No matter what its eventual resolution, this idea has stimulated public investment in an interesting, burgeoning field of scientific inquiry. It did not create that field out of whole cloth, of course, since AI researchers have been interested in the Web for as long as there has been a Web. A distributed, decentralized hypermedia system is just too rich with possibility for AI folks to ignore. Together with industry, the W3C and other standards bodies, and the web-hacker community, the academic research community is working hard to redeem some of the promise of AI web technology, if not yet the public Web itself.My view, sustained by an admittedly simplistic analogy to the way the Web itself developed, is that if the Semantic Web is to happen, it will be because of a loosely coupled collaboration between three communities: the academics, the industrialists, and the hackers. This view gives me some pain, however, since the hacker community (by which I mean people who develop open source software for fun and for profit) is perhaps the one least engaged in the Semantic Web effort."
