not (just) implementations, and ideas never die.

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