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Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

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Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#41

Post by igorlev »

What happened is that the technology spawned by the Semantic Web "fad" is now absolutely everywhere but it looks and works nothing like how people thought it would.

Freebase, after being bought by Google became the foundation of the Google Knowledge Graph (aka "things not links"). This kicked off an arms race between all the major search providers to build the largest and most complete knowledge graphs (or at least keep pace with Google [1]). Instead of waiting for folks to tag every single page, it turned out that simple patterns cross referenced across billions of pages were good enough to extract useful knowledge from unstructured text.

Some companies who had easier access to structured but dirty data (like LinkedIn and Facebook) were also able to utilize (and contribute to) all of that research by building their own knowledge graphs with names like the Social Graph and Economic Graph. Those in turn are helping to power a decent amount of their search and ad targeting capabilities as well as spawning some interesting work[2]

All those knowledge graphs became a major part of Siri, Alexa and Google Home's ability to answer a wide range of natural language queries. As well as being pretty fundamental to a lot of tech like semantic search, improved ecommerce search and a bunch of intent detection approaches for chatbots.

So yeah while the technology and associated research did turn out to be incredibly useful, adding fancier meta-tags to pages was not the direction that proved the most useful.

[1] https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub45634 [2] https://research.fb.com/publications/unicorn-a-system-for-se...

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#43

Post by bootsz »

> Imagine a Facebook that keeps your list of friends, hosted on your own website, up-to-date, rather than vice-versa. Basically, the Semantic Web was going to be a web where everyone gets to have their own personal REST API, whether they know the first thing about computers or not.

Sounds more or less like what the Urbit project (https://urbit.org/) is trying to accomplish. Not an endorsement; it has serious flaws just like everything else. This is a very hard problem to solve. But I sure do hope someone manages to figure it out.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#45

Post by z3t4 »

As it is now, the one who provides the data is the one who pays for everything (production, storage, compute, bandwidth), while middleman search engines take all the money. What if the middleman was required to pay a fee to index the data ? For example build money transactions into the HTTP protocol, where web sites could automatically ask for a small fee in order to "see more".

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#48

Post by ghaff »

evrydayhustling wrote: post #31
ghaff wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I remember his AAAI '07 talk where he laid into the audience for changing and reusing URLs. It made me really want to see this world he was imagining where millions of people using the web every which way agree to universally abide by a rule that makes their life a lot harder but makes it easier to reason about algorithms on the Web. Btw, I don't think this or failure of semantic web reflect badly on TBL. He is in a…

Oh, I'm certainly not going to be very critical of Sir Tim! Along with the obvious reasons, I believe he coined the read/write web term and was a strong advocate of users being creators as well as consumers. And TBH, while it's fairly obvious today that classification and discovery has to happen largely organically if only because of the scale of the Web, thinking in terms of formal schemes is a pretty natural bias for someone of TBL's background to have.

My main point was that this wasn't just some fantasy of out-to-lunch bureaucrats.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#49

Post by throwawaysemweb »

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…

Wow, had such a similar story, except with a Master's degree. Most of my graduate program was consumed by a highly-cited and quite arrogant professor who focused on the Semantic Web. I took 2(!) separate Semantic Web courses and couldn't understand what the fuss was all about.

By the end, I figured out the professor was full of crap. When AJAX became a big thing, I remember the professor asking, "Why don't you add AJAX to this project?" What does that have to do with the Semantic Web? In the end, I got a paper published in a fairly prestigious journal by just combining some flashy visuals with the Semantic Web and having the professor be a co-author.

That was one of the big experiences that helped me figure out that academia wasn't for me. And I would be perfectly fine never hearing about triples, RDF, or that other nonsense again!

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