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Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?

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Re: Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?

#21

Post by crazysmoove »

One of the big things to come out of the semantic web was RFD-A (embedding semantics in unstructured web pages) and similar technologies (microformats, JSON-LD, schema.org). It's what lets Google show product reviews and rankings in search results, and lets shopping aggregator sites show things like price comparisons from other websites. While it's probably not as widespread as its boosters from a decade ago hoped it would be, it did lead to some helpful technologies that are in widespread use now.

I wonder if Facebook won't someday be forced to publish its social graph data in FOAF format the same way Microsoft was forced to publish its Office document specs as part of an anti-trust decision.

Speaking of Facebook, the OpenGraph tags are another example of widely-used semantic data on the web, maybe the most widely-used, since all kinds of sites pull in page summaries, images, and other data from those tags. So while Facebook doesn't make social network data available, it did popularize a format for sharing other types of data (about companies, articles, websites, etc.).

Re: Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?

#22

Post by bogomipz »

acutesoftware wrote: post #18
smadge wrote: post #8

The 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 serv…

Where is Googles internal ontology used exactly?

Re: Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?

#23

Post by acutesoftware »

bogomipz wrote: post #22
acutesoftware wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 serv…

Where is Googles internal ontology used exactly?

I don't know, but I just assumed they use it everywhere. They have a very good mapping of related terms and a fairly consistent mapping.

A visible example is when you look for organisations and they have a classification against it.

e.g. Google IBM and they call it "Computer manufacturing company" - these classifications are different to many of the standards for specific sets of data

Re: Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?

#25

Post by drcode »

I think the main issue is that even though "knowledge representation" with ontologies is an enticing goal, it's simply a fact that real entities, as used by humans at a practical level, don't map neatly onto mathematically-sound hierarchies.. . To see this, just look at the arguments the ancient Greeks already had as to whether a human is a "two-legged featherless animal" or the endless online arguments as to whether a "circle is an ellipse" or vice versa.

Because of this, there's just not much utility in taking the time to generate semantic markup- it'll be sloppy and incomplete even when done by a PhD student specializing in this subject.

Re: Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?

#26

Post by throwaway2016a »

The Semantic Web Meetup happens at MIT in Cambridge, MA occasionally: https://www.meetup.com/The-Cambridge-Semantic-Web-Meetup-Gro...

Though it seems mostly cancelled / sporadic now, it had a lot of interesting people presenting on interesting academic uses of the semantic web / RFD / etc.

A couple times I was there Tim Berners-Lee himself was there too. He's an interesting guy to meet.

Overall though, I think due to business reasons (really companies are not incentivized to share) it has mostly caught on in academia. With a shining example in "microformats" which gained adoption because companies like Google adopted them as a way to make gathering (as opposed to sharing) data.

Edit:

Personally I found a lot of aspects useful but others not all that well thought out when it comes to practical specs. The community has a tendency to try to build complete taxonomies rather than taxonomies that have long term usability. As a result they become stale. For example, Friend of a Friend (FOAF) [1] is nice but it is very narrowly speced in some areas but not others. For example, there is a tag for AOL Instant Messenger ID but none for Facebook.

Microformats in a way has some similar issues though not as bad.

[1] http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/

Re: Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?

#27

Post by icebraining »

smadge wrote: post #8

The 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.

Well, some tech companies. StackOverflow, for example, now annotates their questions and answers with http://schema.org/Answer. But then again, they've always been good citizens in that regard: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

Re: Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?

#28

Post by executesorder66 »

acutesoftware wrote: post #23
bogomipz wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is Googles internal ontology used exactly?

I don't know, but I just assumed they use it everywhere. They have a very good mapping of related terms and a fairly consistent mapping. A visible example is when you look for organisations and they have a classification against it. e.g. Google IBM and they call it "Computer manufacturing company" - these classifications are different to many of the standards for specific sets of data

Where do you see google calling IBM a "Computer manufacturing company" if you search for IBM? I'm not saying they don't. I just want to see examples of what you are talking about.

I googled IBM, and did not see it classified as such.

Re: Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?

#29

Post by icebraining »

drcode wrote: post #25

I think the main issue is that even though "knowledge representation" with ontologies is an enticing goal, it's simply a fact that real entities, as used by humans at a practical level, don't map neatly onto mathematically-sound hierarchies.. . To see this, just look at the arguments the ancient Greeks already had as to whether a human is a "two-legged featherless animal" or the endless online arguments as to whether…

But RDF was pretty good with that, because it didn't force records into hierarchies. You could just define relationships, and then create them freely between records. Some people created heavy ontologies, but it wasn't a result of the data model.

Re: Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?

#30

Post by roberdam »

bogomipz wrote: post #22
acutesoftware wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 serv…

Where is Googles internal ontology used exactly?

On Google Knowledge Graph https://youtu.be/mmQl6VGvX-c
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