Another serious problem with the
demos was that they lacked evaluations.
At first glance, this is understandable:
evaluation is the difference between a
demo and a research paper. But consider and, after several of the talks, asked
some variant of “How did making this
a Semantic Web application make it
better than a traditional application?”
Some speakers didn’t have an answer;
others did but hadn’t put it in their
papers. When prompted, one presenter
went on at length about how much
easier it had been to build their system17
using Semantic Web technologies
instead of traditional databases.
This was great to hear, but this argument
was barely made in the paper
itself, and no (evaluation-based) proof
existed — only opinion. Where was
the comparable system that tried to do
things the old-fashioned way and was
harder? How do we know that Semantic
Web technologies were actually better
here, as opposed to just being what
the developers found most familiar?