The History of the Semantic Web & the Future of Content

Twenty-five years ago, Scientific American magazine published an article entitled "The Semantic Web," introducing to the world the idea of a meaningful web of data that computers as well as humans could navigate. That article was both a punctuation mark in the history of technology — built on decades of AI research and development — and the beginning of a new era for enterprise technology and the World Wide Web. I think the content profession is at a similar juncture now. I don't know what we'd call the magazine article that would herald the future of content, but it would build on decades of insights about structured content, composable architectures, metadata strategy, and human-centered design, and it would set a vision for content in the age of AI and beyond. I'm not a futurist, so I'll focus this talk on the history of semantic tech and content, with just a little speculation at the end about what might lie ahead.

About Larry Swanson
Larry Swanson is a long-time content architect and since 2020 a semantic technology ambassador. He hosts the Knowledge Graph Insights and Content Strategy Insights podcasts and co-organizes the Dataworthy Collective, a weekly gathering of semantics, ontology, and data professionals. Alongside his content strategy and information architecture work, he has organized a number of professional communities and events: the Knowledge Graph Conference, Connected Data London, Decoupled Days, the Future of Content meetup in Amsterdam, the Seattle Content Strategy meetup, and World Information Architecture Day. He is also a founding member of the Kinetic Council, an association-formation committee that aims to connect professionals across the data, knowledge, semantics, and content industries.