The Time Traveler's Guide to Semantic Web Research: Analyzing Fictitious Research Themes in the ESWC "Next 20 Years" Track

TL;DR

This paper analyzes fictitious future research papers submitted to a conference track to explore emerging themes, research methods, and community perspectives on the future of Semantic Web research over the next 20-30 years.

Contribution

It provides a survey of science fiction-style submissions to identify future research themes and methods, offering insights into community expectations and research practices.

Findings

Emerging research themes include advanced AI integration and data privacy.

Analysis of methods reveals a mix of serious and speculative approaches.

Fictitious references highlight evolving terminology and concepts.

Abstract

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.