Posted on http://gigaom.com/2013/11/03/three-reasons-why-the-semantic-web-has-failed/ as a comment (but at the time of posting it is still awaiting moderation).
I’d like to disagree with most of the article. Your argument “the Semantic Web has failed” does not follow from your “reasons”.
Sure, I’m pretty familiar with the Semantic Web and able to understand RDF (really, it’s not impossible to understand) and (most of) OWL, but that is not why I think a Synaptic Web can live next to a Semantic Web. To start: wouldn’t it be great for your streaming web interpreters to be presented with structured information next to unstructured text? Let it live on top of the Semantic Web (and the rest of the Web).Do you want to exclude facts from knowledge? I, too, couldn’t care less about Leonardo da Vinci’s height, but if I see the Mona Lisa in Paris, I might want to know what else he painted and did and where I can see that. You need boring facts for that. Boring, but useful facts.
For human consumption “messages” are only part of knowledge. Take science for example. Science doesn’t only live in conversation; loads of scientific knowledge is transferred in documents.The Semantic Web doesn’t depend on XML. Or JSON – although JSON-LD is gaining lots of ground. Human end users shouldn’t need to see raw facts in any text format, only developers. Turtle is the easiest to read and write by hand, I think, but eventually programmers will do that just as rarely as they read and write JSON.
We’re still a long way from having phones that measure brain activity to decipher our thoughts before they become pieces of knowledge consisting of concepts and, err, facts about things we do, want, and feel. In light of my privacy, I’d like my phone to not push my thoughts and activities to the Synaptic Web. It could ask specific questions to the Web that I would like answered, but those questions are likely to be based around concepts, time and place (“what museums are open around here tomorrow?”). That almost works and looks like keyword search.
I like the vision of a Synaptic Web (I heard the term for [the] first time today), but to call the Semantic Web failed because people actually want a Synaptic Web was not proven today.