Why the Semantic Web Will Fail

Jack Action writes "A researcher at Canada's National Research Council has a provocative post on his personal blog predicting that the Semantic Web will fail. The researcher notes the rising problems with Web 2.0 — MySpace blocking outside widgets, Yahoo ending Flickr identities, rumors Google will turn off its search API — and predicts these will also cripple Web 3.0." From the post: "The Semantic Web will never work because it depends on businesses working together, on them cooperating. There is no way they: (1) would agree on web standards (hah!) (2) would adopt a common vocabulary (you don't say) (3) would reliably expose their APIs so anyone could use them (as if)."

Far out!

Thank God for Web4.1!

So let me get this straight ...

One of the problems is lack of standardization, and one of the symptoms is Yahoo! normalizing Flickr's user accounts with its own?

It will fail for other reasons too

The semantic web will fail because it is too complex and noone outside the academic community working on it really understands it. The ad-hoc tagging systems and microformats Web 2.0 has brought are good enough for most people, and much simpler for the casual web developer to understand.

Re:It will fail for other reasons too

Have you ever read the original presentation of work by Codd on relational databases? How about the RFC standards on TCP/IP? How about the original presentation and arguments on the inclusion of Interrupts in a processor? Boy, those were so easy to understand and obvious that they were even published at all. The process of science is to push the state of the art; which by definition is new and novel. This is the job of the computer science researcher. It is left to others to examine the research and reformulate in terms that mere mortals can understand. If you understand the concepts behind the OSI layers, Lambda expressions, or symmetric multi-processing, thank a computer science educator who abstracted and distilled the hell of the science and research and packaged in such a way that you can understand it and maybe even use it. To claim that failure is imminent because the current presentation of the Semantic Web is too complex is nonsense.

Re:It will fail for other reasons too

You're missing the point. It's not that the current "presentation" of the Semantic Web is too complex; the problem is that actually creating the Semantic Web is too complex a task for most Web content creators to be interested in.

Essentially, the Semantic Web asks users to explicitly state relations between concepts and ideas to make up for our current lack of an AI capable of discerning such things for itself from natural human language. But let's face it, the average Joe writing his weblog or LiveJournal entries - or even a more technical user such as myself - would generally not be interested in performing this time-consuming task, even with the aid of a fancy WordPress plugin or other automated process. This is what the parent meant by saying it's just "too complicated".

The way to realize the Semantic Web is to advance AI technology to the point where it becomes an automated process. Anything less would require too much manual labor to take off.

Re:It will fail for other reasons too

Essentially, the Semantic Web asks users to explicitly state relations between concepts and ideas to make up for our current lack of an AI capable of discerning such things for itself from natural human language.

The problem here is trust. All of the previous features of the web, whether it is javascript or metadata or something else, have invariably been abused by those seeking to game the system for profit. The semantic web is asking the marketplace to state relations in an unbiased fashion when there are powerful economic incentives to do otherwise (i.e. everything on the semantic web will end up being related to pron whether it actually is or not). Indeed there are entire businesses devoted to "optimizing" search engine results, targeting ads, spamming people to death, and other abuses. The problem was that the people that designed and built the initial web protocols and technologies did not account for the use of their network by the general public and thus did not take steps to technologically limit abuses (their network of distinguished academic colleagues was always collegial after all so there would be no widespread abuses). The semantic web will fail precisely because human nature is deceptive, not because the technology is somehow lacking.

In fact, this whole discussion is reminiscent of the conversation that Neo has with the Architect in The Matrix Reloaded. The Architect, as you may recall, explains why a system (the Matrix), which was originally designed to be a harmony of mathematical precision, ultimately failed to function, in that form, because the imperfections and flaws inherent in humanity continuously undermined its ability to function as it was intended. The same general principle is at work with the Semantic Web, the perfect system could work in a perfect world, but not in our world because humans are not perfect.

Web services

Doesn't Web 2.0 reach a "critical mass" as some point, where busineese will no longer be able to not cooperate? Of course, it all gets very fragile even then...

"Why the semantic web will fail"

...says the guy who's blogging this opinion...

The real reason

The researcher is just annoyed because no one sent him invites to Gmail.

Reason #1 the Semantic Web will fail

It was created to solve a problem we had when everyone was using Hotbot and Altavista, but people are trying to introduce it into a world where everyone is using Google. (And Wikipedia. And all that Web 2.0 junk.)

