[HN Gopher] The semantic web is dead - Long live the semantic web ___________________________________________________________________ The semantic web is dead - Long live the semantic web Author : LukeEF Score : 159 points Date : 2022-08-10 14:42 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (github.com) (TXT) w3m dump (github.com) | bawolff wrote: | Funnily enough, the why semantic web is good section is the | section that actually identifies why it failed. | | We are going to have an ultra flexible data model that everyone | can just participate in? | | That never works. Protocols work by restricting possibilities not | allowing everything. The more possibilities you allow, the more | room for subtle incompatibilities and the more effort you have to | spend massaging everything into compatibility. | ggleason wrote: | That's discussed in the article though. The open world | assumption is untenable. Having shareable interoperable | schemata that can refer to each-other safely would be a god | send however. And that's what is currently very hard but | needn't be. | leoxv wrote: | What is "unsafe, untenable or hard" about embedding some | JSON-LD (which is just some JSON metadata, transformed using | a small JS library), like I did here: | https://twitter.com/conzept__/status/1552719001826074625 | | Whether you trust the URIs or the data that was placed there | is not a problem for the semantic web. The fact that you | _can_ state these things and relate to other resources and | concepts on the web is already wonderful and useful in | itself. Google is reading this metadata and relating it to | their trust/ranking-graph. The semantic web 'community' could | do the same later also, in a more decentralized way | (blockhain web IDs perhaps?). For now it all works fine. | convolvatron wrote: | people should use something like json-schema to publish | their structure. this doesn't solve the root denotation | problem, but it would help a lot. | ramoz wrote: | The future of web standards will be structured in neural network | high dimensional spaces. Accessibility to that future web will be | built in models that exist across a decentralized environment | similar to blockchain/smart-contract architectures. | rch wrote: | JSON-LD has some traction, but the author seems to prefer a | slightly different syntax. | | I don't see a material difference, but I'm curious to know what | others think. | | -- https://w3c.github.io/json-ld-bp/#contexts | | -- https://w3c.github.io/json-ld-bp/#example-example-typed- | rela... | | -- https://terminusdb.com/docs/index/terminusx-db/reference- | gui... | ggleason wrote: | Well, in one sense the are directly interconvertable. The | documents in TerminusDB are elaborated to JSON-LD internally | during type-checking and inference. | | However, it's not just a question of whether one can be made | into another. The use of contexts is very cumbersome, since you | need to specify different contexts at different properties for | different types. It makes far more sense to simply have a | schema and perform the elaboration from there. Plus without an | infrastructure for keys, Ids become extremely cumbersome. So | beyond just type decorations on the leaves, It's the difference | between: { "general_variables": { | "alternative_name": ["Sadozai Kingdom", "Last Afghan Empire" ], | "language":"latin" }, "name":"AfDurrn", | "social_complexity_variables": { | "hierarchical_complexity": {"admin_levels":"five"}, | "information": {"articles":"present"} }, | "warfare_variables": { "military_technologies": { | "atlatl":"present", "battle_axes":"present", | "breastplates":"present" } } } | | And { "@id":"Polity/7286b191f5f62a05290 | b8961fd8836a26ddc8399611b216fae4aaacc58ba6c11", | "@type":"Polity", "general_variables": { "@id | ":"Polity/7286b191f5f62a05290b8961fd8836a26ddc8399611b216fae4aa | acc58ba6c11/general_variables/GeneralVariables/e4360ee3766c2863 | f06a34ffcdd9869d41b03d04c6f6af5f94b0a14a47e8e704", | "@type":"GeneralVariables", "alternative_name": | ["Last Afghan Empire", "Sadozai Kingdom" ], | "language":"latin" }, "name":"AfDurrn", | "social_complexity_variables": { "@id":"Polity/7286b1 | 91f5f62a05290b8961fd8836a26ddc8399611b216fae4aaacc58ba6c11/soci | al_complexity_variables/SocialComplexityVariables/191353c4b7138 | 842ec4029dd07fbd63c9dda752f0cd72b1584f046a274cf024c", | "@type":"SocialComplexityVariables", | "hierarchical_complexity": { "@id":"Polity/7286b191 | f5f62a05290b8961fd8836a26ddc8399611b216fae4aaacc58ba6c11/social | _complexity_variables/Polity/7286b191f5f62a05290b8961fd8836a26d | dc8399611b216fae4aaacc58ba6c11/social_complexity_variables/Soci | alComplexityVariables/191353c4b7138842ec4029dd07fbd63c9dda752f0 | cd72b1584f046a274cf024c/hierarchical_complexity/HierarchicalCom | plexity/d6a772c5c6919cc511a24ab89f908032aa32b1e3e939d2e0c32044b | 3a5d9151d", "@type":"HierarchicalComplexity", | "admin_levels":"five" }, "information": { | "@id":"Polity/7286b191f5f62a05290b8961fd8836a26ddc8399611b216fa | e4aaacc58ba6c11/social_complexity_variables/Polity/7286b191f5f6 | 2a05290b8961fd8836a26ddc8399611b216fae4aaacc58ba6c11/social_com | plexity_variables/SocialComplexityVariables/191353c4b7138842ec4 | 029dd07fbd63c9dda752f0cd72b1584f046a274cf024c/information/Infor | mation/2f557c1016552f30b8d8bb1bdd9a8584791dd06d32f25bded86a7eb5 | 9788ea7f", "@type":"Information", | "articles":"present" } }, | "warfare_variables": { "@id":"Polity/7286b191f5f62a05 | 290b8961fd8836a26ddc8399611b216fae4aaacc58ba6c11/warfare_variab | les/WarfareVariables/704a2c1854a2fe80616fbea0ef0dcd6ce47f517452 | 9ca191617e42397108c437", "@type":"WarfareVariables", | "military_technologies": { "@id":"Polity/7286b191f5 | f62a05290b8961fd8836a26ddc8399611b216fae4aaacc58ba6c11/warfare_ | variables/Polity/7286b191f5f62a05290b8961fd8836a26ddc8399611b21 | 6fae4aaacc58ba6c11/warfare_variables/WarfareVariables/704a2c185 | 4a2fe80616fbea0ef0dcd6ce47f5174529ca191617e42397108c437/militar | y_technologies/MilitaryTechnologies/80a91b3e5381154387bde4afc66 | fdd38834de16c671c49c769f5244475cbbb1b", | "@type":"MilitaryTechnologies", "atlatl":"present", | "battle_axes":"present", "breastplates":"present" | } } } | rch wrote: | > contexts at different properties for different types | | It seems like I could use syntax from HOCON to achieve this | in a less verbose way, perhaps with minor changes to the | parser. | | > have a schema and perform the elaboration from there | | I like your schema approach. I'll have to experiment a bit. | fleddr wrote: | You can debate syntax forever but the semantic web will never | rise without the proper incentives. Not only is there no | incentive for industry to participate in it, there's in fact an | anti-incentive to do so. | | Say you've build a weather app/website. Being a good citizen, you | publish "weatherevent" objects. Now anybody can consume this | feed, remix it, aggregate, run some AI on it, new visualizations, | whichever. A great thing for the world. | | That's not how the world works. Your app is now obsolete. | Anybody, typically somebody with more resources than you, will | simply take that data and out-compete you, in ways fair on unfair | (gaming ranking). You may conclude that this is good at the macro | level, but surely the app owner disagrees on the micro level. | | Say you're one of those foodies, writing recipes online with the | typical irrelevant life story attached. The reason they do this | is to gain relevance in Google (which is easily misled by lots of | fluffy text), which creates traffic, which monetizes the ads. | | Asking these foodies instead to write semantic recipe objects | destroys the entire model. Somebody will build an app to scrape | the recipes and that seals the fate of the foodie. No | monetization therefore they'll stop producing the data. | | In commercial settings, the