Semantic web practices: infrastructural politics and the future of the Web

Abstract

In the past thirty years the Web has developed from its inception as a
layer of protocols on top of the internet, to use by more than 5 billion
people and organizations. This has driven the creation of vast quantities
of data and led to deep concerns about the politics of digital data and
computational methods. To date, critical investigation of these concerns
has focused on large commercial platforms built on top of the Web, and
their use of machine learning methods. Meanwhile, less attention has
been paid to the underlying design and protocols of Web itself, and how
these might be implicated in the very same process and concerns. We
explore ongoing endeavors to transform the Web from a library of
documents intended for humans, to a "semantic Web" using symbolic
Artificial Intelligence to enable machine reasoning across multiple
heterogenous data sources. In principle this would transform the
production and circulation of knowledge at Web scale. We present the
findings from an experimental, interdisciplinary study exploring the
epistemological politics and sociomaterial practices involved in situated
accomplishment of the semantic Web. Our findings have consequences
for the future of the Web and the future of Web-based platforms.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Mark Weal: orcid.org/0000-0001-6251-8786

ORCID for Nicholas Gibbins: orcid.org/0000-0002-6140-9956

ORCID for Samantha Pearman-Kanza: orcid.org/0000-0002-4831-9489

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