I don't need you to mark "This page is a REVIEW of a CELL PHONE that has the NAME iPhone" anymore. All I need to do is Google "iPhone review" or hop on over to Amazon. Problem pretty freaking solved from my perspective.

Re:Reason #1 the Semantic Web will fail

Just not true. For one thing, Google's results are much too noisy. For another, it relies on keywords occurring on pages, and that's rather primitive (it's not always trivial to find good keywords, and even then you might miss the one page your were looking for because they used a synonym or misspelled it).

But the most important reason is that it would be much cooler to have a web where you could say "give me a list of all the goals scored by Romario" and have it list them for me. I don't care about pages, I want information, answers to questions. That's what the Semantic Web is supposed to be a first mini step for.

Re:Reason #1 the Semantic Web will fail

For one thing, Google's results are much too noisy. For another, it relies on keywords occurring on pages, and that's rather primitive

No it doesn't. The genius of google was that it relies on people linking to pages talking about keywords. And uses various tools to identify and promote good linkers.

But the most important reason is that it would be much cooler to have a web where you could say "give me a list of all the goals scored by Romario" and have it list them for me.

That's a curious thing to ask for, since the first google result is a story about how there is a good bit of controversy surrounding Romario's "1,000" goals. The problem is your request is to vague and doesn't define all the words within itself (i.e. does a goal scored as teenager in a different league count?).

This goal is quite a bit higher than many realize, as you could get 10 people (5 of them experts) in a room and they wouldn't necessarily be able to agree on the "right" answer.

To ask, or even demand, that computers do the same task as a background function is ludicrious, IMHO (at least when applied to a universal context).

Everyone can agree that would be cool

But there are three ways to get that.

1) A search service that indexes all of Romario's goals.
2) A manually built asset that aggregates all of Romario's goals.
3) A standard system of semantic tags that self-identifies all Romario goal assets.

#1 is Google. As you point out now it relies primarily on keywords but you oversell the problem in two ways. First of all most video hosting sites already provide author and/or community tagging--thus providing a way for keywords to be assigned. Second, you're comparing a future semantic Web against the Google of today.

#2 can be provided by commercial video companies now ("1,000 Great Man U Goals," etc). It's also possible that a fan site could do the manual labor to find, upload, and keyword the videos.

#3 is the "semantic Web" approach, wherein all content providers follow a standard for self-identifying their content in a computer-parsable way.

The thing that distinguishes 1 and 2 from 3 is the scope of work required. #1 and #2 rely on a small team of dedicated people to accomplish the task. #3 relies on a very broad group of people of varying levels of dedication.

If you're talking practically about the solution, none of those approaches are going to to get to 100%. As others have pointed out there is a real human semantic problem in identifying which goals of Romario to count, how far back to look, etc.

But the key is that #1 and #2 are approaches of a scope that we know can work. #3 seems unlikely to get the buy-in and effort required.

Re:Reason #1 the Semantic Web will fail

All those spam and sales people will probably still tag their page with "review", the same way people used to stick anything and everything in META tags. The semantic web won't make people tell the truth about their pages...

Corporate Self Centeredness

Only way to set an industry standard is, to get so fast so big in a new market/technology that everybody has to follow.
Problem is, when you get so big so fast, there are almost neccessarily major flaws in the designs.
Problem is, you never get rid of them again.

Google

What are those rumors about Google who would be closing their search API ? Are we talking about the boxes we can put on our sites to make a search in Google ? I thought the add shown besides the results were their main revenue : Why the hell would they close it ?

Why it will fail

It might fail for the reasons given (no I've not read the full article yet - naturally) but personally I think it will fail simply because it's too much work for the amount of payback. It would be great if one day magically over night all our data was semantically marked up but that's not going to happen. The reality of it is that we will have to mark up the majority of content by hand. Even then inter-ontology mappings are so difficult that I'm not sure the system would be much use.

Perhaps worse than that though is the prospect of semantic spamming. It would be impossible to trust the semantic mark up in a document unless you could actually process the document and understand it. What would be the point in the mark up in that case?

Yes. Also...

I agree that the Semantic Web people haven't read their epistemology texts. Here's an interesting article on this topic [cam.ac.uk], explaining how essentially, all this "web-of-meaning" stuff was tried by NLP/AI researchers decades ago, and plain does not work.

The article concludes that a "weak" version of the semantic web may be possible - no clever inference or anything, just a set of data interchange standards. Which is basically the XML / data interchange standards bit of Web 2.0.

