"The Semantic Web will never work because when it works, you won't know it's the Semantic Web". Source: https://twitter.com/TomDeNies/status/653572860766781440
Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
61–70 of 209 posts
Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
#62Earlier 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…
I don't think a "universal semantic" was ever a design goal of the semantic web. What's needed is not one semantic, but the ability to map between competing/complementary semantics. Which is still a hard problem, to be sure, but which admits varying degrees of partial progress.
Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
#63Nothing "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.
Wikidata would be an obvious example. They support SPARQL queries via the endpoint at https://query.wikidata.org/
Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
#64I 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 AJ…
Yup, I was in academia in UK and Germany for a total of 7 years. Had similarly crappy experience and got out. I think 80% of research is crap done "just to get the grant" and not real research.
Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
#65I 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…
:-)
You might be interested in the Underlay Project that Danny is starting: https://underlay.mit.edu/
Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
#66I 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…
:-) You might be interested in the Underlay Project that Danny is starting: https://underlay.mit.edu/
Its great to see he's continuing this work! Makes sense to use existing technology like IPFS to distribute the graph, instead of building the technology from the ground up like we were trying to do back in the day.
Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
#67Nothing "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.)
That's an interesting question, because it has a few assumptions baked into it. I'd love to write a long eassy on that right now, but I don't really have time. But to answer the core question, one good place to start familiarizing oneself with the various schemas that are available is:
https://schema.org/docs/schemas.html
There's also a lot of good information at
http://linkeddata.org/guides-and-tutorials
although I fear that site doesn't get as much love / attention as it should, and some of the links might be stale.
Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
#68I 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…
Really interesting to hear that my experience is shared by any. I wrote my master thesis on rdf and linked data and the more I got into it the more I realize how it's just a collection of people praising each other's ideas without any outward potential.
In theory the idea is brilliant but the execution is poor. In many cases the world of academia is way too detached from software development to be able to produce any real-world useful tooling beyond toy projects and proof-of-concepts.
Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
#69The Semantic Web was not XML but RDF. XML was the serialisation format.
Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
#70I 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…
Seems pretty clear to me that freebase was a thread to Google search. A semantic knowledge search with a powerful query language could replace a good chunk of free text google searches at least for power users. Makes sense for them to buy it and get rid of it that way.
>Makes sense for them to buy it and get rid of it that way.
Except they didn't : The Freebase team moved to Google and carried on the work there, as "Google Search".
btw s/thread/threat/