I find the comment on “having it completely backward” very aggressive. It implies that your view is the right one. In your view, I have it backward. What you forget is that, in mine, you do. I have found the community of users that espouse this view to be very dogmatic and aggressive in pushing their views, and that, to me, is a big turn-off. Recently, as you know, I made the mistake of going down the path of a nasty discussion on those issues, with less than logical people who were in to bully their views through and threw everything but the kitchen sink at me for it, and I’d like to avoid that in the future. If I may: knowing you a little, I would like to encourage you to be the voice of reason in that community by continuing to support a more constructive dialog without throwing in belligerent lines.

I know there are assertions I make that go against the most fundamental beliefs of this community and each individual views within it, and that can be frustrating. But realize this is the same on my end and that of people who support a different definition for the semantic web concept and brand, and so the only constructive way forward is a democratic dialog. I hope this doesn’t come across as a lecture, and I apologize if it does, but I think this is important at this point to mention it.

The point is not exclusivity, it’s that the people working in this field are trying to achieve a particular goal of networking the world’s data: siloing it by not making it addressable runs counter to that goal.

I think you miss the point when you say “If you want the semantic web to succeed, a more flexible vision of what it includes will get you there faster.” Get where exactly? Not where I plan to be. My goal is not to get everyone to adopt the “semantic web” brand, but to adopt the principles that we have labeled semantic web so I think you have it completely backward.

The objective you state (machines understanding the meaning of information…) is not one i recognise as belonging to the semantic web at all. The semantic web is foremost an evolution of the existing web to include networked data.

BTW, I don’t believe that machines can understand the meaning of information but I believe they can use a semantic web to assist humans in understanding it.

My favourite quote from weaving the web: “Computers might not find the solutions to our problems, but they would be able to do the bulk of the legwork required, assist our human minds in intuitively finding ways through the maze. “

As you very well know, I espouse a more flexible view of the semantic web, and I think the top-down attempts at restricting the definition will fail (see my post at http://www.semanticsincorporated.com/2009/02/the-siloed-view-of-the-semantic-web-as-linked-data.html). I understand the focus you want to achieve, and that you see the rest as distraction, but trying to trademark the semantic web brand to only a select set of applications espousing Berners-Lee’s original vision is counterproductive in my opinion, b/c it is the very reason we are having the debates you yourself describe as “unnecessary distractions”.

With this post, you venture yourself in the field of branding (defining the semantic web brand) and as marketers know (I imagine some will find this “arrogant”, but after all marketing is a trade, and I’ve heard ‘as programmers know’ so many times w/o seeing anyone raise a red flag), one can try to manage a brand, but it cannot control how the market will perceive it. The differences between business and tech folks (to use broad, simplified groups) on this are nothing new: think web 2.0. If you want the semantic web to succeed, a more flexible vision of what it includes will get you there faster.

That’s not to say that you can’t assert your opinion about the superiority of the stack or the linked data, but I would recommend finding different brands to characterize those, and letting the Semantic Web be defined by its objectives (machines understanding the meaning of information better and using that to process it more intelligently) rather than by its origins and tools. As I wrote in the discussion you called a distraction, the suggestion to rebrand a number of applications calling themselves “semantic web”, to “semantic technologies”, is unrealistic, simply because you can’t enforce it. Again, think web 2.0 here.

I’m saying it was a mistake, when we launched the Semantic Web project formally at W3C as the Semantic Web Activity, to let nounification run rampant. It has created all kinds of confusions, which generally take the form of pointless debates about whether something is “on” or “in” or “of” the SW or not.

I want the community to avoid another round of “what is the semantic web” and focus on deployment of what we understand and know works. Posts such as http://www.web3beat.com/2009/02/the-definitional-challenges-of.html are unnecessary distractions.

Dan, if you want to convince people that this is just a project then you have your work cut out. Any evidence that it was simply an effort to improve the web appears to have been lost because I can’t find any references to “semantic web project” in the sense you are using it. Timbl’s semantic web roadmap ( http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic.html ) from 1998 which is the earliest mention I can find of the term says this “The Semantic Web is a web of data, in some ways like a global database. The rationale for creating such an infrastructure is given elsewhere [Web future talks &c] here I only outline the architecture as I see it.” It’s even capitalised as a proper noun. I think it’s too late anyway – the tide is with the Semantic Web as an outcome, not an activity.