Editing Semantic Web (section)

== Skeptical reactions ==
=== Practical feasibility ===
Critics question the basic feasibility of a complete or even partial fulfillment of the Semantic Web, pointing out both difficulties in setting it up and a lack of general-purpose usefulness that prevents the required effort from being invested. In a 2003 paper, Marshall and Shipman point out the cognitive overhead inherent in formalizing knowledge, compared to the authoring of traditional web [[hypertext]]:<ref name="which">{{cite conference |title=Which semantic web? |last1=Marshall |first1=Catherine C. |last2=Shipman |first2=Frank M. |conference=Proc. ACM Conf. on Hypertext and Hypermedia |pages=57–66 |year=2003 |url=http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~marshall/ht03-sw-4.pdf |access-date=2015-04-17 |archive-date=2015-09-23 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150923211553/http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~marshall/ht03-sw-4.pdf |url-status=dead }}</ref>

{{blockquote|While learning the basics of HTML is relatively straightforward, learning a knowledge representation language or tool requires the author to learn about the representation's methods of abstraction and their effect on reasoning. For example, understanding the class-instance relationship, or the superclass-subclass relationship, is more than understanding that one concept is a "type of" another concept. [...] These abstractions are taught to computer scientists generally and knowledge engineers specifically but do not match the similar natural language meaning of being a "type of" something. Effective use of such a formal representation requires the author to become a skilled knowledge engineer in addition to any other skills required by the domain. [...] Once one has learned a formal representation language, it is still often much more effort to express ideas in that representation than in a less formal representation [...]. Indeed, this is a form of programming based on the declaration of semantic data and requires an understanding of how reasoning algorithms will interpret the authored structures.}}

According to Marshall and Shipman, the [[tacit knowledge|tacit]] and changing nature of much knowledge adds to the [[knowledge engineering]] problem, and limits the Semantic Web's applicability to specific domains. A further issue that they point out are domain- or organization-specific ways to express knowledge, which must be solved through community agreement rather than only technical means.{{r|which}} As it turns out, specialized communities and organizations for intra-company projects have tended to adopt semantic web technologies greater than peripheral and less-specialized communities.<ref name="Herman000">{{cite conference |url=http://www.w3.org/2007/Talks/0424-Stavanger-IH/Slides.pdf |title=State of the Semantic Web |access-date=July 26, 2007 |author=Ivan Herman |year=2007 |conference=Semantic Days 2007}}</ref> The practical constraints toward adoption have appeared less challenging where domain and scope is more limited than that of the general public and the World-Wide Web.{{r|Herman000}}

Finally, Marshall and Shipman see pragmatic problems in the idea of ([[Knowledge Navigator]]-style) intelligent agents working in the largely manually curated Semantic Web:{{r|which}}

{{blockquote|In situations in which user needs are known and distributed information resources are well described, this approach can be highly effective; in situations that are not foreseen and that bring together an unanticipated array of information resources, the Google approach is more robust. Furthermore, the Semantic Web relies on inference chains that are more brittle; a missing element of the chain results in a failure to perform the desired action, while the human can supply missing pieces in a more Google-like approach. [...] cost-benefit tradeoffs can work in favor of specially-created Semantic Web metadata directed at weaving together sensible well-structured domain-specific information resources; close attention to user/customer needs will drive these federations if they are to be successful.}}

[[Cory Doctorow]]'s critique ("[[metacrap]]")<ref>{{cite web |last1=Doctorow |first1=Cory |title=Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia |url=https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm |website=www.well.com/ |access-date=11 September 2023}}</ref> is from the perspective of human behavior and personal preferences. For example, people may include spurious metadata into Web pages in an attempt to mislead Semantic Web engines that naively assume the metadata's veracity. This phenomenon was well known with metatags that fooled the [[Altavista]] ranking algorithm into elevating the ranking of certain Web pages: the Google indexing engine specifically looks for such attempts at manipulation. [[Peter Gärdenfors]] and [[Timo Honkela]] point out that logic-based semantic web technologies cover only a fraction of the relevant phenomena related to semantics.<ref name="Gardenfors04">{{Cite book
 | title=How to make the Semantic Web more semantic
 | first=Peter
 | last=Gärdenfors
 | pages=17–34
 | publisher=IOS Press
 | year=2004
 | work=Formal Ontology in Information Systems: proceedings of the third international conference (FOIS-2004)}}</ref><ref name="Honkela08">{{cite journal
 | title=Simulating processes of concept formation and communication
 | year=2008
 | first1=Timo
 | last1=Honkela
 | first2=Ville
 | last2=Könönen
 | first3=Tiina
 | last3=Lindh-Knuutila
 | first4=Mari-Sanna
 | last4=Paukkeri
 | journal=Journal of Economic Methodology| volume=15
 | issue=3
 | pages=245–259
 | doi=10.1080/13501780802321350
 | s2cid=16994027
 }}</ref>

=== Censorship and privacy ===
Enthusiasm about the semantic web could be tempered by concerns regarding [[Internet censorship|censorship]] and [[privacy]]. For instance, [[Intelligent text analysis|text-analyzing]] techniques can now be easily bypassed by using other words, metaphors for instance, or by using images in place of words. An advanced implementation of the semantic web would make it much easier for governments to control the viewing and creation of online information, as this information would be much easier for an automated content-blocking machine to understand. In addition, the issue has also been raised that, with the use of [[FOAF (software)|FOAF]] files and geolocation [[meta-data]], there would be very little anonymity associated with the authorship of articles on things such as a personal blog. Some of these concerns were addressed in the "Policy Aware Web" project<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.policyawareweb.org/ |title=Policy Aware Web Project |publisher=Policyawareweb.org |access-date=2013-06-14}}</ref> and is an active research and development topic.

=== Doubling output formats ===
Another criticism of the semantic web is that it would be much more time-consuming to create and publish content because there would need to be two formats for one piece of data: one for human viewing and one for machines. However, many web applications in development are addressing this issue by creating a machine-readable format upon the publishing of data or the request of a machine for such data. The development of microformats has been one reaction to this kind of criticism. Another argument in defense of the feasibility of semantic web is the likely falling price of human intelligence tasks in digital labor markets, such as [[Amazon.com|Amazon]]'s [[Amazon Mechanical Turk|Mechanical Turk]].{{Citation needed|date=February 2015}}

Specifications such as eRDF and RDFa allow arbitrary RDF data to be embedded in HTML pages. The [[GRDDL]] (Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Language) mechanism allows existing material (including microformats) to be automatically interpreted as RDF, so publishers only need to use a single format, such as HTML.