Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web, a slight return

After talking with a friend and a friend of his about the Semantic Web and healthcare yesterday, I re-watched a great video on Web 3.0 by Kate Ray that I bookmarked and blogged about a couple of years ago. I like this video because it frames the problems that the Semantic Web is trying to solve. My last published book (for APress) had Web 3.0 in the title, a term that did not really catch on :-)

At least a little bit of my enthusiasm for Semantic Web technologies has diminished over the last ten years because of problems that I have had on customer projects trying to collect linked data from disparite sources and merge it into something useful. There are (apparently) no silver bullets and any data collection and exploitation activities involve a lot of difficult work.

I would not be surprised if this problem of merging different data sources is not solved by using Ontologies and webs of linked data sites, but rather, by vendors curating data in narrow domains and selling interfaces to this curated data.

In a world of too much information the activity of curation can have a very high value and this value and the market price for these services will determine the amount of resources invested in combinations of automated and manual curation of information.