Much of the criticism aimed at The Semantic Web relates to it's difficulty - both to learn and to implement - but technical issues aren't the only problem. A greater problem may be human nature itself - do people have a self-interest sufficient to motivate them to implement the Semantic Web, and, if implemented, will people pay any attention to it?

The Semantic Web is a promise of precision in language - a precision which is required if we are to leverage it's promise. Human language, on the other hand, is ambiguous, tinted with values, and, in many instances, designed to persuade rather than to represent. If we consider a news story in any given newspaper, the journalist and editor have taken great care to provide the reader with the important facts, but not all of the facts, because there's not enough room on the paper, nor enough time in people's lives to gather every related fact to every event. What this means in terms of precise language is that news stories are redacted - the facts are chosen to represent a point of view, a perception of the events in question. This does not mean that there is any malicious bias, or intended distortion of the news story - it means that a selection of facts have been gathered and that a human has rendered some kind of judgement upon their relevence.

This line of thought occurred to me after reading an interesting article about 9/11 published on Janes.com on the second anniversary of the crime. What caught my attention was the observation that XML could have prevented 9/11. Huh? Now, we have all seen a lot of hype about XML, but this seemed over the top...improve the bottom line....increase flexibility...save the world...come on, now. It's a file format.

Upon further reading, the point the author was making was that there were enough facts available and widely distributed through the media and other authoritative information sources to have predicted 9/11, but that we didn't predict it because we were unable to identify these critical facts from the background data noise that we all face daily. The author asserted that Semantic Web technology, applied systematically to this data, would make it easier to sort through all of it and to piece these different pieces together and, possibly, make it more likely to make the necessary connections among data points to allow us to prevent future terrorist activities. Theoretically, I see his point. But I'm not sure if it will ever work.

He envisioned teams of specially trained researchers sorting through all the data and applying Semantic Web encoding to the data so that it would be stored in a massive RDF (I assume) repository and upon which all kinds of inferencing could be done. As a newspaper professional (at the time) this made me wonder about what would be involved in taking the average news story and making use of RDF to make it more meaningful and useful in that context. Would news organizations do the work themselves, or would it be the responsibility of researchers culling data after the fact? (Is there a business opportunity in doing this?)

Knowing that journalists (see Journalism) like to feel their way through stories, and often have an active contempt for technology, I have my doubts (if you've been around newsrooms for any significant period of time, you can still hear stories about cantankerous journalists who insist on using typewriters - stories always told with mythic admiration).

I once took a class called The Rhetoric of Written Discourse - and this is the topic I will turn to next as I try to ferret out an answer to the question of the relationship between rhetoric and the Semantic Web...and whether the Semantic Web will ever find a home outside of scientific and academic circles.