[HN Gopher] Semantics and the Web: An Awkward History ___________________________________________________________________ Semantics and the Web: An Awkward History Author : tannhaeuser Score : 18 points Date : 2021-11-15 21:10 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (lists.xml.org) (TXT) w3m dump (lists.xml.org) | rektide wrote: | Mailing List Link: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml- | dev/202109/msg00001.html | | Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77qDvd5uOx8 | | Transcription: | http://simonstl.com/balisage/TRANSCRIPT09042021.txt | | Pairs well with Brian Kardell's History of the Web series (2015), | which covers some of these bits & is a delightful enjoyable read | as well: https://bkardell.com/blog/Brief-ish-History-of-The-Web- | Part-... | | Also, note, very little about "semantic web". The word semantic | does not appear in the transcript (other than as the title). | tannhaeuser wrote: | The History of the Web series deserves its own post for sure. | But going by the publication date, unlike the OP, it seems to | end just before it all went south ;) | miguelrochefort wrote: | I never understood why the semantic web failed. | | Is there anything better than RDF? | abbe98 wrote: | Did it fail or did it just turn out different from what many | imagined? | | I mean RDF is alive and well and Schema.org is widely adopted. | [deleted] | austincheney wrote: | Two things killed it: | | 1. The simultaneous emergence of walled gardens | | 2. The concepts were too challenging for most developers to | fully grasp and too distant to inspire common interest. | | You have to remember the web prior to 2005. Nobody had heard of | Facebook and Twitter did not exist. Google was just a search | engine and data auction. Most of the web displayed static | content dynamically generated by either ASP, PHP, or TCL. Most | of the people on here have probably never even heard of TCL. | | Back then all the value of online businesses were some form of | payment processing, think ecommerce, or application processing | like data mining. The idea that the data itself had value aside | from the products and services it represented was known but not | fully realized. This wasn't even deliberate. | | Emerging online services needed to generate revenue to repay | their investors and in most cases the only thing that stuck was | online advertising. You can show ads to anybody, but the more | precisely targeted those ads became and the more they followed | users across third party sites the more valuable they became. | You have to understand that in most cases these are high | quantity but nearly worthless transactions so anything that | could raise the value of a transaction is a really big deal. | This is how the walled gardens happened. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-11-15 23:00 UTC)