The Time Traveler's Guide to Semantic Web Research: Analyzing Fictitious Research Themes in the ESWC "Next 20 Years" Track
This work provides a speculative analysis of future research directions for the Semantic Web community, but it is incremental as it surveys fictional submissions without advancing methods or solving real-world problems.
The paper analyzed ten fictitious research papers submitted to a 'Next 20 years' track at ESWC 2023, which envisioned Semantic Web research themes for 2043, to identify emerging topics and community insights, but did not report concrete numerical results.
What will Semantic Web research focus on in 20 years from now? We asked this question to the community and collected their visions in the "Next 20 years" track of ESWC 2023. We challenged the participants to submit "future" research papers, as if they were submitting to the 2043 edition of the conference. The submissions - entirely fictitious - were expected to be full scientific papers, with research questions, state of the art references, experimental results and future work, with the goal to get an idea of the research agenda for the late 2040s and early 2050s. We received ten submissions, eight of which were accepted for presentation at the conference, that mixed serious ideas of potential future research themes and discussion topics with some fun and irony. In this paper, we intend to provide a survey of those "science fiction" papers, considering the emerging research themes and topics, analysing the research methods applied by the authors in these very special submissions, and investigating also the most fictitious parts (e.g., neologisms, fabricated references). Our goal is twofold: on the one hand, we investigate what this special track tells us about the Semantic Web community and, on the other hand, we aim at getting some insights on future research practices and directions.