Debate

Long-running W3C Technical Architecture Group issue over whether an HTTP URI names a web page or the thing the page describes, such as a person.

The problem of recognising when different names refer to the same thing. OWL's owl:sameAs states it, but used loosely across datasets it merges things that are only similar.

William Woods's 1975 critique showing that the links in semantic networks had no agreed meaning, mixing up, for example, a class with its members and a definition with an assertion; it set the agenda for giving networks a formal semantics.

Cory Doctorow's essay arguing that reliable metadata is unattainable because people lie, are lazy and disagree.

Clay Shirky's essay arguing that the Semantic Web's reliance on syllogistic logic fails on real-world, context-dependent data.

Clay Shirky's 2005 essay, from talks at O'Reilly ETech and IMCExpo, arguing that hierarchical classification is a habit of the shelf and that on the Web links and free tagging work better than expert ontologies; the best-known case for folksonomy.

IEEE Intelligent Systems article in which Shadbolt, Hall and Berners-Lee reassessed the Semantic Web five years after the 2001 article.

Jim Hendler's 2007 editorial in IEEE Intelligent Systems, six years after he co-wrote the Scientific American article that promised Semantic Web agents, asking why those agents had not appeared.

2008 paper by Pat Hayes and Harry Halpin arguing that reference is ambiguous in any language, so Web architecture cannot make what a URI names fully unambiguous, and that a redirect alone does not settle it.

Halevy, Norvig and Pereira's 2009 essay arguing that simple models trained on very large amounts of web data beat elaborate hand-built models, and that meaning is better learned from use at scale than specified in advance.

Jonathan Rees's February 2012 call, for the W3C TAG, for proposals to change or withdraw the 2005 resolution, citing the cost of 303 redirects: extra round trips, caching, and hosts that cannot send them.

Report of a W3C workshop held in Cambridge, Massachusetts in September 2013. Participants found no standard for checking RDF data against constraints, and a majority backed a working group to define one.

Manu Sporny's January 2014 blog post, written days after JSON-LD became a W3C Recommendation, saying that better Web APIs, not the Semantic Web, motivated JSON-LD, and that keeping RDF out of sight was what made it usable.

David Booth's November 2018 message to the W3C semantic-web list arguing that the whole RDF ecosystem, from SPARQL and OWL to tools, is too hard for average developers, the middle third by ability, and that education had not fixed it in fifteen years; it began the EasierRDF effort on GitHub.

Report of a W3C workshop held in Berlin in March 2019 that brought the RDF, property-graph and SQL communities together. It backed a property-graph query language developed alongside SQL (GQL) and discussed extending RDF to make statements about statements.