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Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

In practice, "AI" is used as an umbrella term that definitely includes that kind of stuff. I can't speak for YC, but IMO Semantic Web work should probably fall under the AI umbrella in this case.

(Edit: in the interest of full-disclosure, my startup is doing a lot of work with Semantic Web technologies, particularly in terms of applying them to Enterprise knowledge management)

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I think there's two viewpoints. There's "outside in" when the media calls things like Siri "AI" then there's the scifi AI perspective where we want talking starships.

Siri++ doesn't get us closer to sarcastic GSVs. If saying a structured connected wisdom of the crowds folksonomy is actually AI helps people get funding/attention/growth, that's what people will do.

There's also "middle out," but that's a talk for another day.

FWIW, when you talk about the Semantic Web, that also entails reasoning and reasoners, and there's no requirement that those reasoners be simple deductive logic based reasoners. Work being done to make a more useful reasoner could certainly be "real" AI work. I'd also personally say that "knowledge representation" is part of AI, and KR problems are also being attacked by the SW community. Those, among other reasons, are why I say that one should classify SemWeb "stuff" as AI.

But you're right to say that there are different definitions, and it does depend on who you talk to. The media definitely take a more expansive view of AI than probably most of us, but what can ya do? shrug

A third and important viewpoint is academia. In that realm, you'll often hear people give the definition: "AI is search," which would encompass reasoning algorithms, knowledge bases and ontologies like the Semantic Web. Deep Blue and Watson come to mind as the best examples of AI as reasoning through search.

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