The fable of the blind men and the elphant as applied to the Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is a very sophisticated animal, or "beast" if you will, an elephant in some sense. The level of sophistication is so extreme that even a lot of well-meaning software professionals cannot agree on what exactly the Semantic Web is and is not. This situation is in fact a great real-world example of the the fable of the blind men and the elephant, with each participant focused on only their particular perspective and none able to sense the totality of the phenomenon they were experiencing.

And even if some guru were to inform the blind men of the holistic phenomenon that they were experiencing, albeit in their own disjoint fragments, none of them would be in a position to either comprehend or disagree with the holistic view.

Alas, this does appear to be the case with the Semantic Web. Personally I still believe that many of us professionals can actually make sense of the whole elephant, but the evidence to date does appear tilted against me at this moment.

So, what are some of the diverse perspectives on what the Semantic Web is or is not:

• The Semantic Web is simply XML
• The Semantic Web is simply XML "technologies", such as XML Schema
• The Semantic Web is based on RDF
• The Semantic Web requires RDF
• The Semantic Web does not require RDF
• The Semantic Web is based on XML Schemas
• The Semantic Web is primarily about interfaces for Web Services
• The Semantic Web is not primarily about interfaces for Web Services
• The Semantic Web is exemplified by RSS/Atom, web feeds, and Web 2.0
• The Semantic Web is not exemplified by RSS/Atom, web feeds, and Web 2.0
• The Semantic Web is capable of representing human knowledge
• The Semantic Web is not capable of representing human knowledge
• The Semantic Web is capable of representing human meaning
• The Semantic Web is not capable of representing human meaning
• The Semantic Web is about meaning
• The Semantic Web is about inference, not human meaning
• The Semantic Web requires ontologies
• The Semantic Web does not require ontologies
• The Semantic Web is nothing without OWL
• The Semantic Web is perfectly usable without OWL
• The Semantic Web is well-suited for representing data from relational databases
• The Semantic Web is ill-suited for representing data from relational databases
• The Semantic Web can represent any form of data, including non-Web data
• The Semantic Web is unable to represent non-Web data
• And so on...

Over time I will seek to address all of these "perspectives", and more.

-- Jack Krupansky