The Reality of the Semantic Web
Date: 2026-08-30
There is this Semantic Web thing that people, Including the Founder of the World Wide Web[1], like to talk about. It doesn't seem to have gotten anywhere and is just something nerds like to talk about. Let's articulate the vision, check in on where it is at, and try to guess at what the nerds are expect from this collection of ideas.
The Vision of Hypertext, "Anything must be able to link to anything"
The Vision of "Semantic Web", data with well defined meaning is exchanged, and computers and people work side by side in cooperation.
Well last time I checked we have this wikidata thing which has a beautiful graph of what people find relevent. But people don't use that graph with anything. Like every article on the internet should be tagged with RDF Quads to wikidata to describe what it is about. Every reference to a popular enough person should link to their wikidata entry. Every mention of a place should link to its wikidata entry. Every mention of a movie or song should linkt to its wikidata entry. Last I checked there is not a single website on the internet that tries to do this.
AI can do a bunch of this labeling retroactively, but there isin't even an app or medium for the AI to do it. There should be a browser extention that color codes all the types of wikidata links, green for places, yellow for people, blue for definitions, red for media. Each of these types of objects can be turned on or off via toggles in the chrome extension. There should also be filters to see how different "organizations" tagged the same content.
..... Thoughts?