The Semantic Web is a great vision that began almost ten years ago, but at this point, the failures outnumber the successes by a very large margin. In order to move closer to realizing the great theoretical vision of its founder, Tim Berners-Lee, it is important to understand the common pitfalls of semantic undertakings. Let's examine the top 10 failures of Semantic Web projects and companies one by one.
The Semantic Web world is like a lumbering, giant group of smart people stumbling around without too much direction or vision, while all around them, smart and savvy entrepreneurs are creating amazing social, content, and mobile projects and companies at a comparatively break-neck speed and a fraction of the cost. In the last few years the Web has seen a revolution where small and cheap projects spring up, rapidly succeed or fail (and if fail, try again, succeed or fail, if fail, try again, and repeat this loop until succeed) and move forward, while Semantic Web projects are bulky, complex in nature, and require lots of time, money, and brain power before they can be even brought to market. They resemble projects of the late 90s where it took millions of dollars to realize whether a company would succeed or fail, while Web 2.0 companies can still participate in the "fail fast" startup approach where it takes 3-6 months and a few thousand dollars to realize whether the project will be successful or should be shut down.
The Web has shown that, while project organizers (large company projects or new startups) have to follow their vision, they also need to pay very close attention to the feedback of their users in order to get a sense of the true user experience of the product. The "rapid feedback loop" approach has garnered much attention and is prevalent in theories of Eric Reis and Steve Blank; and has been widely accepted throughout the business world.
Unfortunately for Semantic Web, its projects are complicated and not easy to create. This increases the amount of time that has to pass before the initial customer feedback is even possible, also slowing down ensuing feedback loop iterations, ultimately putting Semantic Web applications at a user-experience and agility disadvantage when compared to their Web 2.0 counterparts, because usability inadvertently takes a back seat to the number of other complex problems that have to be solved before clients even see the application.
Remember how difficult it was to get a good Java programmer to work for your company or project in the late 1990s? We should be lucky I guess now the 21st Century has evolved with innovative technology incorporated with the Web. You almost had to give away your first born(just an expression), a signing bonus, and be forever sentenced to deal with prima donnas who did not have to play nice, and jumped jobs for larger salaries within months. That was the result of not enough supply of talent to go around for a very large demand of it. Right now a very similar situation is occurring in the Semantic Web world. Hiring a good NLP engineer (computational linguist) will cost you an arm and a leg and so will hiring a good taxonomist, ontologist, or a programmer who can work with Semantic Web frameworks and build the application. Not only that, but they know they are difficult to replace, so you are at their mercy if they decide they want to misbehave.
Not only are Semantic Web professionals more expensive, harder to find, and have more flexibility to misbehave, they can just kill a project simply by leaving because the work they do is often too complex for someone to just come in and pick right up where the original people left off. If the original people leave, the business owner gets stuck with a heap of unreadable code or a bulky ontology that now no one can understand, and lots of wasted time and money. Semantic Web technology is also harder to integrate and sell for the same reason -- it adds extra risk to the buyer since if the founders or creators leave, they get stuck with the best scenario of having to hire more expensive resources who will have a 3-6 months ramp up time if they succeed, and much more if they don't and other people will have to be hired. The world will have moved on by then.
Even the great Sir Tim Berners-Lee famously proclaimed that Web 3.0 is meant to live on top of Web 2.0 and not replace it. What is quickly becoming reality is that the incremental benefit of Web 3.0 over the traditional web is seldom enough to justify adding cost, risk, and time horizons to projects. It is becoming reasonably good practice to prove the business model success without even touching the Semantic Web, and if the business model works, to build out the Web3.0 components over time. Starting at Web3.0 without considering the lessons learned from simpler models is often a key to failure; just too lofty, too fast.
Reference: http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2005/03/18/semweb-ai-java-the-ontological-parallels/[Accessed 20/11/2011]
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