[m34]

Every few months my mind circles around that topic.

I think it won’t work if the underlying transport/presentation is „the web“ (i.e as in Web 2.0).

Instead of decorating semantics/hints around the actual information mostly for SEO reasons it should work the opposite: using all available semantic hints and information bits there already are to create new information by aggregating and putting things in a new context.

It adds value while building upon previous knowledge and allows information and context to be relevant indefinitely.

[beefheart]

Try expressing not such a vague concept, but a concrete, real world application that actual stakeholders would be interested in investing into.

You will find that:

A) It's probably not that valuable

B) None of the hard problems are technological

[m34]

You‘re right, I didn’t go into concrete detail.

It‘s also hard to describe but the best analogy I can come up with: picture a CMS that actually is about _content_ instead of being tied to presentation. So e.g. writing an article about a certain historical event at a certain place consists of stringing all the information and relationships together.

Bringing the correct pieces together eliminates errors and gives a piece of information more meaning when used in different contexts.

Being able to correctly reference e.g. Venice, Italy instead of Venice LA, CA makes a huge difference when looking up time schedules, weather forecast, flight connections etc. Sure there are IATA codes for airports. Wouldn‘t it be great to mention Springfield in an article and having all information about that place (as well as all „backlinks“)?

I also don‘t think it is a technology problem.

However, I‘d like to think about this more in terms of DRY principle of information. There are publications on the web that solely exist to duplicate short-lived, relatively low quality information and putting ads on it. This may be acceptable for some consumer‘s point of view, but fails to create long-lasting contribution to mankind.

Just dumping all bits we currently store into massive archives is possible but taking measures to keep the amount of „information archeology“ needed to understand this data feels the right thing to do.

I‘ll iterate on that.

Sorry if this reads even more confusing and esoteric, need some sleep now.

[PeterisP]

It's worth looking at what you wrote once more from the parent poster suggested perspective "that actual stakeholders would be interested in investing into".

You're giving an example about an improved CMS. If I imagine myself in the shoes of any actual stakeholder who's got a bunch of employees using (or is paying for the development of) a nontrivial CMS system, I don't really see why they would consider your proposed features as needed and valuable. They don't have a problem with referencing the correct Venice, they can say what they want to say as accurately they want with the current CMS systems. If they're writing an article, then either the weather forecast and flight connections would be relevant to the intended message and included by the writer/editor, or otherwise they should be avoided in order not to distract readers from what the publisher wants. Similarly, having 'backlinks' may be considered harmful if the publisher doesn't want the reader to easily go to another resource.

That is the point of looking at the benefit to stakeholders. It doesn't matter if some approach will or will not "create long-lasting contribution to mankind", that's not why technologies get chosen - if the stakeholders who are making the decision on whether to use this technology have an incentive to do so, it will get used, and if they don't have such an incentive, then the technology will die.

And that's the prime weakness of semantic web - its usefulness requires content creators to adopt the technology, but it doesn't provide any strong incentives for these content creators to do so; the main potential benefits accrue to someone else e.g. the general public, not to those who would need to bear the costs of adapting the content. I don't see how it can be successful without addressing this important misalignment of incentives, since incentives matter far more than technology.