But as the blog entry says, even that might not happen due to commercial interests. The obvious (and oh so Slashdot) thing to say at this point is that we need open, not-for-profit data interchange standards - but of course the commercial sites would then refuse to use them. Or if they did, they'd probably try to embrace-and-extend [wikipedia.org] them.

the real reason?

it trivializes the hard problems, and then goes on to make the really soft ones look like they are hard. read shirky [http://www.shirky.com/writings/semantic_syllogism .html]

What is it anyway?

So what is this semantic web / web 2.0 thing anyway?

Sure, we're all seeing community sites, blogs, tagging, etc. But each of those sites is an individual site, and their only connections seem to be plain HTML links. Community sites don't really allow collaboration, blogs are standardized personal web pages and who here uses tags to actually find information? All these things might warrant a "Web 1.0 patch 3283" label, but is it really a new type of web? Is it the type and magnitude of paradigm shift that the first web was? It only seems like people are just becoming more aware of the possibilities of the same web it was 10 years ago.

Why the Semantic Web will work

I challenge everyone to take a look at:

http://wiki.ontoworld.org/ [ontoworld.org]

It will take a while to understand and you'll probably need to read the instructions [ontoworld.org]. But if you can imagine a more user-friendly version of this Wiki you'll begin to see why the Semantic Web is such a powerful idea. Yes, big corporations can really help launch a technology but they are not the be all and end all. Small businesses have played a big role in the emergence of new technologies. Remember those really small companies like Google, MySpace and Netscape?

My gut tells me the semantic web will take off. It won't be a utopia and won't fulfil all the promises, but like so many technologies, it will make things a little better than before.

Cedars.

You keep using that word...

I do not think it means what you think it means

Re:You keep using that word...

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master -- that's all.'

Lewis Carol had it right [sabian.org], and George Orwell agreed with him [wikipedia.org]: "Which is to be master" is the question that matters.

In free societies, everyone is master, and our language is conditioned only by the minimal need to communicate approximately with others. Beyond that, we are free to impose whatever semantics we want, and we do this to a far greater extent than most people realize. As a friend who works in GIS once said, "If I send out a bunch of geologists to map a site and collate their data at the end of the day, I can tell you who mapped where, but not what anyone mapped." Individual meanings of terms as simple as "granite" or "schist" are sufficiently variable that even extremely concrete tasks are very difficult.

Imposing uniform ontologies on any but the most narrowly defined fields is impossible, and even within those fields nominally standard vocabularies will be used differently by rapidly-dividing "cultural" subgroups within the workers in the field.

The semantic web is doomed to fail because language is far more highly personalized than anyone wants to believe. I think this is a good thing, because the only way to impose standardized meanings on terms would be to impose standardized thinking on people, and if that were possible someone would have done it by now. Whereas we know, despite millennia of attempts, no such standardization is possible, except in very small groups over a very specialized range of concepts.

If it can't be defined it can't succeed

Go to Wikipedia (for example) and look up the definition. Then tell me you understand it.

See? Not a hope that a concept which includes 'collaborative working groups' as part of its definition can ever succeed.

I mean these are the people which gave us HTML and CSS, god help us.

Meaning is derived by humans from the interaction between data, knowledge and dialogue. What the semantic web will give us is:

1) Data
2) Limited knowledge to the extent that common, sufficiently rich models of relationships, taxonomies and ontologies are applied to the data.
3) No dialogue. When Google can say 'hello Mr www.fountainofallknowledge.com. I see you have a page called ... which is marked up as being about Mini Coopers. I'm looking for stuff about 1964 Cooper S inlet manifold modifications. This page looks like it might be interesting to my client, but quite a lot of people get confused between the different models of SU carburettor which were used that year. Does this page refer to the model with the No.4 Red needle or not?'

And get a sensible reply.

Which it understands.

Then I'll be interested. Until then all it will be is tagging but with a poncy name and a load of spurious academic nonsense being spouted around it to make it sound exciting.

One word: SPAM

The thing the academics who push the semantic web fail to consider (most of the time) is that the Real World does not function like their Ideal World. In the Ideal World, everybody cooperates and works together to produce something of value for all mankind. So we get lots of correctly and appropriately marked up pages that give useful information on what's stored therein.

