[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".
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