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JSON-LD is not a Semantic Web technology, at least as proposed by TBL et al. in the original vision. It's just syntactic sugar on what was already there and once again falls into the "technology that wasn't for the SW that's been co-opted by SW advocated".

It doesn't solve any of the fundamental problems that the Semantic Web has. Just taking JSON (not a SW tech) and specifying a serialization method on it doesn't suddenly make it SW.

In fact, because JSON is easier to handle the XML, it should make the failure of the idea even more apparent.

Instead it's acted as a distraction, emulating "progress" while everybody starts to move their semantic graph engines to support it while not actually kicking the ball forward on any specific front. There's really nothing new that JSON-LD introduces other than being easier to parse. Except that it somehow specifies a syntax that turns JSON into something about as ugly and verbose as XML.




The original vision was just a starting point. Did you really expect nothing to change or evolve over the past ~15 years?

Honestly, your argument, to me, sounds like saying "cars have failed since Henry Ford didn't mention fuel injection, overhead cams, or turbochargers".


If the goal is getting to the moon, then proposing cars is a failure. A short thought experiment would reveal this. And it's not really useful to start co-opting rocketships and calling them "cars" and claiming that cars have been the path to the moon all along and amazing things are coming. This is a particularly pernicious habit I've noticed in the KM field.

The short thought experiment that would reveal that cars won't work simply hasn't been done as a field with the SW and it's usually not done in any kind of Semantic technology circles. You end up with "just tweak the model!" and "it'll start to work when there's sufficient data" and "we just need to build the reasoning engines" is what the field has been spinning on for more than a decade.

Even in SW circles, there's a general consensus that the SW has not arrived. In some more honest pieces it's recognized that it was a failure. But there's tremendous momentum behind the idea because of TBL and people aren't willing to give it up and jump ship onto what's actually working until it gets a big name and W3C (or some other notable committee) to back it.




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