idea that data has zero value and is | therefore to be freely and openly shared is incredibly naive. You | can't expect any entity to actively work against their own self- | interest, even less so when it's existential. | | As the author describes, even in the academic world, supposedly | free of commercial pressure, there's no incentive or even an | anti-incentive. People rather publish lots of papers. Doing | things properly means less papers, so punishment. | | Like I said, incentives. The incentive for contributing to the | semantic web is far below zero. | marviel wrote: | As my Reinforcment Learning professor said: "It's all about | incentives, people" | | This is the kind of idea that begs me to reconsider crypto as a | possible real-world-problem-solving-tool. But I've yet to see | an example of crypto working in a way that feels like it'll | take off for anything other than (1) another form of "stock" at | best, or (2) a grift at worst. I suppose we're in the market | for another solution. | | To use a Machine Learning analogy, there's the "Credit | Assignment Problem." which is basically the same thing: | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ajcq9xWi2fmgn8RBJ/the-credit... | fleddr wrote: | I think the fundamental issue in the digital world is that | you compete with the entire damn world. | | When I open a bakery, competition is limited to just a few | miles of space. Provided I provide a decent product, I can | exist. This idea allows for millions of independent bakeries | to exist around the world, which is awesome. It provides | great diversity in products, genuine creativity, cultural | differentiation, meaningful local employment. | | When you need to compete with the entire world, it's a | different game altogether. Everything you do digitally can | fairly easily be replicated at low cost. This creates an | unstoppable force of centralization fueled by capital but | also consumer preference: they rather have one service that | has it all. | | So even if you found a way to pay for data use (via crypto or | not) all power will continue to flow to a dominant party. | [deleted] | wyc wrote: | We're trying to make semantic web models easier to use with a | project called TreeLDR...I think usability has been one of the | biggest issues of this ecosystem and OSS in general. Think | programmer-friendly data structure definitions that compile to | JSON-LD contexts, jsonschemas, and beyond. | | https://github.com/spruceid/treeldr | | Shameless plug: we're hiring if you like this kind of stuff and | Rust. | pphysch wrote: | I think there is a lot of fussing about technical solutions to | what is ultimately a cultural problem. | | Suppose we had the perfect technology to define ontologies over | real data. | | This doesn't address the fact that Anglo-American culture is | hostile to alternative ontologies. The idea of "one Truth" is | baked into the national consciousness, from classical Western | religion+philosophy to the liberal-democratic Constitution to | Wikipedia and the current Fact-Checking(tm) Brought To You By | Lockheed-Martin(tm) news-media regime. | | With this worldview, there is no reason to invest in designing or | implementing Semantic Web technologies. It's like building a a | monument to a god that you don't believe exists. Waste of time. | | To be clear, I spend a lot of time thinking about the technical | side too and implementing enterprise solutions. I just think it's | naive to frame it as primarily a technical problem when it comes | to wider public deployment. | lmeyerov wrote: | Very cool topic... and not the article I was expecting! | | I actively work with teams making sense of their massive global | supply chains, manufacturing process, sprawling IT/IOT infra | behavior, etc., and I personally bailed from RDF to bayesian | models ~15 years ago... so I'm coming from a pretty different | perspective: | | * The historical killer apps for semantic web were historically | paired with painfully manual taxonomization efforts. In industry, | that's made RDF and friends useful... but mostly in specific | niches like the above, and coming alongside pricey ontology | experts. That's why I initially bailed years ago: outside of | these important but niche domains, google search is way more | automatic, general, and easy to use! | | * Except now the tables have turned: Knowledge graphs for | grounding AI. We're seeing a lot of projects where the idea is | transformer/gnn/... <> knowledge graph. The publicly visible camp | is folks sitting on curated systems like wikidata and osm, which | have a nice back-and-forth. IMO the bigger iceberg is from AI | tools getting easier colliding with companies having massive | internal curated knowledge bases. I've been seeing them go the | knowledge graph <> AI for areas like chemicals, | people/companies/locations, equipment, ... . It's not easy to get | teams to talk about it, but this stuff is going on all the way | from big tech co's (Google, Uber, ...) to otherwise stodgy | megacorps (chemicals, manufacturing, ..). | | We're more on the viz (JS, GPU) + ai (GNN) side of these | projects, and for use cases like the above + cyber/fraud/misinfo. | If into it, definitely hiring, it's an important time for these | problems. | strangattractor wrote: | Generally agree. There is a lot of discussion concerning the | technical difficulties, RDF flaws and road blocks little | acknowledgement of other non-technical impracticalities. Making | something technically feasible does insure adoption. Changing a | bunch of code over time will always be preferable redefining | ontologies and reprocessing the data. | gibsonf1 wrote: | The semantic web has been reintroduced as part of "Solid" by Tim | Berners-Lee (and Inrupt) and is growing very fast: | https://solidproject.org/ | | The opposite of dead in fact. | boilerupnc wrote: | For a year and a half, I worked on a project called OSLC: Open | Services for Lifecycle Collaboration [0] which became an Oasis | Open Project. It's an open community building practical | specifications for integrating software. For software tools that | adopt and provide OSLC enabled APIs, data integration and | supported use cases become really easy. | | As an example, if your department prefers Tool A for defining | requirements (Aha, etc ...), Tool B for change management | (bugzilla, etc ...) and Tool C for test management and they | aren't already a unified platform, it can be hard to gain | semantic context across them. I've seen many situations where dev | teams prefer a specific FOSS/vendor change management tracking | tool while testers prefer a different thing and are unwilling to | change because of historical test automation investment. To | illustrate, imagine I run a test and it fails. I want to open a | bug and have it linked to this failing test and also associate it | with an existing requirement. If all 3 tools are OSLC API enabled | consumers/producers, then their data can be integrated together | trivially and experiences can be far more seamless and pleasant | to all involved (e.g. testers can have popups to query | (find/select reqmnts) or delegated creates (open new bug)) | without leaving their own familiar test tool's UI. Nice. Anything | can have an OSLC enabled API adapter from existing servers to | spreadsheets (with an associated proxy server). It has great | promise in bringing FOSS/vendor tooling together. | | In a nutshell, it's a set of standards around building a digital | thread for tools to integrate together. Workstreams are focused | per domain (quality management, change management, requirements | management, etc ...) [1]. Linked Data and RDF are its core tech | underpinning [2] | | [0] https://open-services.net/ | | [1] https://open-services.net/specifications/#active- | publication... | | [2] https://oslc.github.io/developing-oslc- | applications/technica... | iamwil wrote: | On our podcast, The Technium, we covered Semantic Web as a retro- | future episode [0]. It was a neat trip back to the early 2000s. | It wasn't a bad idea, pre se, but it depended on humans doing- | the-right-thing for markup and the assumption that classifying | things are easy. Turns out neither are true. In addition, the | complexity of the spec really didn't help those that wanted to | adopt its practices. However, there are bits and pieces of good | ideas in there, and some of it lives on in the web today. Just | have to dig a little to see them. Metadata on websites for | fb/twitter/google cards, RDF triples for database storage in | Datomic, and knowledge base powered searches all come to mind. | | [0] https://youtu.be/bjn5jSemPws | lolive wrote: | I was hired by a BIG company to help their data governance, and | a pragmatic semantic web is giving pretty interesting results. | Just to add some hotness/trollness to the discussion, Neo4J was | a mind opener for many people [both technical and non- | technical] | low_tech_punk wrote: | The entire movement felt like a massive tragedy of the commons. | There is just no incentive for any single player to push the | standard forward and the commercial players are already reaping | enough benefits from Web 2.0 that putting more money in Semantic | Web makes no sense. | | Semantic Web was supposed to be the Web 3.0. It's so dead now | that even its name is stolen by the blockchain. RIP. | [deleted] | [deleted] | mxmilkiib wrote: | LV2 audio plugins use RDF/Turtle; | | https://github.com/lv2/lv2 curl -H "Accept: | text/turtle,application/rdf+xml" http://lv2plug.in/ns/ext/lv2core | curl -H "Accept: text/turtle,application/rdf+xml" | http://lv2plug.in/ns/ext/atom | | Some hosts also use it for saving audio graphs; | | https://drobilla.net/software/ingen.html | http://drobilla.net/ns/ingen.html | | https://github.com/moddevices/mod-factory-user-data/tree/mas... | https://pedalboards.moddevices.com/ | de6u99er wrote: | While I love the semantic web I see two major issues with it: | | 1. Standardization in regards of (globally) unique identifiers | and ontologies. Most things un the semantic web have multiple | identifiers and, based on personal preferences, attributes linked | to different ontologies. There's several projects that try to | gather data for the same thing from various ontologies, but | sometimes the same attributes have differing values because of | conversions or simply extracting data points from different | publications where different methods have been used to measure | stuff. | | 2. Performance of large datasets gets really bad since | distributing graphs is still a problem that lacks good solutions. | One of the solutions is to store data in distributed column | stores. But there's still a ton of unsolved graph traversal | performance issues. | | I strongly believe that the technological batriers need to be | solved first. Until then there will always be the person in | meetings, asking why not use relational or NoSql tech because of | performance... | leoxv wrote: | Many of the biggest companies in world are using semweb tech: | http://sparql.club | | Open linked-data has been growing very fast over the last few | years. Many governments are now demanding LD from their | executive/subsidized organizations. These data stores are then | made accessible using REST and/or SPARQL. | terminatornet wrote: | blank is dead, long live blank | jxramos wrote: | That github was created 2 days ago, wasn't this article discussed | elsewhere someplace? It looks very recognizable. Was it on a blog | or something and just made a new home in github or was it some | other similar article I may be thinking about. | ggleason wrote: | I wrote it from scratch 2 days ago. | hosh wrote: | This is a really fascinating analysis. I have wondered why the | semantic web never took off, and I am finding myself interested | in being able to create data sources in a federated way. The | author's mention of Data Mesh and his own project, TerminusDB | looks like what I had been looking for, for a side project. | | One adjacent project I did not see mentioned is XMPP. The | extensibility of XMPP comes from being able to refer to schemas | within stanzas of the payload. It's also an interesting case | study on an ecosystem built from a decentralized, extensible | protocol. One of the burdens plaguing the XMPP ecosystem is spam, | and I wonder to what extent we might see that if the semantic web | revives again. | Krisjohn wrote: | Sigh | | When the phrase "The King is dead, long life the King" is used, | the two kings are different people; the one that just passed and | the one that replaced him. If the King is replaced by a Queen | then the phrase is "The King is dead, long live the Queen". This | is not some life after death thing. You aren't saying the King | will live on in the hearts and minds of the people, you're | stating your support for the successor. | lolive wrote: | The new king of the Semantic Web is obviously Neo4J. | leoxv wrote: | I'm building a front end app for Wikipedia & Wikidata called | Conzept encyclopedia (https://conze.pt) based on semantic web | pillars (SPARQL, URIs, various ontologies, etc.) and loving it so | far. | | The semantic web is not dead, its just slowly evolving and and | growing. Last week I implemented JSON-LD (RDF embedded in HTML | with a schema.org ontology), super easy and now any HTTP client | can comprehend what any page is about automatically. | | See https://twitter.com/conzept__ for many examples what Conzept | can already do. You won't see many other apps do these things, | and certainly not in a non-semantic-web way! | | The future of the semantic web is in: much more open data, good | schemas and ontologies for various domains, better web extensions | understanding JSON-LD, more SPARQL-enabled tools, better and more | lightweight/accessible NLP/AI/vector compute (preferably embedded | in the client also), dynamic computing using category theory | foundations (highly interactive and dynamic code paths, let the | computer write logic for you), ... | lolive wrote: | The future of the semantic web is in big companies. Where | handling data exchanges at scale is becoming a massive waste of | time, resources and sanity. | lancesells wrote: | > Because distributed, interoperable, well defined data is | literally the most central problem for the current and near | future human economy. | | I'm having a really hard time seeing this at least in the terms | of the web and the majority of web content. | lolive wrote: | Whoever dismisses the semantic web and prefers CSV for data | exchange can burn in HELL!!! | jansc wrote: | The semantic web is dead. Long live Topic maps [1] ;-) | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_map | tconfrey wrote: | I think the general message here is that complex and complete | architectures tend to fail in favor of simpler solutions that | people can understand and use to get things done in the here and | now. | | Its interesting to me that the recent uptick in the personal | knowledge management space (aka tools for thought)[0] is all | around the bi-directional graph which is basically a 2-tuple | simplified version of the RDF 3-tuple. You lose the semantics of | a labelled edge, but its easier for people to understand. | | [0] See Roam Research, Obsidian, LogSeq, Dendron et al. | openfuture wrote: | Lots of good points raised, necessary discussion. | | My take is that we know a lot of this already but refuse to | accept the solutions. The way to exchange data and the way to | relate and query data is both known to a large extent; canonical | S-expressions and datalog-ish expressivity. I just can't | understand why no one thinks datalisp.is a persuasive foundation. | strangattractor wrote: | Having worked for an Academic Publisher that had intense interest | in this I finally came to the following conclusions to why this | is DOA. | | 1. Producers of content are unwilling to pay for it (and neither | are consumers BTW) 2. It is impossible to predict how the | ontology will change over time so going back and reclassifying | documents to make them useful is expensive. 