In the late 1990s, I worked on lowercase-semantic Web problems.
I used descriptions like "the Web as distributed machine-accessible knowledgebase".
Some of the problems I identified were already familiar or hinted at from other domains (e.g., getting different parties to use the same terms or ontology, motivating the work involved, the incentive to lie (initially thinking mostly thinking about how marketers stretch the facts about products, though propaganda etc. was also in mind), provenance and trust of information, mitigations of shortcomings, mitigating the mitigations, etc.).
One problem I didn't tackle... I got into distributing computation among huge numbers of humans, and probably stopped thinking about commercial organization incentives. I don't recall at that time asking "what happens if a group of some kind invests lots of effort into a knowledge representation, and some company freeloads off of that, without giving back?". But we had seen eamples of that in various aspects of pre-Web Internet and computing. Maybe I was thinking something akin to compilation copyright, or that the same power that generated the value could continue to surprise and outperform hypothetical exploiters. Also, in the late 1990s, every crazy idea without traditional business merit was getting funded, and it was all about usefulness (or stickiness) and what potential/inspiration you could show.
I used descriptions like "the Web as distributed machine-accessible knowledgebase".
Some of the problems I identified were already familiar or hinted at from other domains (e.g., getting different parties to use the same terms or ontology, motivating the work involved, the incentive to lie (initially thinking mostly thinking about how marketers stretch the facts about products, though propaganda etc. was also in mind), provenance and trust of information, mitigations of shortcomings, mitigating the mitigations, etc.).
One problem I didn't tackle... I got into distributing computation among huge numbers of humans, and probably stopped thinking about commercial organization incentives. I don't recall at that time asking "what happens if a group of some kind invests lots of effort into a knowledge representation, and some company freeloads off of that, without giving back?". But we had seen eamples of that in various aspects of pre-Web Internet and computing. Maybe I was thinking something akin to compilation copyright, or that the same power that generated the value could continue to surprise and outperform hypothetical exploiters. Also, in the late 1990s, every crazy idea without traditional business merit was getting funded, and it was all about usefulness (or stickiness) and what potential/inspiration you could show.