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Extending the structuring of names of instances and concepts in XML, Berners-Lee predicted the use of two more layers of semantic formalization using XML: Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL).¹⁸⁸ RDF assigns every name a URL, and links three kinds of name in subject–predicate–object triples, or mini-assertions.¹⁸⁹ So, subject: Bill Cope > predicate: has the email address > object: billcope@illinois.edu. OWL adds a layer of reasoning based in the formalisms of description logic, where “individuals” (our instances) and “classes” (our concepts) are named as such, and their properties can be described, establishing logical connections between things.¹⁹⁰

RDF and OWL have proven both too simple to capture and reason from the structure of meaning in the world, and too complicated to make practical sense. OWL rules run to 700-odd pages.¹⁹¹

In the activity areas of the W3C these were superseded in 2013 by the more modestly named “W3C Data Activity.”¹⁹² The focus now is on web data standardization, or just a lot of ontology work. A visualization created by the Linking Open Data project shows a bewildering number of ontologies across geography, government, linguistics, life sciences, media, and publishing – another ramshackle list, though this time a list of lists rather than universal semantic principles. And like all ontologies, it has the ubiquitous escape classification, “other,” which it calls “cross-domain.”¹⁹³

Despite all the talk of semantic web, artificial intelligence^§AS1.4.6b even, we really only have ontologies, whose spatialized architectures mostly pre-date the internet. The Semantic Web hasn’t worked out, we would venture to say, because the structures of meaning-in the world are infinitely varied in their specificity, and our meaning-for can exceed them, manifesting all kinds of peculiarities according to our human designs.¹⁹⁴

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¹⁸⁷ Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila, 2001, “The Semantic Web,” Scientific American, May, pp. 34–43, pp. 36, 40; Dieter Fensel, James Hendler, Henry Lieberman, and Wolfgang Wahlster, eds., 2005, Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the Worldwide Web to Its Full Potential, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

¹⁸⁸ Allen H. Renear and Carole L. Palmer, 2009, “Strategic Reading, Ontologies, and the Future of Scientific Publishing,” Science 325(5942):828–32. doi: 10.1126/science.1157784.

¹⁸⁹ www.w3.org/RDF/

¹⁹⁰ www.w3.org/TR/owl2-overview/

¹⁹¹ Christian F. Hempelmann, 2012, “NLP for Search,” pp. 53–74 in Applied Natural Language Processing: Identification, Investigation, and Resolution, edited by P.M. McCarthy and C. Boonthum-Denecke, Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

¹⁹² www.w3.org/2013/data/

¹⁹³ http://lod-cloud.net

¹⁹⁴ Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis, and Liam Magee, 2011, Towards a Semantic Web: Connecting Knowledge in Academic Research, Cambridge, UK: Elsevier.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 316–318. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Tim Berners-Lee’s “Semantic Web” §MS3.3c