An Object Web Seminar: A Retrospective on a Technical Dialogue Still Reverberating

The Semantic Web set out to give information a machine-interpretable form so that software could integrate and reason over it. Its standards became scientific knowledge infrastructure, but the machine competence it promised did not follow, and the systems now answering questions over scientific knowledge are language models holding no inspectable account of what they know. This paper argues the original goal was right and the technical programme incomplete, states what is missing, and names the extended programme Semantic Knowledge Technologies: the same technical core carried out of its web-publishing origin and applied to knowledge wherever held. The diagnosis is that the standards formalised truth while omitting three things: the conditions under which a claim holds, the operations its terms permit, and any account of what a base covers. Without conditions, contradiction and applicability cannot be judged; without operational grounding, holding a statement confers no ability; without declared coverage, a system cannot recognise the boundary of its own content, which under the open-world assumption cannot be inferred. The paper fixes the word understanding to five measurable tests (check, connect, derive, act, delimit) and sets out a seven-layer architecture in which the first three layers are enabling and the rest the cognitive capabilities they make possible. It then defines three terms the programme implies: Large Knowledge Model, a model whose unit of output is a reference to an addressable claim, not a token; SLKM, the knowledge base an agent builds for itself from declared sources; and Semantic Artificial General Intelligence, stated as a falsifiable position about necessary conditions, not a system. A graded ladder replaces the untestable word general. It is offered as a research agenda, with its weakest points and refutation condition named.

As web agents rapidly evolve, an increasing body of work has moved beyond conventional atomic browser interactions and explored tool use as a higher-level action paradigm. Although prior studies have shown the promise of tools, their conclusions are often drawn from limited experimental scales and sometimes non-comparable settings. As a result, several fundamental questions remain unclear: i) whether tools provide consistent gains for web agents, ii) what practical design principles characterize effective tools, and iii) what side effects tool use may introduce. To establish a stronger empirical foundation for future research, we revisit tool use in web agents through an extensive and carefully controlled study across diverse tool sources, backbone models, tool-use frameworks, and evaluation benchmarks. Our findings both revise some prior conclusions and complement others with broader evidence. We hope this study provides a more reliable empirical basis and inspires future research on tool-use web agents.

To support practitioners in understanding how agentic systems are designed in real-world industrial practice, we present a review of practitioner conference talks on AI agents. We analyzed 138 recorded talks to examine how companies adopt agent-based architectures (Objective 1), identify recurring architectural strategies and patterns (Objective 2), and analyze application domains and technologies used to implement and operate LLM-driven agentic systems (Objective 3).