Very nice, thank you @anon36056958! We were about to cross-post… here’s what I was preparing:
As a very good follow-up to the TerminusDB Linked Data article referenced above I highly recommend reading @RubenVerborgh’s paper:
Ultimately, all of above indicates a need to guard ourselves from conducting research in a vacuum. Not all science requires practical purposes, but many of the research problems we study will never actually occur if the Semantic Web does not take off any further, so we should at least consider—for our own sake—prioritizing those urgent problems that are blockers to its adoption. […]
Converting technological research into digestible chunks for developers is considered trivial and outside of our scientific duty […] Yet everything that reeks of engineering is shunned. However, most researchers in our community have not built a single Semantic Web app, so we cannot pretend to understand the insides of the 20% [where practical application occurs]. […]
Not only do many of us lack Semantic Web experience as app developers, our even bigger gap is experience as users. […]
[In conclusion] Turns out that the engineers and developers have moved on and are creating their own solutions, bypassing many of the lessons we already learned, because we stubbornly refused to acknowledge the amount of research needed to turn our theories into practice. As we were not ready for the Web, more pragmatic people started taking over.
So referring back to the need for a ‘fresh and modern inititiative’ I think at least some criteria should be:
- Targeted towards practical real-world application
- Developer-friendly, easily grasped and adopted (without an entire semantic web as precondition)
- User-oriented, related to real-world domain models (and preferably bounded contexts thereof)