How Can Scientific Methods Provide Guidance for Semantic Web Research and Development?

We hope to advance the Semantic Web by doing research within the boundaries of the known. Isn’t that all we can do? It seems hard to break out of the boundaries of the known, but no, I don’t think it is good enough, and that we need to challenge this view, and that we should look to philosophy of science and natural science for inspiration. My fundamental assumption, which I hope you will agree with, is that science has had a remarkable rate of progress, and that we should adopt the practices that achieves this. Now, we just end up testing one little piece at a time, based on what is already there, but the fact is that if we get to the visions that are presented as the Semantic Web, then it will be completely different in terms of workloads, data profiles, etc. And therefore, the central problem is that to really argue that we progress towards the Semantic Web, we have to test against a reality that doesn’t exist yet. That makes the problem different from other sciences.