The Lingering Promise of the Semantic Web as a Modern Application Platform

The bundle of technologies and standards constituting the "Semantic Web" platform have evolved considerably over the last few decades. Adoption on a large scale remains low, due in part to the challenges of ramping up with the available tooling and difficulty of building a modern web application on such a foundation. Conversely, as cloud infrastructure has matured and become the norm, fresh possibilities have opened up for exploiting the distinctive benefits offered by the Semantic Web for building and deploying low-cost decentralized web applications.

This talk will present a survey of the ongoing challenges for application development using Semantic Web technologies followed by a sketch of how integrating a modified set of Semantic Web ideas into the modern cloud could provide a robust and accessible decentralized web platform. Attendees will learn about the current state of Semantic Web Technologies in addition to an opinionated vision for how the traditional ideas underpinning the Semantic Web can be migrated into the contemporary web ecosystem.