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Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

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Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#21

Post by evrydayhustling »

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…

These are definitely interesting things that semantic web influenced, but they're definitely not what semantic web aspired to be. The differences are a good laundry list of things that make standardized data models viable in the wild:

They are organized around use cases, not data origins. They are opt-in, rather relying on distribution via some discovery standard. They are only used by subsets of the industry they serve, and that's ok. They aren't integrated with regulation in ways that force their use. (list continues)

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#22

Post by lmm »

stickfigure wrote: post #5

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…

The two problems here are that XML/XSLT are horrible to work with (to the extent that you want to achieve what they were supposed to, you do it with the modern "single page app" style where you write javascript that retrieves data from an API and renders it into a UI) and that no-one actually wants to separate the content from the presentation anyway.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#23

Post by jerven »

What happened is that it became. We learned that we can't trust anything on the Web, but joly it is rather nice that you marked up your opening hours.

In the end the semantic Web uptake was on the data not the meta data.

Regards to the academic semweb grant story these same idiots are now chasing the cloud with out a clue. And before it was grid.

For some fields there is uptake because it solves problems. But they hardly market themselves as semweb.it's more profitable to market they solve solutions.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#24

Post by bordercases »

augustocallejas wrote: post #9

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 glob…

That really sucks. Being bought out by Google probably creates some implicit benefits to their search experience (likely with their topical breadcrumbs which returns widgets inside the search window giving a list of objects that match and near-match, like books by an author).

But the acquisition prevents there from existing a service that can inspire a wider ecosystem on something like a federated platform.

Blood monopolies, man

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#25

Post by nine_k »

evrydayhustling wrote: post #21
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…

These are definitely interesting things that semantic web influenced, but they're definitely not what semantic web aspired to be. The differences are a good laundry list of things that make standardized data models viable in the wild: They are organized around use cases, not data origins. They are opt-in, rather relying on distribution via some discovery standard. They are only used by subsets of the industry they se…

I would rather see features on the web appear because users want them and expect them to work, and not because some regulation mandates their use.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#26

Post by ghaff »

evrydayhustling wrote: post #16
xamuel wrote: post #8

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…

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 suita…

>hacked the brains of academic-facing bureaucrats

In all fairness, it was also promoted by legitimate academics including Time Berners-Lee. I actually saw him give a talk about it a number of years back for his Draper Prize speech.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#27

Post by jesuslop »

xamuel wrote: post #8

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…

It's not cynism, is how much things went. Meanwhile there is much genuine work in knowledge representation awaiting to be done and funded both in the foundations and the platform sides.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#28

Post by jerf »

evrydayhustling wrote: post #16
xamuel wrote: post #8

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…

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 suita…

'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.'

My core objection to "the Semantic Web" is the non-existence of "the Semantic". There is no way you can get everyone to agree upon a universal "semantic", and if you can, which you can't, you can't get people to accurately use it, and if you can, which you can't, you can't prevent people from gaming it into uselessness. But it all starts from the fact that the universal semantic doesn't even exist.

Somewhere there's a great in-depth series of blog posts from someone who describes just trying to get libraries to agree upon and correctly use an author field or set of author fields for libraries. This is a near-ideal use case, because you have trained individuals, with no motivations to insert bad data into the system for aggrandizement or ad revenue. And even just for that one field, it's a staggeringly hard problem. Expecting "the web" to do any better was always a pipe dream. Can't dredge it up, though.

(To the couple of other replies about how "it's happening, because it's happening in [medical] or [science]", well, no, that's not it. That's a smaller problem. The Semantic Web (TM) would at most use those as components, but nobody would consider that The Semantic Web (TM), at least in its original incarnation. Yes, smaller problems are easier to solve; that does not make the largest version of the problem feasible.)

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#29

Post by imhoguy »

> Sean B. Palmer, [...], posits that the real problem was the lack of a truly decentralized infrastructure to host the Semantic Web on. To host your own website, you need to buy a domain name from ICANN, configure it correctly using DNS, and then pay someone to host your content if you don’t already have a server of your own.

Exactly that was the lacking brick of true distributed linked (semantic) web which now has a chance to be fulfiled by IPFS/IPNS/IPLD or some upcoming standarized equivalent.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#30

Post by ghaff »

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…

Like a lot of things--though not everything--with the modern Internet (e.g. RageRank vs. hierarchical directories), some echo of the Semantic Web ended up happening mostly organically. The Semantic Web was a rather academic concept--think a library classification system for the Web. Tim Berners-Lee, among others, promoted it for a long time.
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