3. Most pieces of | info have a shelf life so it is not worth the expense of doing | it. 4. Search is good enough and much easier. 5. Much of what is | published is incorrect or partial so. | | In the end I decided this is akin to discussing why everybody | should use Lisp to program but the world has a differ opinion. | ternaryoperator wrote: | Not sure I understand the comparison with Lisp. You list five | reasons for the semantic web that mostly involve cost. | pornel wrote: | Semantic Web lost itself in fine details of machine-readable | formats, but never solved the problem of getting correctly marked | up data from humans. | | In the current web and apps people mostly produce information for | other people, and this can work even with plain text. Documents | may lack semantic markup, or may even have invalid markup, and | have totally incorrect invisible metadata, and still be perfectly | usable for humans reading them. This is a systemic problem, and | won't get better by inventing a nicer RDF syntax. | | In language translation, attempts of building rigid formal | grammar-based models have failed, and throwing lots of text at a | machine learning has succeeded. Semantic Web is most likely | doomed in the same way. GPT-3 already seems to have more | awareness of the world than anything you can scrape from any | semantic database. | pphysch wrote: | Sure, but there are still a lot of decisions being made behind | the curtain, when it comes to producing a model like GPT-3. How | was the training data ontologized? Where did it come from? To | some extent, these are the same problems facing manual | curation. | pornel wrote: | GPT may have had some manual curation to avoid making it too | horny and racist, but on a technical level for such models | you can just throw anything at it. The more the better, shove | it all in. | cyocum wrote: | The author of this post mentions the Humanities at the end of | their post and TerminusDB. I work on a Humanities based project | which uses the Semantic Web (https://github.com/cyocum/irish-gen) | and I have looked at TerminusDB a couple of times. | | The main factor in my choice of technologies for my project was | the ability to reason data from other data. OWL was the defining | solution for my project. This is mainly because I am only one | person so I needed the computer to extrapolate data that was | logically implied but I would be forced to encode by hand | otherwise. OWL actually allowed my project to be tractable for a | single person (or a couple of people) to work on. | | The author brings up several points that I have also run into | myself. The Open World Assumption makes things difficult to | reason about and makes understanding what is meant by a URL hard. | Another problem that I have run into is that debugging OWL is a | nightmare. I have no way to hold the reasoner to account so I | have no way when I run a SPARQL query to be able to know if what | is presented is sane. I cannot ask the reasoner "how did you come | up with this inference?" and have it tell me. That means if I run | a query, I must go back to the MS sources to double check that | something has not gone wrong and fix the database if it has. | | Another problem that the author discusses and what I call | "Academic Abandonware". There are things out there but only the | academic who worked on it knows how to make it work. The | documentation is usually non-extant and trying to figure things | out can take a lot of precious time. | | I will probably have another look at TerminusDB in due course but | it will need to have a reasoner as powerful as the OWL ones and | an ease of use factor to entice me to shift my entire project at | this point. | closewith wrote: | > I work on a Humanities based project which uses the Semantic | Web (https://github.com/cyocum/irish-gen) and I have looked at | TerminusDB a couple of times. | | I had never come across anything like this before, but this is | a wonderful project. | zozbot234 wrote: | "Reasoning" capability can be added to any conventional | database via the use of views, and sometimes custom indexes. | The real problem is that it's computationally expensive for | non-trivial cases. | lolive wrote: | I hardly see how you can define in a RDBMS that a resource | that both have an engine and four wheels should be seen as a | car. Without going into a nightmare of unbearable SQL... | zozbot234 wrote: | The SQL for describing "resources that contain other | resources" gets a bit unidiomatic, but defining a query for | those that have e.g. an engine and four wheels is quite | easy. Then you can add that as a custom view, so that your | inferred data is in turn available and queryable on an | equal basis with raw input to the knowledge base. | lolive wrote: | Sure. But maintaining the coherence between your business | data model definitions and their implementation in the | RDBMS can quickly become a massive headache, don't you | think? | asplake wrote: | Seems to miss the obvious double whammy: | | 1) Because it burdens producers to no obvious benefit, a problem | forever | | 2) Because progress over time in language processing makes it | less and less necessary | jll29 wrote: | Natural language processing (NLP) may indeed understand the | unstructured text, then according to (2), the "Semantic Web" is | not needed, except for perhaps caching NLP outputs in machine- | readable form. | | (1) is more fundamental: a lot of value-add annotation (in RDF | or other forms) would be valuable, but because there is work | involved those that have it don't give it away for free. This | part was not sufficiently addressed in the OP: the Incentive | Problem. Either there needs to be a way how people pay for the | value-add metadata, or there has to be another benefit for the | provider why they would give it away. Most technical articles | focus on the format, or on some specific ontologies (typically | without an application). | | A third issue is trust. In Berners-Lee's original paper, trust | is shown as an extra box, suggesting it is a component. That's | a grave misunderstanding: trust is a property of the whole | system/ecosystem; you can't just take a prototype and say "now | let's add a trust module to it!" In the absence of trust | guarantees, who ensures that the metadata that does exist is | correct? It may just be spam (annotation spam may be the | counterpart of Web spam in the unstructured world). | | No Semantic Web until the Incentive Problem and the Trust | Problem are solved. | leoxv wrote: | "No Semantic Web until the Incentive Problem and the Trust | Problem are solved." | | No. The semweb is already functional as is (see my other | comments here). Trust is orthogonal and can/is being solved | in different ways (centralized/decentralized as in | Wikidata/ORCIDs/org-ID-URIs). | oofbey wrote: | Talking about "the incentive problem" as if it's some minor | fixable issue ignores all of human psychology and | economics. | | The climate crisis is a somewhat comparable example - it | requires changing behavior on a massive scale for abstract | benefit. In the climate case the benefit is much more | fundamental than what semweb promises. And despite massive | pain and effort we are very very far from addressing it. | Thinking semweb would happen just cuz it sounds cool is | super naive. | leoxv wrote: | 1) | | - SPARQL