Four popular fallacies

about the Semantic Web

2

First: clear up some popular misunderstandingsFalse statement No :“Semantic Web people try to

enforce meaning from the top”

They only “enforce” a language.They don’t enforce what is said in that language

Compare: HTML “enforced” from the top,But content is entirely free.

3

First: clear up some popular misunderstandingsFalse statement No :“The Semantic Web people will require

everybody to subscribe to a single predefined "meaning" for the terms we use.”

Of course, meaning is fluid, contextual, etc.

Lot’s of work on (semi)-automatically bridging between different vocabularies.

4

First: clear up some popular misunderstandingsFalse statement No :“The Semantic Web will require users to

understand the complicated details of formalised knowledge representation.”

All of this is “under the hood”.

5

First: clear up some popular misunderstandingsFalse statement No :“The Semantic Web people will require us

to manually markup all the existing web-pages.”

Lots of work on automatically producing semantic markup:

named-entity recognition, concept extraction, etc.