The Semantic Web — by Lee Rainie, Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, Janna Quitney Anderson, Elon University

Overview

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has worked along with many others in the internet community for more than a decade to achieve his next big dream: the semantic web. His vision is a web that allows software agents to carry out sophisticated tasks for users, making meaningful connections between bits of information so that “computers can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, combining, and acting upon information on the web.”

Some 895 experts responded to the invitation of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center to predict the likely progress toward achieving the goals of the semantic web by the year 2020. Asked to think about the likelihood that Berners-Lee and his allies will realize their vision, often called Web 3.0, these technology experts and stakeholders were divided and often contentious.

Some 47% agreed with the statement:

“By 2020, the semantic web envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee will not be as fully effective as its creators hoped and average users will not have noticed much of a difference.”

Some 41% agreed with the opposite statement, which posited:

“By 2020, the semantic web envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee and his allies will have been achieved to a significant degree and have clearly made a difference to average internet users.”

From DSC:
Given the pace of technological change these days, there’s no doubt in my mind that the use of software-based learning agents, learning bots, and/or whatever they may be called in 2020 will be a regularly/commonly-used set of web-based set of tools and experiences by 2020. Such bots will help us locate, connect and synthesize information. No doubt in my mind that will (continue to) happen — the technologies to make this occur will only get better, more accurate, more powerful. Will computers/computing mechanisms be able to get it right every time? No, probably not…but that doesn’t mean they can’t help us a great deal.