Will the semantic web live up to the vision of Tim Berners-Lee? According to respondents to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center’s & American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center, no – and yes. Slightly more (47 percent) of the 895 experts polled for the survey say it’s more likely to be the case that the semantic web won’t be as effective as hoped and won’t make much of a difference in the lives of average users than those who say it will have made significant progress and have significant impact (41 percent).

Not as ringing an endorsement as one might like, but it’s not as if they’re saying it will never happen as envisioned – just that it will take longer than the next ten years. For example, Susan Crawford, founder of OneWebDay, Internet law professor at the University of Michigan, former special assistant in the Obama administration for Science, Technology and Innovation, believes “there will be more and better meta-information, but it will continue to be opportunistic, siloed, and ad hoc in 2020.”

Other respondents see the whole enterprise and its associated standards and technologies as too ivy tower – even political — for the real world; too antagonistic to the commercial sector, where open and sharing are clearly second fiddles to proprietary and patented; and just too darn hard for the average web site operator and database pros to bother with. One can perhaps see some of these as too cynical, but concerns raised about the future of privacy and identity in a semantic web world strike a chord.

The optimists are out there too, though even not all of them agree that the semantic web will be the Semantic Web. ” I’m saying yes to this one more because I wish it and hope for it than that I know or feel it to be the clear shape of things to come,” says Joshua Freeman, director of interactive services, Columbia University Information Technology. And, from Axel Bruns, associate professor, Media & Communication, Queensland University of Technology and general editor of the journal Media and Culture, “I firmly believe that the web of 2020 will be substantially more semantic than it is today – but it won’t be the semantic web in the orthodox definition promoted by Berners-Lee et al,” says. It “is a user-generated, semantic web from below rather than a wellordered, well-structured semantic web from above.”

Other key thoughts coming from survey respondents include:

• The semantic web needs a killer app to really take off;
• The killer app will be a result of having conversational search, which will be the key to opening users’ eyes to the potential for the semantic web;
• While so much of the excitement today is around consumer applications of the semantic web, it’s the business applications that ultimately will have more stakeholders and consumer or social apps.
• And whatever direction the Semantic Web itself takes, online information will continue to be organized and made accessible in
smarter and more useful ways in coming years.

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