is _a lot better_ than the many different forms of | SQL. | | - Adding some JSON-LD can be done through simple JSON metadata. | Something people using Wordpress are already able to do. All | this will be more and more automated. | | - The benefit is ontological cohesion across the whole web. | Please take a look at the https://conze.pt project and see what | this can bring you. The benefit is huge. Simple integration | with many different stores of information in a semantically | precise way. | | 2) AI/NLP is never completely precise and requires huge | resources (which require centralization). The basics of the | semantic web will be based on RDF (whether created through some | AI or not), SPARQL, ontologies and extended/improved by AI/NLP. | Its a combination of the two that is already being used for | Wikipedia and Wikidata search results. | azinman2 wrote: | > The benefit is ontological cohesion across the whole web | | This has no benefit for the person who has to pay to do the | work. Why would I pay someone to mark up all my data, just | for the greater good? When humans are looking/using my | products, none of this is visible. It's not built into any | tools, it doesn't get me more SEO, and it doesn't get me any | more sales. | leoxv wrote: | Why are people editing Wikipedia and Wikidata? What would | it bring you if your products were globally linked to that | knowledge graph and Google's machines would understand that | metadata from the tiny JSON-LD snippet on each page? The | tools are here already, the tech is evolving still, but the | knowledge graph concept is going to affect web shop owners | too soon enough. | azinman2 wrote: | It's unclear to me at this point why people are | contributing to Wikipedia and certainly wikidata, but | they're getting something out of it (perhaps notoriety), | and a lot probably has to do with contributing to the | greater good. It's all non profit. The rest of the web is | unlike these stand out projects. | | Meanwhile, why would say Mouser or Airbnb pay someone to | markup their docs? WebMD? Clearly nothing has been | compelling them to do so thus far, and when you're | talking about harvesting data and using it elsewhere, | it's a difficult argument to make. Google already gets | them plenty of traffic without these efforts. | leoxv wrote: | They do it because it benefits them too. OpenStreetMaps | links with WD, GLAMs link with WD, journals/ORCIDs link | with WD, all sorts of other data archives link with WD. | Whoever is not linking with may see a crawler pass by to | collect license-free facts. | | Also, I just checked: WebMD is using a ton of embedded | RDF on each page. They understand SEO well as you said :) | oofbey wrote: | Exactly. | | A refinement on your second point is that the groups who would | have benefited the most from semantic web were the googles of | the world, but they were also the ones who needed it the least. | Because they were well ahead of everybody else at building the | NLP to extract structure from the existing www. In fact the | existence of semantic web would have eroded their key | advantage. So the ones in a position to encourage this and make | it happen didn't want it at all. So it was always DOA. | Arrgh wrote: | Building a trust relationship between commercial entities isn't | automatable; it nearly always requires a contract to be carefully | hand-written and argued over by high-priced lawyers before any | meaningful exchange of value can take place. | | Sure, this is an unfortunate level of friction, and overkill in | many cases, but think about it from a cost/benefit perspective: I | can spend $10k on legal fees and successfully avoid not just a | lot of uncertainty, but very infrequently, the contract also | protects me from losses that can be orders of magnitude larger | than it cost me to negotiate the contract. | staplung wrote: | Clay Shirky nailed in in 2003: | | https://deathray.us/no_crawl/others/semantic-web.html | | I'll just excerpt the conclusion: | | ``` The systems that have succeeded at scale have made simple | implementation the core virtue, up the stack from Ethernet over | Token Ring to the web over gopher and WAIS. The most widely | adopted digital descriptor in history, the URL, regards semantics | as a side conversation between consenting adults, and makes no | requirements in this regard whatsoever: sports.yahoo.com/nfl/ is | a valid URL, but so is 12.0.0.1/ftrjjk.ppq. The fact that a URL | itself doesn't have to mean anything is essential - the Web | succeeded in part because it does not try to make any assertions | about the meaning of the documents it contained, only about their | location. | | There is a list of technologies that are actually political | philosophy masquerading as code, a list that includes Xanadu, | Freenet, and now the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web's | philosophical argument - the world should make more sense than it | does - is hard to argue with. The Semantic Web, with its neat | ontologies and its syllogistic logic, is a nice vision. However, | like many visions that project future benefits but ignore present | costs, it requires too much coordination and too much energy to | effect in the real world, where deductive logic is less effective | and shared worldview is harder to create than we often want to | admit. | | Much of the proposed value of the Semantic Web is coming, but it | is not coming because of the Semantic Web. The amount of meta- | data we generate is increasing dramatically, and it is being | exposed for consumption by machines as well as, or instead of, | people. But it is being designed a bit at a time, out of self- | interest and without regard for global ontology. It is also being | adopted piecemeal, and it will bring with it with all the | incompatibilities and complexities that implies. There are | significant disadvantages to this process relative to the shining | vision of the Semantic Web, but the big advantage of this bottom- | up design and adoption is that it is actually working now. ``` | leoxv wrote: | "However, like many visions that project future benefits but | ignore present costs, it requires too much coordination and too | much energy to effect in the real world" ... Wikipedia, | Wikidata, OpenStreetMaps, Archive.org, ORCID science-journal | stores, and the thousands of other open linked-data platforms | are proofing Clay wrong each day. He has not been relevant for | a long time IMHO. Semweb > tag-taxonomies. | asiachick wrote: | I only skimmed the article so maybe I missed I but at a glance it | seemed the completely miss the biggest issue. People will | intentionally mislabel things. If chocolate is trending people | will add "chocolate" to there tags for bitcoin. | | You can see this all over the net. One example is the tags on | SoundCloud. | | Another issue is agreeing on categories. say women vs men or male | vs female. for the purpose of id the fluidity makes sense but | less so for search. to put it another way, if I search for | brunettes i'd better not see any blondes. If I search for dogs | I'd better not see any cats. And what to do about ambiguous | stuff. What's a sandwich? A hamburger? a hotdog? a gyro? a taco? | PaulHoule wrote: | Semweb people got burned out by the stress of making new | standards which means that standards haven't been updated. We've | needed a SPARQL 2 for a long time but we're never going to get | it. | | One thing I find interesting is that description logics (OWL) | seem to have stayed a backwater in a time when progress in SAT | and SMT solvers has been explosive. | ggleason wrote: | That's a very good point re SAT/SMT. F* (https://www.fstar- | lang.org/) has done truly amazing things by making use of them, | and it's great to be able to get sophisticated correctness | checks