41–50 of 72 posts
The utopia is more than this but I assume that few people will used these tools directly.
1. We've realized that people in general can't reliably and consistently mark data up. That's a problem of incentives, technical difficulties, UI, bitrot of invisible metadata, etc. 2. We've settled on extracting information from "raw" text (with everything from regexes to recognize flight info in e-mails to getting word statistics from terabytes of garbage) and duct-taping that with special-purpose APIs.
Perception, culture, linguistics, time, reality.
What happened is that it was pointless.
Build something people want, not the semantic web.
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…
> don't map neatly onto mathematically-sound hierarchies. I think they do, but finding the right mathematical model is very difficult. If it were easy, everyone would be a mathematics PhD. Learning to program is becoming efficient at recognizing the right spherical cow in any given situation, because such shortcuts are essential to getting shit done.
(To pick one question where something doesn't map onto a hierarchy simply)
At our company we still use Semantic Web (or rather, RDF) for inference and annotation with medical ontologies (UMLS, Gene Ontology, Human Phenotype Ontology, etc). The ease of use of triples + SPARQL (basically a PROLOG-ish unification scheme) is really powerful (and quite performant when using Jena/Fuseki with Lucene as a text index). But it's a far cry from the "dream" of semantic web like federated queries and OpenAnnotations (now just W3C Annotations). Still, every time someone implements an EAV scheme without even considering an RDF triple store I cringe a bit.
It was the sort of largely academic tops-down exercise to organizing information that has mostly lost out time and time again to more organic bottoms-up/self-organizing approaches. Think Yahoo vs. Google. [ADDED: i.e. manually populating hierarchies vs. search, in case that wasn't clear] I remember when it was going to be Web 3.0. Tim Berners-Lee gave a talk about it when he won the Draper prize. As others have said,…