We call it "blockchain" now.
A lot of the solution in search of a problem work that went into semantic web just shifted to the crypto currency space.
Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?
11–20 of 72 posts
Re: Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?
#12The Semantic Web is incompatible with the commercial incentives of most technology companies. For instance, it would currently be irrational for Facebook to voluntarily publish their social network using the friend of a friend schema. Their profit is derived from their centralized, private ownership of this data. Hopefully we can move towards a decentralized or federate, public web.
The Semantic Web as originally imagined is also incompatible with privacy, and with malicious fake data. So is the decentralized Web you imagine, I think.
Let's keep using FOAF as an example. The facts about who knows who in FOAF are just bare RDF triples. There's nothing about who's allowed to know who knows who. There isn't even room to specify who's allowed to know who knows who. If any significant number of people had described their friends and relationships with FOAF, all of it would quickly have been slurped into a marketing database.
There's also no room in traditional Semantic Web ontologies to keep track of the provenance of why you believe something, and to disbelieve something that comes from an unreliable source. Every triple is supposed to be a statement of fact that you can derive things from as if it is 100% true. You could use FOAF to say you're married to Tim Berners-Lee, and not even Sir Tim would have a way to say "no you're not".
Re: Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?
#13Most technologies that were specific to the "Semantic Web", such as OWL and SPARQL, failed to scale and failed to solve realistic problems, and therefore died. (I always maintained that running a SPARQL endpoint amounted to running a DDoS on yourself.)
However, we got something kind of cool out of the RDF model that underlies it, especially when some sufficiently opinionated developers identified the bad parts of RDF and dumped them. We got JSON-LD [1], a way for making APIs describe themselves in a way that's compatible with RDF's data model. For what I mean about sufficiently opinionated developers, I recommend reading Manu Sporny's "JSON-LD and Why I Hate the Semantic Web" [2], a wonderful title for the article behind the main reason the Semantic Web is still relevant.
Google makes use of JSON-LD in real situations: for example, an airline that uses JSON-LD can send you an e-mail that Google Assistant can use to update you on the status of your flight, and Gmail can use to give you a simple button for checking in.
Re: Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?
#14It was always a cruel joke, never to be taken seriously.
At its core were SEO hucksters trying pass off page rank hacks as a business model for consulting work, during the post-dot-com bust period, when money was scarce and web design couldn't pay the bills anymore.
Many ascended to the priesthood of RESTful web microservice development, where they poo poo and tisk-tisk improper path grammar and noodle with JSON objects, in between periods of intense navel gazing.
Re: Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?
#15Onthologies are hard. Curation is harder. People are lazy. The ideas are still around; some [1] were lifted by Facebook [2], for example. There's also continuation work that's related, like web annotations [3], but generally the commercial web is moving even more away from neatly-organized resources [4] and towards Javascript state machines [5]. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160713021037/http://dig.csail.... [2]…
I think you hint great points especially with "People are lazy".
The semantic web was a great idea, but in the period from 2000 to 2010, people advertized it as a kind of AGI that would solve all hard problems with junk data.
It is still used in biology, for example in Gene Ontology [0] but the main use case (People are lazy) is "If your research cannot find interesting stuff, just query Gene Ontology".
Re: Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?
#16Onthologies are hard. Curation is harder. People are lazy. The ideas are still around; some [1] were lifted by Facebook [2], for example. There's also continuation work that's related, like web annotations [3], but generally the commercial web is moving even more away from neatly-organized resources [4] and towards Javascript state machines [5]. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160713021037/http://dig.csail.... [2]…
I think you hint great points especially with "People are lazy". The semantic web was a great idea, but in the period from 2000 to 2010, people advertized it as a kind of AGI that would solve all hard problems with junk data. It is still used in biology, for example in Gene Ontology [0] but the main use case ( People are lazy ) is "If your research cannot find interesting stuff, just query Gene Ontology". [0] https:/…
While re-reading what I wrote, a part of a sentence makes me wonder "a kind of AGI that would solve all hard problems with junk data"
Re: Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?
#17The Semantic Web is incompatible with the commercial incentives of most technology companies. For instance, it would currently be irrational for Facebook to voluntarily publish their social network using the friend of a friend schema. Their profit is derived from their centralized, private ownership of this data. Hopefully we can move towards a decentralized or federate, public web.
The Semantic Web as originally imagined is also incompatible with privacy, and with malicious fake data. So is the decentralized Web you imagine, I think. Let's keep using FOAF as an example. The facts about who knows who in FOAF are just bare RDF triples. There's nothing about who's allowed to know who knows who. There isn't even room to specify who's allowed to know who knows who. If any significant number of peopl…
First, Does it matter much if agents spread misinformation in an unstructured versus structured format? I can already assert that I am married to Tim Berners-Lee. I will do so right now: I am married to Tim Berners-Lee.
I will do so again:
"smadge" .
"http://example.com/timbl" .
.
Second, although again I am out of my area of expertise, I think you can make provenance statements about statements using reification in Semantic Web technologies. I don't know if this is a good source but it seems to suggest it's possible [1].
[1] https://wiki.blazegraph.com/wiki/index.php/Reification_Done_...
Re: Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?
#18The Semantic Web is incompatible with the commercial incentives of most technology companies. For instance, it would currently be irrational for Facebook to voluntarily publish their social network using the friend of a friend schema. Their profit is derived from their centralized, private ownership of this data. Hopefully we can move towards a decentralized or federate, public web.
Yes, once everyone thinks that 'Data is the new oil', things like public shared standards fly out the window.
There are many open upper level ontologies available (I counted 16 when I did a review a few years ago - http://www.acutesoftware.com.au/aikif/ontology.html), but the really complete ones are not publically available (Cyc full version, Googles internal ontology and the countless others held in corporate servers).
Re: Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?
#19Most technologies that were specific to the "Semantic Web", such as OWL and SPARQL, failed to scale and failed to solve realistic problems, and therefore died. (I always maintained that running a SPARQL endpoint amounted to running a DDoS on yourself.) However, we got something kind of cool out of the RDF model that underlies it, especially when some sufficiently opinionated developers identified the bad parts of RDF…
I don't like how json-ld makes you store full resource urls. What if the origin change? or you'd like to use a different protocol?
Re: Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?
#20the (semi)automatic annotation never really happened.
there are ontologies, there are amounts of raw data everywhere on the web, but we haven't discovered a way how to reliably turn those data into rdf triplets matching the ontology without doing it by manually hand.