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Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

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Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#51

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

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…

Cool comment...but say you have a friend whose dumb and wanted to explain why its not ok to store usernames and passwords....

What would you say to them?

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#52

Post by etimberg »

degyves wrote: post #7

We actually are on the semantic web for healthcare. See: http://wiki.hl7.org/index.php?title=RDF_for_Semantic_Interop... Other fields are moving towards semantic also

It's used in power systems as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Information_Model_(elec...

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#53

Post by arcbyte »

lmm wrote: post #22
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.

Except you just contradicted yourself. If everyone wants to use JavaScript frameworks and APIs for data they they ARE separating the content from the presentation.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#54

Post by [deleted] »

jerf wrote: post #28
evrydayhustling wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#55

Post by EamonnMR »

mindcrime wrote: post #14

Nothing "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 /…

Well, now's as good a time as any to start! Let's say I wanted to throw a layer of semantic markup over an existing site - where would I go to figure out what schemas to use and how to use any given schema (it's been a while since I tried to SemWeb up a site.)

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#56

Post by gaius »

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…

In my circle the semantic web types morphed seamlessly into data scientists and continued to extract funding without missing a beat

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#57

Post by miket »

The main downfall of the Semantic web efforts are not technological, but due to a misalignment of incentives. Semantic web formats require content creators to annotate metadata for machines where webpages are intended for human readers.

We think that the main way to achieve a practical semantic web is to have AI synthesize a Knowledge Graph from applying CV/NLP techniques to understanding all webpages. More about our project here:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-web-as-a-database-the-bigg...

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#58

Post by m34 »

Every few months my mind circles around that topic.

I think it won’t work if the underlying transport/presentation is „the web“ (i.e as in Web 2.0).

Instead of decorating semantics/hints around the actual information mostly for SEO reasons it should work the opposite: using all available semantic hints and information bits there already are to create new information by aggregating and putting things in a new context.

It adds value while building upon previous knowledge and allows information and context to be relevant indefinitely.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#59

Post by arxpoetica »

mindcrime wrote: post #14

Nothing "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 /…

Care to share a concrete example of growth? Very curious onlooker here.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#60

Post by nradov »

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…

What do you think of SNOMED as an anatomy ontology? Is it good enough or are there serious flaws?
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