while doing basically non of the work. | | I'm going to have to go away and think about how one could | effectively leverage this in a data setting, but I'd love to | hear ideas. | PaulHoule wrote: | It doesn't have anything directly to do with SAT but I'd say | the #1 deficiency in RDFS and OWL is this. | | Somebody might write :Today :tempF 32.0 . | | or :Today :tempC 0.0 . | | The point of RDFS and OWL is _not_ to force people into a | straightjacket the way people think it is but rather make it | possible to write a rulebox after the fact that merges data | together. You might wish you could write | :tempC rdfs:subPropertyOf :tempF . | | but you can't, what you really want is to write a rule like | ?x :tempC ?y -> ?x :tempF ?y*1.8 + 32.0 | | but OWL doesn't let you do that. You can do it with SPIN but | SPIN never got ratified and so far all the SPIN | implementations are simple fixed point iterators and don't | take advantage of the large advances that have happened with | production rules systems since they fell out of fashion (e.g. | systems in the 1980s broke down with 10,000 rules, in 2022 | 1,000,000 rules is often no problem.) | zozbot234 wrote: | A recent paper connects SHACL (mentioned in OP) to description | logic and OWL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.06096 . This is a | surprising link which seems to have been missed by SemWeb | practitioners when SHACL was proposed. | blablabla123 wrote: | Wikidata is quite usable though with SPARQL through REST. To me | the biggest problem seems lack of documentation but for small | scale experiments interesting stuff can be done with it (with | enough caching, probably with SQL). Running my own triple store | seems a lot of work though, already choosing which one to use | actually | jrochkind1 wrote: | > Semweb people got burned out by the stress of making new | standards which means that standards haven't been updated. | | True. But and also, web standards seem to have mostly been | abandoned/died beyond just semantic web. I am not sure how to | explain it, but there was a golden age of making inter-operable | higher-level data and protocol standards, and... it's over. | There much less standards-making going on. It's not just SPARQL | that could use a new version, but has no standards-making | activity going on. | | I can't totally explain it, and would love to read someone who | thinks they can. | Yahivin wrote: | Cleary the writings of a brilliant and disturbed mind. | throwaway0asd wrote: | Semantic web is data science for the browser. Most people can't | even figure out how to architect HTML/JS without a colossal tool | to do it for them, so figuring out data science architecture in | the browser is a huge ask. | z3t4 wrote: | There are two camps, | | one that thinks you should use tools to generate HTML/JS and | those tools should generate strict XML and any extra semantic | data. The problem is that the actual users of these tools | either don't care, or know about semantic HTML nor semantic | data. | | Then the other camp that thinks HTML should be written by hand | which makes it small, simple and semantic (layout and design | separated into CSS) without any div elements. Hand-writing the | semantic data in addition to the semantic HTML becomes too | burdensome. | jerf wrote: | The reason why the semantic web is even more fundamental: You | can't get everyone to agree on one schema. Period. Even if | everyone is motivated to, they can't agree, and if there is even | a hint of a reason to try to distinguish oneself or strategically | fail to label data or label it incorrectly, it becomes even more | impossible. | | (I mean, the "semantic web" has foundered so completely and | utterly on the problem of even barely working at all that it | hasn't hardly had to face up to the simplest spam attacks of the | early 2000s, and it's not even remotely capable of playing in the | 2022 space.) | | Agreement here includes not just abstract agreement in a meeting | about what a schema is, but complete agreement when the rubber | hits the road such that one can rely on the data coming from | multiple providers as if they all came from one. | | Nothing else matters. It doesn't matter what the serialization of | the schema that can't exist is. It doesn't matter what inference | you can do on the data that doesn't exist. It doesn't matter what | constraints the schema that can't exist specifies. None of that | matters. | | Next in line would be the economic impracticality of expecting | everyone to label their data out of the goodness of their hearts | with this perfectly-agreed-upon schema, but the Semantic Web | can't even get far enough for this to be its biggest problem! | | Semantic web is a whole bunch of clouds and wishes and dreams | built on a foundation that not only _does_ not exist, but _can_ | not exist. If you want to rehabilitate it, go get people to agree | (even in principle!) on a single schema. You won 't rehabilitate | it. But you'll understand what I'm saying a lot more. And you'll | get to save all the time you were planning on spending building | up the higher levels. | lyxsus wrote: | There're a lot of wrong perspectives on the topic in this | thread, but this one I like the most. When someone starts to | talk about "agreeing on a single schema/ontology" it's a solid | indicator that that someone needs to get back to rtfm (which I | agree a bit too cryptic). | | The point here is that in semantic web there're supposed to be | lots and lots of different ontologies/schemas by design, often | describing the same data. SW spec stack has many well-separated | layers. To address that problem, an OWL/RDFS is created. | wrnr wrote: | I've been part of 4 commercial project that used the semantic | web in one way or another. All these project or at least | their semantic web part where a failure. I think that I have | a good idea on where the misunderstanding about the semantic | web originate. The author does seem to have a good | understanding and is right about the semantic web forcing | everything into a single schema. Academia sells the straight | jacked of the semantic web as a life long free lunch at an | all-you-can eat-buffet but instead you are convicted to a | life sentence in prison. Adopting RDF is just too costly | because it is never the way computers or humans structure | data in order to work with it. Of course everything can be | organised in a hyper graph, there is a reason why Steven | Wolfram also uses this structure, they just so flexible. At | the end of the day I don't agree with the author opinion of | the semantic web having much of a future, I did my best but | it didn't work out, time for other things. | lyxsus wrote: | > semantic web forcing everything into a single schema | | I don't think "forcing" is the right word here, I think the | right one would be "expects it to converge under practical | incentives". That's a more gentle statement that reflects | the fact, that it doesn't have to for SW tech to work. | | Also, the term "schema" is a bit off, bc there's really no | such thing in there. You can have the same graph described | differently using different ontologies at the same moment | without changing underlying data model, accessible via the | same interface. It's a very different approach. | | > never the way computers or humans structure data in order | to work with it | | If you haven't mentioned that you had an experience, I | would say you confuse different layers of technology, | because graph data model is a natural representation of | many complex problems. But because you have, can I ask you | to clarify what you mean here? | | > Academia sells the straight jacked of the semantic web as | a life long free lunch at an all-you-can eat-buffet | | I disagree, bc I in fact think that academia