This post is part contribution to the general Web 3.0 / Data-Web / Semantic Web discourse, and part experiment / demonstration of the Data Web.

I came across a pretty deep comments trail about the aforementioned items on Fred Wilson's blog (aptly titled: A VC) under the subject heading: Web 3.0 Is The Semantic Web.

Contributions to the general Semantic Web discourse by way of responses to valuable questions and commentary contributed by a Semantic Web skeptic (Ed Addison who may be this Ed Addison according to Google):

Ed, Responses to your points re. Semantic Web Matrialization:
<< 1) ontologies can be created and maintained by text extractors and crawlers" >>

Ontologies will be developed by Humans. This process has already commenced and far more landscape has been covered that you may be aware of. For instance, there is an Ontology for Online Communities with Semantics factored in. More importantly, most Blogs, Wikis, and other "points of presence" on the Web are already capable of generating Instance Data for this Ontology by way of the underlying platforms that drive these things. The Ontology is called: SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities).

<< 2) the entire web can be marked up, semantically indexed, and maintained by spiders without human assistance >>

Most of it can, and already is :-) Human assistance should, and would, be on an "exception basis" a preferred use of human time (IMHO). We do not need to annotate the Web manually when this labor intensive process can be automated (see my earlier comments).

<< 3) inference over the semantic web does not require an extremely deep heuristic search down multiple, redundant, cyclical pathways with many islands that are disconnected >>

When you have a foundation layer of RDF Data (generated in the manner I've discussed above), you then have a substrate that's far more palatable to Intelligent Reasoning. Note, the Semantic Web is made of many layers. The critical layer at this juncture is the Data-Web (Web of RDF Data). Note, when I refer to RDF I am not referring to RDF/XML the serialization format, I am referring to the Data Model (a Graph).

<< 4) the web becomes smart enough to eliminate websites or data elements that are incorrect, misleading, false, or just plain lousy >>

The Semantic Web vision is not about eliminating Web Sites (The Hypertext-Document-Web). It is simply about adding another dimension of interaction to the Web. This is just like the Services-Web dimension as delivered by Web 2.0.

We are simply evolving within an innovation continuum. There is no mutual exclusivity about any of the Web Dimensions since they collectively provide us with a more powerful infrastructure for building and exploiting "collective wisdom".

As for the Data-Web experiment part of this post, I would expect to see this post exposed as another contribution to the Data-Web via the PingTheSemanticWeb notification service :-) Implying, that all the relevant parts of this conversation are in a format (Instance Data for the SIOC Ontology) that is available for further use in a myriad of forms.