Semantic Web Scepticism and Critic

On this page we collect a number of essays and posts that criticise the Semantic Web. It is menationed several times that the Semantic Web was supposed to make online information understandable to machines by adding structured meaning through metadata and shared ontologies. However, many of the critics argue that this vision was unrealistic.

One major problem is citeted in that the Semantic Web may rely too much on people to create accurate and consistent metadata. But in reality, humans are busy, biased, and often inaccurate, making the foundation of the system unreliable. Another criticism is that ontologies —the formal structures meant to define how concepts relate— are too rigid. Meaning changes across cultures, contexts, and time, and no single classification system can capture this complexity. On the contrary it may highlight this feature of information.

Critics also point out that the Web is too large and varied for everyone to agree on shared standardisation. While Semantic technologies can work very well in small, controlled environments, they do not scale easily to the open, messy nature of the real Web. Meanwhile, ordinary users rarely notice or benefit from these technologies. In practice, people rely on search engines, links, and tags and folksonomies rather than complex logical semantic frameworks.

Finally, the effort required to maintain Semantic Web systems often outweighs the benefits. More recent approaches, especially machine learning and connectionist AI, extract meaning from data without requiring humans to define everything upfront.

Overall, the idea of a Semantic Web didn’t fail because the technology was flawed —it failed because it asked the World Wide Web to behave in ways that people don’t. Meaning the online space grows organically from how people use information, not from a top-down rule based design. As a result, the dream of a fully semantic, machine-understandable Web remains largely unfulfilled, even though some of its tools find it well deserved application an use. Mainly in expert domains and hybrid AI systems.

Essays and Online Publications

Cory Doctorow. Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia. 26 August 2001 (May 15 2001. First draft)
https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm

Clay Shirkey. The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview. in Networks, Economics, and Culture. November 2003
https://www.karmak.org/archive/2004/06/semantic_syllogism.html (retrieved 2020)

Clay Shirkey. Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags. 2005
https://oc.ac.ge/file.php/16/_1_Shirky_2005_Ontology_is_Overrated.pdf (retrieved 2020)

Tim O'Reilly. My "Outdated View" of the Semantic Web. 2007
https://web.archive.org/web/20240227163731/http://radar.oreilly.com/2007/03/my-outdated-view-of-the-semant.html (retrieved 2024 )

Jim Hendler. “Why the Semantic Web will Never Work” (note the quote marks!). 2011
https://my.usgs.gov/confluence/download/attachments/76611856/eswc2011_hendler_work_01.pdf (retrieved 2021) youtube
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/why-the-semantic-web-will-never-work/8174404 (retrieved 2025)

McComb, Dave. Shirky, Syllogism and the Semantic Web. 2015
https://www.semanticarts.com/shirky-syllogism-and-the-semantic-web/ (retrieved 2020 )

Ismail, Salih and Shaikh, Talal . A Literature Review on Semantic Web - Understanding the Pioneers' Perspective. 2016.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308960594_A_Literature_Review_on_Semantic_Web_-_Understanding_the_Pioneers'_Perspective (retrieved 2020 )

Sinclair Target. Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?. 2018
https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html (retrieved 2020 )

Trond Aalberg et al. Semantic Web manifesto: the community of data. Publication date (Draft version): 12 October 2020
https://www.aib.it/struttura/commissioni-e-gruppi/gruppo-di-studio-catalogazione-ed-indicizzazione/2020/85657-semantic-web-manifesto-the-community-of-data/

Philippe Fournier-Viger. The Semantic Web and why it failed. 2021
https://data-mining.philippe-fournier-viger.com/the-semantic-web-and-why-it-failed/#:~:text=The%20languages%20for%20encoding%20metadata,describing%20knowledge%20was%20not%20easy.

Gavin Mendel-Gleason. The Semantic Web is Dead - Long Live the Semantic Web. 11 August 2022
https://github.com/GavinMendelGleason/blog/blob/main/entries/semantic_future.md