Thinking Clearly .

Some guy says that the Semantic Web will fail and then Slashdot picks up the story and the possibility of sane discourse sags a bit; but let’s try anyway, huh?

First, which Semantic Web does he mean? Tim’s? Jim’s? Nova Spivack’s? Clay Shirky’s? Dave Beckett’s? There are lots of different possibilities and competing or overlapping ideas of what would constitute “the Semantic Web”. Does this guy prophesy about all of them or only some or what?

We take a very agnostic view about all of that, both publicly and in our internal considerations. Our goal is to prosper by solving very hard problems, mostly using and in the context of Web technologies, and in a way that increases, rather than diminishes, our customer’s control over their information and IT universes.

If that’s “Semantic Web”, great. If not, that’s fine too. It’s hard for me to come up with good reasons why we should care too much about the overarching marketing slogan, frankly.

Second, and more interestingly, this Cassandra of the Semantic Web claims that it will fail because—wait for it!—there is no business case to be made for integration.

The Semantic Web will never work because it depends on businesses working together, on them cooperating.

Businesses don’t work together or cooperate? Honestly, that’s just nuts. Not only do they cooperate, but there are very good business reasons to cooperate:

1. trading partners need their machines to trade vital information, including supply chain management, logistics, inventory, business processing state, etc


2. some businesses are so large that they are, in effect, separable economies, larger than many nation states; these businesses need to cooperate between their different, very heterogenous parts, a task that is technically indistinguishable from cooperation between disparate companies (that is, even if he were right, he’d be wrong)


3. e-government mandates and other regulatory requirements (SOX, HL7, etc) require businesses to cooperate with governments and regulatory bodies, and increasingly that is done via machine-to-machine data exchange


4. software-as-a-service is not going away; it’s only going to get bigger and bigger; hence, businesses will increasingly use each others APIs, etc.


5. Businesses in emerging markets often actively cooperate during the market growth phase

In short: businesses cooperate when it’s in their self-interests to cooperate. Which is, granted, not all the time, but it’s not never.

But it gets even worse:

Now – there are many technical reasons why I think the Semantic Web is a loser, along with some cultural and philosophical reasons. namely: the people who designed the Semantic Web never read their epistemology texts.

Not only will it fail for so-called “business reasons”, but also for “many technical reasons” too. Well, don’t keep us all in suspense: do tell! If there are so many technical warts, surely he could mention a few, in detail?

But, really, my favorite bit of all is this idea that “the people who designed the Semantic Web never read their epistemology texts”. That’s an awesome prospect. If this guy is right, Clark & Parsia, LLC, is set for life. We can’t possibly fail…

After all, if there’s anything Bijan and I have done, it’s to have read our epistemology texts!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 at 9:56 am and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.