doesn't sell | shit, and that's the problem. There's no clear marketing | proposal and I don't think they really bother or equipped | to make it. There's a lack of human-readable specs and | docs, it's insane how much time you need to invest in this | topic even just to be able estimate whenever it's a | reasonable to consider using SW in a first place. Also, | lack of conceptual framework, "walkthroughs", tools, | outdated information, incorrect information drops survival | chance of a SW-based project by at least x100. But it can | really shine in some use-cases, that unfortunately have | little to do with the "web" itself. | zozbot234 wrote: | RDF is just an interoperability format. You aren't supposed | to use it as part of your own technology stack, it just | allows multiple systems to communicate seamlessly. | jerf wrote: | "The point here is that in semantic web there're supposed to | be lots and lots of different ontologies/schemas by design, | often describing the same data." | | Then that is just another reason it will fail. We already | have islands of data. The problem with those islands of data | is not that we don't have a unified expression of the data, | the problem is the _meaning_ is isolated. The lack of a | single input format is little more than annoyance and the | sort of thing that tends to resolve itself over time even | without a centralized consortium, because that 's the _easy_ | part. | | Without agreement, there is no there there, and none of the | promised virtues can manifest. If what you say is the | semantic web is the semantic web (which certainly doesn't | match what everyone else says it is), then it is failing | because it doesn't solve the right problem, though that isn't | surprising because it's not solvable. | | If what you describe is the semantic web, the Semantic Web is | "JSON", and as solved as it ever will be. | | A "knowing wizard correcting the foolish mortals" pose would | be a lot more plausible if the "semantic web" had more to | show for its decades, actual accomplishments even remotely in | line with the promises constantly being made. | lyxsus wrote: | so if it tries to have a unified ontology that's why it's | destined to fail, but if it's designed to working with many | small ontologies... that's why it will fail! lol, but you | can't have it both ways. | | In SW, the "semantic" part is subjective to an interpreter. | You can have different data sources, partially mapped using | owl to the ontology that an interpreter (your program) | understands. That allows you to integrate new data sources | independently from the program if they use a known ontology | seamlessly or create a mapping of a set of concepts into a | known ontology (which you would have do anyway in other | approach). So in theory, data consumption capabilities (and | reasoning) grows as your data sources evolve. | | > If what you describe is the semantic web, the Semantic | Web is "JSON", and solved. | | It has nothing to do with JSON, JSON-LD, XML, Turtle, N3, | rdfa, microdata and etc.. RDF is a data model, but those | are serialisation formats. That's another interesting | point, because half of the people talk only about formats | and not the full stack. That's not a reasonable discussion. | | > which certainly doesn't match what everyone else says it | is | | oh, I know it and it's upsetting. | pessimizer wrote: | > if it tries to have a unified ontology that's why it's | destined to fail, but if it's designed to working with | many small ontologies... that's why it will fail! lol, | but you can't have it both ways. | | You're only supposed to say "you can have it both ways" | about contradictory things. It can both be a hopeless | endeavor because it is impossible to agree on ontologies | and a useless endeavor if you don't agree on ontologies. | lyxsus wrote: | Oh, I would like to see a look on your face when just in | about 100-200 years from now it will be mature enough for | a "web scale". | pessimizer wrote: | Just 200 years around the corner. | jrochkind1 wrote: | Maybe 300. But no longer, I'm confident! Do you want to | be left out in a couple centuries? You better get on the | train now. | kortex wrote: | > The point here is that in semantic web there're supposed to | be lots and lots of different ontologies/schemas by design, | often describing the same data. | | This is incredibly problematic for many reasons. Not the | least of which is the inevitable promulgation of bad | data/schemas. I remember one ontology for scientific | instruments and I, a former chemist, identified multiple | catastrophically incorrect classifications (I forget the | details, but something like classifying NMR as a kind of | chromatography. Clear indicators the owl author didn't know | the domain). | | The only thing worse than a bad schema is multiple bad | schemas of varying badness, and not knowing which to pick. | Especially if there is disjoint aspects of each which are | (in)correct. | | There may have been advancements in the few years since I was | in the space, but as of then, any kind of | probabilistic/doxastic ontology was unviable. | lyxsus wrote: | That's a valid point, but I'm not sure, the following | problem has a technical solution: | | > Clear indicators the owl author didn't know the domain | kortex wrote: | It doesn't, which is exactly the problem. Ontologies | inevitably have mistakes. When your reasoning is based on | these "strong" graph links, even small mistakes can | cascade into absolute garbage. Plus manual taxonomic | classification is super time consuming (ergo expensive). | Additionally, that assumes that there is very little in | the way of nebulosity, which means you don't even have a | solid grasp of correct/incorrect. Then you have | perspectives - there is no monopoly on truth. | | It's just not a good model of the world. Soft features | and belief-based links are a far better way to describe | observations. | | Basically, every edge needs a weight, ideally a log- | likelihood ratio. 0 means "I have no idea whether this | relation is true or false", positive indicates truthiness | and negative means the edge is more likely to be false | than true. | | Really, the whole graph needs to be learnable. It doesn't | really matter if NMR is a chromatographic method. _Why_ | do you care what kind of instrument it is? Then apply | attributes based on behaviors ( "it analyses chemicals", | "it generates n-dim frequency-domain data") | lyxsus wrote: | Understood, thank you. | | Yes, that's not solvable with just OWL (though it might | help a little) or any other popular reasoners I know. | There're papers, proposals and experimental | implementations for generating probability-based | inferences, but nothing one can just take and use, but | there're tons of interesting ideas on how to represent | that kind of data in RDF or reason about. | | I think the correct solution in SW context would be to | add a custom reasoner to the stack. | leoxv wrote: | Wikidata is already providing a nearly globally accepted store | of concept IDs. Wikipedia adds a lot of depth to this knowledge | graph too. | | Schema.org has become very popular and Google is backing this | project. Wordpress and others are already using it. | | Governments are requiring not just "open data", but also "open | linked-data" (which can then be ingested into a SPARQL engine), | because they want this data to be usable across organizations. | | The financial industry are moving to the FIBO ontology, and on | and on... | lysergia wrote: | Long live the dream of the semantic web. For visual learners | there's a great YouTube video explaining the semantic web here: | | https://youtu.be/6gmP4nk0EOE | mxmilkiib wrote: | For a longer in-depth video playlist, | https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoOmvuyo5UAeihlKcWpzVzB51... | thirdtrigger