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.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, 2 table