It's been awhile since I last wrote my blog. I start off by saying that "Semantic Web" is dead. I don't think it will ever pick up and it's buzz has been replaced by "Social Media" and News Aggregators. Purpose of Semantic Web is to write code so that machines can learn and make inferences. For example I want to fly to Tahiti and I get my information on a web page which is written in OWL* (which includes Lite, DL and Full) and the machine via the internet is going to give me the best flight rates. This approach seemed great in 2004 however with the phenomenons of social networking and graph mining have squashed that fantasy. Don't get me wrong, Ontologies and OWL files are still needed in research oriented labs however they are not for the common users. Semantic Web promised us rich logic in the XML document which is parsed by the machine. Social Networks state that humans can relate to other humans and they are smart enough to make the right choices. I, personally, would rather trust someone in my social network to tell me about the hidden restaurant in Tahiti, where they serve grilled island crab and a glass of coconut milk, rather than an Oracle database churning on a RedHat Linux server somewhere on the cloud. With smart devices like iPads and iPhones, folks would rather view a YouTube video than to have a semantic web enabled application which is hogging up the device resources.After looking at the trends, I have to say bye to "Semantic Web" and hello to "Social Web". Speaking about "Social Web", what do you guys think of Rock Melt?
Image taken by happy.apple and stored on Flickr