But in the Real World, any online system that is used by a large enough number of people will eventually become attractive for spammers and scammers to defile and twist to their own purposes. So you'll get a deluge of pages that appear to be useful reviews of digital cameras (and are marked up as such) but in fact simply go to a useless "search" page that has lots of link farm references.

And if you say "Ok, so we don't trust the author of the page, we have someone else do it"... then who? Who's going to do all the work? Answer: Nobody. AI is nowhere near being smart enough for this. Keyword searching is, unfortunately, here to stay. If you trust the author to do the markup, then the spammers have a field day. If you say "Only trusted authors" then the system will still fail, due to laziness on most people's part - if a system isn't trivial to implement and involves some kind of "authentication" or "authorization" then nobody will use it, period. The Web succeeded in the first place because anybody anywhere could just stick up a Web server and publish pages, and it was immediately visible to the whole world.

The Semantic Web will fail for the same reason that the "meta" tag failed in HTML: Any system that can be abused by spammers, will be abused.

So, the Semantic Web, which is all about helping people find stuff, will fail. Not because of any technological shortcomings (it's all very nice in theory), but simply because we as people won't work together to make it work. Well, a small number of people could work together, but as that number got larger, until it reaches the point of being useful, it will automatically get to the tipping point where it becomes worthwhile for the spammers to jump in and foul it all up.

Obvious

The Semantic Web is a solution in search of a problem.

No matter how cool your RDF/OWL ontologies are, the real world is perfectly happy with plain XML/CSV. If there isn't an obvious benefit, people won't switch.

Other Market

Maybe these things will fail in the public world of free service bureaus with which this guy is familiar, but the concept of webservice API is exploding in the vertical market spaces. In only the last two or three years virtually every single vendor my company works with in the financial industry has launched fully WSE compliant webservices to tie into their products. Previously you would have to work in batch by uploading a file to a secure FTP site and wait for results to appear as another file in that same FTP site. Now the results are real-time.

Companies are certainly embracing the new standards (and yes, there are standards) and they are certainly using them to replace existing older protocols and there is a lot of money to be made in this field.

Skilled Writer

+1 for figuring out how to bash Libertarians and Republicans in an article about the Internet; a task not easily accomplished.

I mostly agree with the article though. Companies will not adopt these technologies until it starts to cost them business. This article assumes, though, that will never happen. I disagree. I think things will move slow at first, but will start to see use more and more. Like all internet technologies, the more they are used, the more people are likely to use them.

One other thing ...

After it would work the academic way. It would be spammed to hell.

Who do you trust giving away the right semantics for a page?

Maybe a handful of companies will trust each other. Or google will make them sign something?

Not a WEB I'm part of I guess.

semantic horizon

this semantic web is not made for today or yesterday: it is made for the future. of course there are obstacles. but if the amount of available online content grows as rapidly as predicted we need a better way to find what we want: we need machine understandable annotations.

so the semantic web fails right now. but your google queries fail you in the future, then what? maybe then the semantic web will also make sense to to the guy who wrote this article.

Why I hope people stop calling Web 2.0 the SW

First, the current Web 2.0={Facebook, Blogs, Tagging, Mashups, ... } is NOT the end of the Semantic Web. What tiny bit of SW technology that has leaked into the infrastructure of these technologies is a tiny fraction of the capabilities of this technology. In fact, I am amazed and appalled at the general reaction of the slashdot community. The general consensus is that this couldn't possibly work because it will require "corporations" to come together (ironic given the etnymology of the word corporation). The same could be said of the early Linux community. That Linus Torvalds is never going to amount to anything because his new OS will require people all over the place to agree on standards (the kernel) and to cooperate in a huge development process that has never been tried on this scale before. I'm quite certain that Linux is just a passing fancy. Seriously though, today's computing paradigm sucks. I spend most of my time working on stupid technical problems instead of actually working on the hard research issues I am trying to focus on. Case in point, I spent the weekend trying to get JDBC and/or PERL to insert a long string into a CLOB of XMLType with Oracle. Why? Because the agent I developed was performing tests and producing result sets in XML, and it would be handy to store in Oracle. In the end, I spent more time solving the "how do I do this stupid task" than working on the actual research issues of the project. In other cases, we (as a community) still spend our time worrying about little bits of a the technical minutiae. One of the things that draws my interested toward the Semantic Web is that it won't work on today's computing paradigm. It isn't going to be successful so long as we are worried about connecting this SQL query to that CGI script, and discussing how we screen scrape that HTML page and extract that information from a CDF file. These are the things we have been doing since the first magentic tapes were sent in the mail to be read by some other system. I think it is time that we start moving on and looking forward to what the next generation of computing CAN do. Yes, there are significant technical challenges ahead. Yes, there will be false starts and probably a high infant mortality rate as we move forward. Already there have been numerous Semantic Web languages (e.g. DAML+OIL) that are being replaced by others (e.g. OWL), and already the research community is pushing a new version of OWL to include in its definition things which we cannot do today. I guess if anything, I am encouraged by the stalwarts of today's technology calling for the impending implosion of the Semantic Web. It means that the research community has pushed so far to the edge of what We (as a species) are currently capable of that only visionaries (not including myself in this set) can see the whole picture. This is good. This represents the first honest See-change in the future of computing that I've seen in years. So, if anything, keep calling for its demise. Keep predicting its death. One day, when the research moves it from science to technology, you will be excited about how cool this new technology is, and Slashdot will be filled with discussions of how Microsoft's implementation of the Semantic Web is terrible, and how the OSS version of a Semantic Web database is 5% faster than Oracle's. And there will be some comfort in knowing that all is right in the world after all.

