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Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

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Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#2

Post by AznHisoka »

What happened to the semantic web?

Well... it happened.

1) We got schema data for Job Postings that companies like Google reads to build a job search engine.

2) We got schema for recipes. https://schema.org/Recipe

3) We got the Open Graph schema for showing headlines/preview images in social networks. http://ogp.me/

4) We got schema for reviews: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/review

5) We got schema for videos: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/video

6) We got schema for product listings.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#3

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

With regard to the first example, lowering volume of playing media when you get a phone call, I had that set up on my Nokia N900 a decade ago (Dbus on the N900 would trigger a script to ssh into my computer and pause mpd). Naturally this was a nerdy thing and not something accessible for the general public, but I mention it here just to encourage my fellow nerds to realize how much power they might already have with existing tools.

The writer says that a business owner must add their office info to Google or Yelp and suggests there are no alternatives to such centralized repositories of information. However OpenStreetMap also has opening hours for businesses and medical practioners and that data is yours to process and play around with as you like.

In fact, there is just so much data present now in OSM, we simply lack convenient end-user tools to extract and process it automatically.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#4

Post by [deleted] »

AznHisoka wrote: post #2

What happened to the semantic web? Well... it happened. 1) We got schema data for Job Postings that companies like Google reads to build a job search engine. 2) We got schema for recipes. https://schema.org/Recipe 3) We got the Open Graph schema for showing headlines/preview images in social networks. http://ogp.me/ 4) We got schema for reviews: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/review 5) We got sc…

[deleted]

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#5

Post by stickfigure »

It's really too bad that XML+XSLT didn't take off as the "replacement" for HTML. Before you recoil in horror hear me out...

Web pages are a giant mess of content and presentation, and CSS doesn't really help much. XML is at least a way of describing data in a meaningful way. , , , etc. XSLT provided a way of formatting XML in the browser. Sure the internet would still be full of inconsistent content structures, but it would still be way easier to machine read than the big mess of arbitrary s and

s (most of which just display something blinky) that we have today.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#8

Post by xamuel »

I have some insight here because I did a postdoc working on anatomy ontologies in the UK. A big part of the problem with the semantic web is that lots of people in European academia use it as a collection of buzzwords for making grant proposals sexier, without understanding or caring what it actually means.

Instead of saying, "Give us money to build a webpage", they say, "Give us money to expose metadata annotations using a RESTful API on the semantic web."

I would prepare conference presentations where I was just filling slides up with BS to fill time.

Devs from other universities (gotta check that international research box!) understood the technology even less than our team did. We provided them a tool for storing RDF triples for their webpage so they could store triples about anatomical relationships. They wanted to use said RDF store as their backend database for storing things like usernames and passwords. facepalm

So you have all these academics publishing all this extremely important sounding literature about the semantic web, but as soon as you pry one nanometer deep, it's nothing but a giant ball of crap.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#9

Post by augustocallejas »

I thought Freebase [1] was the most promising "Semantic Web" technology, with a powerful query language (MQL) and an application platform called Acre [2]. I'm biased because I worked at Danny Hillis' adjacent company, Applied Minds, and met with the Freebase folks to talk about graph databases. I went to one of Freebase's Hack Days, and I could feel the energy around building applications on a semantically-aware global database.

Unfortunately, they got acquired by Google, and Freebase eventually shut down. Thinking back now, I wonder if there would have been a business model in hosting private data graphs to subsidize the open source data.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase [2] - https://opensource.googleblog.com/2010/08/acre-open-source-p...

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