Page:Aaron Swartz s A Programmable Web An Unfinished Work.pdf/16

4. '''1. INTRODUCTION: A PROGRAMMABLE WEB'''

And yet this is what Semantic Webheads are spending their time on. It’s as if to get people to use the Web, they started writing a new operating system that had the Web built-in right at the core. Sure, we might end up there someday, but insisting that people do that from the start would have doomed the Web to obscurity from the beginning.

All of which has led “web engineers” (as this series’ title so cutely calls them) to tune out and go back to doing real work, not wanting to waste their time with things that don’t exist and, in all likelihood, never will. And it’s led many who have been working on the Semantic Web, in the vain hope of actually building a world where software can communicate, to burnout and tune out and ﬁnd more productive avenues for their attentions.

For an example, look at Sean B. Palmer. In his inﬂuential piece, “Ditching the Semantic Web?”, he proclaims “It’s not prudent, perhaps even not moral (if that doesn’t sound too melodramatic), to work on RDF, OWL, SPARQL, RIF, the broken ideas of distributed trust, CWM, Tabulator, Dublin Core, FOAF, SIOC, and any of these kinds of things” and says not only will he “stop working on the Semantic Web” but “I will, moreover, actively dissuade anyone from working on the Semantic Web where it distracts them from working on” more practical projects.

It would be only fair here to point out that I am not exactly an unbiased observer. For one thing, Sean, like just about everyone else I cite in the book, is a friend. We met through working on these things together but since have kept in touch and share emails about what we’re working on and are just generally nice to each other. And the same goes for almost all the other people I cite and criticize.

Moreover, the reason we were working together is that I too did my time in the Semantic Web salt mines. My ﬁrst web application was a collaboratively-written encyclopedia, but my second, aggregated news headlines from sites around the Web, led me into a downward spiral that ended with many years spent on RDF Core Working Groups and an ultimate decision to get out of the world of computers altogether.

Obviously, that didn’t work out quite as planned. Jim Hendler, another friend and one of the AI transplants I’ve just spend so much time taking a swing at, asked me if I’d write a bit on the subject to kick off a new series of electronic books he’s putting together. I’ll do just about anything for a little cash (just kidding; I just wanted to get published (just kidding; I’ve been published plenty of times times