The Semantic Web from 2000 to 2019, and Beyond (Andrea Volpini with Jason Barnard)

Andrea Volpini with Jason Barnard at TakeItOffline Brighton 2019 Andrea Volpini talks with Jason Barnard about the semantic web from 2000 to 2019, and beyond. This conversation packs in a phenomenal amount of fascinating information about linked data, knowledge graphs, Artificial Intelligence (AI), machines… Andrea started working on semantic web technologies back in 2000 – so Andrea has been expecting the web to transition from being page based to being entity based for 20 years (see also Bill Slawski and Sergey Brin). All three have waited patiently for a long time and were starting to get impatient :) I then get unreasonably excited at the mention of Tim Berners Lee and his web of meanings. I find out that AI is hungry for data (as opposed to angry with data, as I had understood after a few beers the previous evening). Building a knowledge graph is a way to transfer the knowledge you have in a specific domain to the world, and in that sense it is much like a webpage. Andrea foolishly mentions the move from Mobile-first to Data first… so I push him to look into the future, and he brilliantly comes up with a lovely concept of Solidarity first and ‘the web of solidarity’, which sounds really cool to me. We finish off with a chat about DBpedia Bus, Norvig, Chomsky … and the possibility of telepathy further down the line!