So what you're saying...

...is that it is this "free market" we live in that will ultimately make the semantic web a non-starter. Businesses won't collaborate because it doesn't afford them a competitive edge. In the end the real losers are we, the great unwashed. Not that a free market is a bad thing, it just doesn't always align with what's in the peoples' best interests.

It has already been known for a long time...

Best essay on the topic I have come across: http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm [well.com]

The Semantic Web May Fail...

... but not for the reasons the researcher cited.

It's relative

This is the real world, most things aren't total successes or total failures.

Most likely the symantic web will fail to achieve all it's objectives but achieve some of them, and may eventually rise again after it's failed. This is the nature of progress. Good ideas that fail are usually resurrected later. However the blogger is probably right, as long as the symantic web is going to be "handed" to us by a group of established corporations it will most likely never succeed, there's too much incentive for back stabbing in that top-down implementation. For it to succeed it needs to be so obvious that there's more money and power available by playing nice that all but the most black hearted capitalists will play nice. We have to be aware that people like spammers exist, though, and anything that could potentially be used to generate advantage will be abused to death.

The real reason = Security

The more functionality and interactivity you have between what were always envisioned as static documents, the more security holes are opened up. This combined with the Search Engine Optimization Industry, which is dedicated to lying about a sites content and relative importance, will ultimately sink any attempt to bring any trustable semanticness to the Web.

Anti-semantism

I categorically condemn these anti-semantic comments. There is no place in our modern, advanced society for bigots like these blatant anti-semantites. Someone should alert the ACLU.

As spoken by an anonymous coward last time...

Will this mean that I will never be able to search for "Girls with breasts bigger than 36D"?

Sighs...

I used to love semantic Web 5.1, but I'm sorry to say it can't even handle the simplest Word. I wonder who will make the Web Perfect? We need a Novell idea, I think.

I think the SW will be developed bottom up

I recently read a critique of "weak" SW (the "lower case semantic web") techniques like microformats, etc. The idea was that we need a high level metadata standard.

Contrary to this opinion:

I recently wrote in my my AI blog [blogspot.com] about my expectations that the SW will develop from the bottom up. I also wrote about this 3 years ago (PDF "Jumpstarting the Semantic Web" [markwatson.com], skip to page 3).

So, I partially agree with Stephen Downes that cooperation is unlikely, but the SW in some form will happen.

RDF promotes interoperability and extensibility

Stephen's argument is based on the belief that "The Semantic Web will never work because it depends on businesses working together, on them cooperating." He says:

"But the big problem is they believed everyone would work together:

• would agree on web standards (hah!)
• would adopt a common vocabulary (you don't say)
• would reliably expose their APIs so anyone could use them (as if)"

While the argument he makes is grounded in his distrust of corporations, which I share to some degree, his second point above is off the mark, at least for RDF.

One of the features of the W3C's model [w3.org] (based on RDF) is that it doesn't push the idea that everyone should adopt the same vocabulary (or ontology) for a topic or domain. Instead it offers a way to publish vocabularies with some semantics, including how terms in one vocabulary relate to terms in another. In addition, the framework makes it trivial to publish data in which you mix vocabularies, making statements about a person, for example, using terms drawn from FOAF [xmlns.com], Dublin Core [dublincore.org] and others.

