Stephen Downes says Semantic Web will never work

Stephen says it won't work because companies will never open their data and co-operate.
This is interesting, because it is almost diametrically opposed to my reasoning.

I asserted ("why the Semantic Web will never work", June 24, 2006) that the individual SW will fail because individuals will never properly mark up their content.
I believe that, to the extent that the SW will work at all, it will be at a corporate level, because they're the only ones organized enough to do mass markup.

via Slashdot Why the Semantic Web Will Fail /.

Comments

[Stephen Downes]

It's not diametrically opposite. It's also true that individuals will never properly mark up their content.

I remember several years ago citing (several times) a study by Norm Friesen showing that most elements of LOM are not used at all. And anyways, the same point has been made by numerous commentators, including Clay Shirkey's 'Metacrap', 2001 or so (I linked to that also).

Nobody ever expected individuals to build the semantic web. All individuals could do was fool around with useless stuff like RSS and wikis. Sloppy work, nothing close to RDF compliant. Not business-reliable.

No, everybody expected, and waited, for the academic and business community to implement the semantic web. So that all of these services could work together. Like the travel agent software that would automatically book our whole trip.

But it never happened. We got Expedia and special deals and the wheels fell off the whole thing.

That's why my argument of today isn't just an update on Shirkey, and isn't the opposite of what he said either.

It's a long overdue recognition that we're not going to get it from businesses either. That there is not enough incentive in the world to get them to all agree to work together and give us our seamless (or even close to) web of services.