There is an alternate timeline where the semantic web took off and there was wide investment in ontological tooling to ensure that the information in academic papers, websites, and applications was structured and accessible to future processing.

We instead live in a world where all the useful data is trapped inside proprietary formats, and entangled in meaningless prose - a world primed for large language models to come along and hallucinate the data that might contained therein.

@sarahjamielewis Do you have any reading recommendations for the semantic web stuff? I'm very lost.

@Madagascar_Sky @sarahjamielewis I found this one painful and I don't agree with all of it, but very well written:

https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html

In my opinion it misses Wikidata, but I'm biased.

Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

In 2001, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, published an article in Scientific American.

@vrandecic @sarahjamielewis Thank you so much!