One of the questions that I hear regularly, and is really difficult to answer, has to do with the prospects for the Semantic Web. The Pew Internet and American Life Project has recently issued a report that complies a substantial number of well-informed views on this issue. The report, and ancillary materials, can be found at:
http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Semantic-Web.aspx
For what it’s worth, my reading is that respondents are fairly evenly split, with a few more doubters than believers in terms of the impact on the majority of internet users in the next ten years. Although, of course, there’s more to the Semantic Web vision than that, and impact can be both direct and indirect.
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI