I attended a talk by one of the architects of the semantic web last month, and when someone asked what an "ontology" meant, the discussion went off into la-la land with much hand waving and misinformation about some ancient Greeks. My impression is that the effort is directed by some very good engineers who are very much out of their depth when they start talking about subjects beyond the domain of programming; it's A.I. 2.0.

And then there are the problems associated with letting men invent the semantic web.

[Corinna] Bath calls into question "computer science modeling that rests on the Cartesian epistemology," or the belief that way we know that we really "know" something is by having no doubt about it.

If our semantic markup reading robot finds markup asserting that a certain relationship exists and does not find any markup asserting that it does not exist - ought we conclude that we've determined the truth of the matter? Particularly if not all perspectives on the matter have been taken into consideration in even formulating how the situation is described, then an assertion that a particular object has a certain property or two subjects have a particular relationship may be woefully inaccurate in describing reality. There are a lot of things people disagree about and there's a lot of knowledge that people deny for political convenience. The absence of doubt is not sufficient basis for determination of truth.

...

Bath isn't suggesting that the semantic web should be rejected, quite the opposite in fact. "I am convinced," she says, "that the perspectives I tried to sketch here can contribute to build better semantic systems or even prevent them from failure in function or on the marketplace."

Give that person some VC funds.

I myself don't believe anything on the web, semantic or not.  ¶ 2:38 PM