We're getting there with CSS grid. First, we have to deal with the usual "You actually have to put div A inside div B in order to do X. Now which one gets the semantic tag? And what happens when we also need div C as a container to fix Y problem? "
Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
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Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
#12It's been replaced by the Decentralized Web as the latest fad (also with the backing of Tim Berners Lee). Let's see how far this one goes as well (though I'm really rooting for it to succeed).
Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
#13I thought the addition of elements to HTML5 like nav, main, article, etc. was the end result of the semantic web.
Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
#14Nothing "happened to" the Semantic Web. It's here, and it's growing in utility and capability as the technology matures. What isn't necessarily growing is understanding of what the Semantic Web really is, who it's for, how to use SemWeb capabilities, etc.
I'll accept some responsibility for that last bit, as somebody who has been active in promoting, and advocating for the adoption of, SemWeb tech. I could do more / do a better job in that regard.
Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
#15With 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…
OSM is open, but it is still centralized. It doesn't come to your webpage and get the information about your hours from you (as far as I can tell)
Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
#16I 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…
Yeah, semantic web really hacked the brains of academic-facing bureaucrats. It fell into this giant gap between what administrators don't know about business and what they don't know about technology... a gap big enough to shove every utopian idea about "an effortlessly integrated, data driven society" into.
There's no such thing as "right" way to represent any given data stream, just ways that are more or less suitable to specific tasks and interests. That's why HTML failed as descriptive language (and has become fine-grained-formatting language), and it's why symantic web was doa.
Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
#17It'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…
That probably would have been cleaner back in the day, but with rich UIs being what they are, I think JSON + client side templating logic is probably simpler (and composes well).
I never had much luck using XSLT for anything non-trivial, and I imagine that experience isn't uncommon.
Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
#18It'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…
The thing that makes this hard is the security model in browsers. You either keep the XSLT scripts in the same directory as the XML or need to turn off the check for cross-site scripts.
Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
#19What 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…
I agree. While it didn't turn out to be the solution to all our Problems and not every webpage is chock full of semantic markup that anyone can scrape, there are still a lot of bits and pieces that stuck around.
I always felt that one problem of more widespread adaption by users was missing software. There were and still are all these great microdata pieces out there, but can my browser save an address, add an event to my calender etc.? If these things were easily possible to even an inexperienced user, I think we would see much more semantic markup. But in the meantime, search engines and social networks sure have an easier time scraping information then before we talked about the semantic web.
Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
#20I thought the addition of elements to HTML5 like nav, main, article, etc. was the end result of the semantic web.
Not really. That stuff does relate to "semantics" in the "Semantic Markup" sense, but it doesn't actually have much to do with the "Semantic Web" per-se. I mean, yeah, there is a weak sort of connection there, but when people talk about the "Semantic Web" they are mostly talking about RDF, whether it's encoded using RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, JSON-LD, or "other". And along with RDF are related technologies like OWL, inference engines that reason over a triplestore, etc.