wrote: | Interesting writeup. I'm of the opinion that the problem of the | naming issue (how to call "things"?) sits in the idea that going | from structured documents to structured data is one abstraction | level too deep (i.e., people don't agree on how to call | "things"). I believe this can be solved by similarity search; if | we can approximate the data and represent the structure in | embeddings. Hopefully, this might be a step in the 2nd try, as | mentioned in the MD :) | | > It would be like wikipedia, but even more all encompassing, and | far more transformational. | | You might like to see this | (https://weaviate.io/developers/weaviate/current/tutorials/se...) | as a step in this direction because it contains the structured | Wikipedia data and the embeddings to target individual nodes in | the graph. | galaxyLogic wrote: | I think the answer is Datalog. It is simple, simpler than SQL but | powerful like Prolog. Why hasn't it caught on? | ggleason wrote: | I am of the same opinion. TerminusDB uses a data log for query | and update. I think it will catch on. | | And in the future we will even be able to add constraints - | which can be a real superpower in querying graphs. | SeanLuke wrote: | The semantic web is notion for _defining_ data relationships. | Datalog and SQL are languages for _queries_. These have little | to do with one another. It 's like saying that HTML is failing | as a format, so the answer is HTTP. | tannhaeuser wrote: | Nit: Datalog isn't as powerful as Prolog, that's the whole | point of it as a decidable fragment of first order logic (and | it's seeing increased use in SMT/fixpoint solvers and | databases) | | But yeah, if getting rid of the whole SemWeb stack, triples, | and their many awful serialization formats, design-by-committee | query and constraint languages (keeping just the good parts) | means we can finally return to focus on Prolog, Datalog, and | simple term encodings of logic, I'm all for it. | travisgriggs wrote: | > My experience in engineering is that you almost always get | things wrong the first time. | | Probably the oldest gem I can remember, harvested from from a | more senior mentor type, was the quip "It takes 3 times to get it | right. And that's an average. Get failing." | | Now, I'm that older guy. I still think this holds. | efitz wrote: | The answer to almost any question beginning with "why don't they" | (or why didn't they), is almost always "money". | | Producing, aggregating, storing, or otherwise adding value to | information costs money. Operating the internet costs money. | Providing access to data costs money. | | People are lazy. Businesses on the internet have learned that | they can extract more money from this vast pool of lazy people by | presenting information rather than just providing information. By | this, I mean that the value-add and/or lock-in of many internet | businesses is tied to how the information is presented; adopting | a standard format would be effort that would not be financially | rewarded. | | (by "lazy", I mean "looking for local minima in effort to | accomplish whatever task that they're trying to do") | | Finally, the web envisioned itself as a hypermedia system that | incorporated presentation (and subsequently active content) | instead of just semantic content. Since presentation is a | property of the web, it was quickly adopted for the reasons | described above and evolved into the modern web (which replaced | the blink tag with shit tons of javascript, don't get me | started). | | Therefore the "semantic web" could never exist because | "semantics" is fundamentally incompatible with "web". Once you | invent the web, you can't have the semantic web anymore because | money. | | We shoulda stuck with gopher. | jsight wrote: | +1 - The surest path to having someone copy your data and | monetize it better than you is to present it in semantically | sound ways. | | Imagine a stock site that made real time prices readily | available in a common format! Oh, it exists, but you have to | pay for it... | | And you don't need semantics for that, you want something more | like Swagger. | [deleted] | kukkeliskuu wrote: | There are deeper issues with semantic web. | | Look at the EDIFACT. Huge standardization effort, but it was | still not possible to automate system to system communication, | because ultimately you need to rely on some words, and words are | flexible. I was working with multiple companies that understood | "through-invoicing" in EDIFACT differently, but the differences | were so subtle they needed a third party to clarify those | differences. | | Lately, in various sectors, such as finance, there are | commercially available reference data models. These are extremely | complex, because they need to cover all the possible alternatives | businesses might have, in various countries. Just to gain basic | understanding of such a model is a huge effort. To have people to | label things properly would probably involve learning a similar | system. | TylerE wrote: | Sort of reminds me of the original idea behind REST. IMO | automated system-to-system is a dead end... you're always going | to need humans in the loop for any useful non-trivial data. | WaitWaitWha wrote: | Very interesting. I would like to see pricing, specially for the | stringchair. I have a few buddies that could use it. | boxslof wrote: | keeping it short because on phone. | | working for a company, 100 % semantic web, integrating many, many | parties for many years now, all of it rdf. | | - you get used to turtle. one file can describe your db and be | ingested as such. handy. - interoperability is really possible. | (distributed apps) - hardest part is getting everyone to agree on | the model, but often these discussions is more about resolving | ambuigties surrounding the business than about translating it to | model. (it gets things sharp) - agree on a minimum model, open | world means you can extend in your app - don't overthink your owl | descriptions | | - no, please no reasoners. data is never perfect. | | - tooling is there - triple stores are not the fastest | | pls, not another standard to fix the semantic web. Everything is | there. More maturity in tooling might be welcome, but this a | function of the number people using it. | 0xbadcafebee wrote: | Very well written introduction to some of the problems with | semantic web dev. | | Personally I think the reason it died was there were no obvious | commercial applications. There are of course commercial | applications, but not in a way that people realize what they're | using is semantic web. Of all the 'note keepers' and 'knowledge | bases' out there, none of them are semantic web. Thus it has | languished in academia and a few niche industries in backend | products, or as hidden layers, ex. Wikipedia. Because there | wasn't something we could stare at and go "I am using the | semantic web right now", there was no hype, and no hype means no | development. | k8si wrote: | Very hard to make a business case because for the reasons you | mentioned + the costs are very front-loaded because ontologies | are so damn hard to build, even for very well-contained | problems. Without a clear payoff, why bother | galaxyLogic wrote: | Yes because that is about formalizing all human thought and | knowledge. In principle that has nothing to do with computers | and is something everybody working in science and humanities | has been always trying to do starting with Socrates or was it | Pythagoras. It is about "building theories". | | Now computers can help in that of course but it doesn't | really make it easy to create a consistent stable "theory of | everything". As we used to say "garbage in garbage out". ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-08-10 23:00 UTC)