The RDF approach was designed with interoperability and extensibility in mind, unlike many other approaches. RDF is showing increasing adoption, showing up in products by Oracle [oracle.com], Adobe [adobe.com] and Microsoft [dannyayers.com], for example.

If this approach doesn't continue to flourish and help realize the envisioned "web of data", and it might not after all, it will have left some key concepts, tested and explored, on the table for the next push. IMHO, the 'semantic web' vision -- a web of data for machines and their users -- is inevitable.

Misconceptions and risk-aversion

Well, if his first point was correct, the web wouldn't exist at all. Allthough there are lengthy fights in for example the HTML area, and it took a while to get RDF on a firm footing, semweb standardisation is actually moving pretty quickly now that we have the foundations.

His second point is just a common misconceptions and FAQs [w3.org]. It doesn't require that people does that.

I have just accepted a position with a consultancy that does a fair amount of work for those cut-throat businesses. And they are interested, very interested, in fact. Which is also why Oracle, IBM, HP, even Microsoft is interested.

Typical use case for them is: So, you bought your competitor, and each of the companies sit on big valuable databases that are incompatible. You have huge data integration problem that needs solving fast. So, throw in an RDF model, which is actually a pretty simple model. Use the SPARQL query language. Now all employees have access to the data they need. Problem solved. Lots of money saved. Good.

But this is not part of the open web, you say? Indeed, you're right. So, Semantic Web technologies have allready succeeded, but not on the open web. And since I'm such an idealist, I want it on the open web. So, the blog still has a valid point.

We need to make compelling reasons why they should put (some) data on the open web. It isn't easy, but then, let TimBL tell you it wasn't easy to get them on the web in the first place. It is not very different, actually. The main approach to this is capitalise on network effects. There is a lot of public information, and we need to start with that.

So, partly, that's what I'll do. We have emergent use cases, and that's the evil part of cut-throat business. You don't talk about those before they happen. So, sorry about that. I think it will be very compelling, but it'll take a few years. If you're the risk-averse kinda developer who first and foremost has a family to feed, then I understand that you don't want to risk anything, and you can probably jump on the bandwagon a couple of years from now, having lost relatively little.

But if you, like me, like to live on the edge, and doesn't mind taking risks doing things that of course might fail, then I think semweb is one of most interesting things right now.

This is not failure

I think the problem is in the author's head. Difficulties always exist between vendors. They are worked out when the beneifts of cooperation outweigh the benefits of non-cooperation. I believe what we are calling the semantic web has other features that many consider failure but in reality are inherent to sharing the amount of information we are trying to share, namely, universal uniformity and a single clean interface into human civilization (which is really what the sm is) is impossible and foolish to hope for. The semantic web will make some things vastly easier and the price we will pay is that other things will become far more difficult. This will stimulate more innovations and hence more problems, etc.

Physics Analogy

Apart from the issues of semantic web relying on people to be unbiased, honest, and smart it seems like using this semantic idea to catalog everything is like using high school level general mechanics to describe the universe.

It all works just fine as long as you don't want to talk about incline planes that have friction or springs that have mass. Describing lots of real things is messy.

I think at this point we'd have a better shot at making machines think like people rather than trying to get people to think like machines.

Why it will fail.

The reason this will not work is because businesses don't want to share information. They want to make as much money as they can from it. The Semantic Web will look appealing to smaller organizations and individuals, but businesses won't consider it.

Top Down?

Top down initiatives rarely work. The 'Web 2.0' is just such a grand scheme that will probably fail. On the other hand, the components of a semantic web already exist in limited domains and in several different versions. As they grow (from the bottom up), a process akin to evolution will select the fittest systems or hybrids of several. (This assumes that the cost of adopting certain systems' best attributes isn't driven too high by licensing restrictions.) The whole 'Web 2.0' thing just seems to be a big social club to which only a select group are invited.

Once invited to the club, all of the members (Microsoft, Google, IBM, etc.) will be watching each other like hawks to make sure nobody breaks out ahead of the pack with some new technology. Because of this, I think that the various components that make up something like a semantic web will come from outsiders. Maybe from a couple of students at Stanford. Or more likely a start-up in Bangalore. They seem to be getting quite a lot of the data mining contract work and I'd bet that this expertise is what will grow into a web-wide product.

Google already turned off its Search API

Google already turned off its Search API for new registrations; only those already w/ accounts can continue using the web services-based search API. I believe their AJAX API, which is less useful, is still open.