Semantic Web narcissism

Have you ever noticed how many articles, links, blog entries and workshops are organized about the Semantic Web?

Have you ever noticed how many articles, links, blog entries and workshops are organized about the humble HTTP?

Yet, everybody uses HTTP while few actually do anything useful with the Semantic Web.

"Broken link" revisited

There was a time when we were used to "broken links" when surfing the Web.

Webs became essentially dynamic and then broken links disspeared.

But the semantic web, reviving that era, shows us plenty of "broken links".

Look for a random ontology, find any supposedly triplified data set, try a SPARQL endpoint: you have high chances of finding the dreaded "broken link".

Common law of SemanticWeb projects: not profitable projects, only supported by public funding, which are abandoned as soon as the payment has been executed (and the taxpayers sacked for nothing).

I don't even bother in putting examples. Google yourself.

SemanticWeb is the Tao

It sounds logic to start the blog defining what the Anti SemanticWeb is. The Semantic Web is a bit like the Tao Te Ching.

The SemanticWeb that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging SemanticWeb. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name.

Ethereal and chamaleonic, the Semantic Web is everything and is nothing. So perhaps blogging against the Semantic Web is favouring it. Who knows. The SemanticWeb is in decline, but it is the eternal promise of future. The future of Internet is, and will always be, the Semantic Web.