How do we handle the metacrap argument?
I've been meaning to deal with this, but haven't taken the time. Now I am motivated to do so. Anybody else interested? These articles pose a serious challenge to everything we are doing here. Moreover, I have seen them accepted, possibly without reading the original, as a reason to diss the upper case Semantic Web by many programmers, such that in a lot of contexts that I visit regularly, it's impossible to even discuss the concept.
So I think we need to deal with it.
If interested and think you can help, read these articles:
- The Future of APIs, which I think would accept what we are doing here as useful and necessary.
- Hacker news discussion of that article, which largely, but not universally, disagrees.
- Some articles linked to comments in that discussion attempting to prove the disagreement:
TL;DR version of the metacrap argument:
A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities.