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Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

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Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#81

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> XSLT provided a way of formatting XML in the browser.

Actually, that was XSL:FO.

XSLT is transformation, not formatting; of course you could translate to (X)HTML with embedded styles, or XSL:FO or something else that includes formatting, but XSLT doesn't do formatting itself.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#82

Post by dzink »

The financial incentives have become stronger for building walled gardens than a semantically open web. The semantic data has been more useful to giants that monetize it, than to millions of small publishers who are supposed to abide by the rules and maintain it. The issue is even bigger if you are listing valuable goods - from products, to jobs, to real estate/rental listings as a part of your marketplace or business. Aggregators like google can scrape and circumvent you, by taking away your users earlier in the acquisition chain, so why bother giving them your product graph.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#83

Post by Thiez »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #51
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?

1) users often use the same username and password on various websites, despite this being dumb (because it's so convenient)

2) if you ask such a stupid question you probably won't be able to properly secure the machine hosting this

3) your users will be totally screwed when you get hacked

And this is why you should never store passwords but only a salted hash, and never trust any service that can email you your password when you click "I forgot my password".

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#84

Post by openfuture »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #79

I worked on the Semantic Web, designing core data infrastructure, back when it was still hot. It disappeared because it had two fatal flaws: it was intrinsically non-scalable, both conceptually and technically. First, there is no universal "semantic". The meaning of things is ambiguous, and given a broad enough pool of people and cultural contexts, it becomes nigh impossible to converge on a single consistent model f…

This is why category theory is so important! It allows us to move between axiomatic systems by looking at the structure they have in common. I am convinced that the 'semantic web' will be accomplished via some easy to use version control meets functors gui program.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#85

Post by phlakaton »

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…

I worked in a web app that used XSLT transformations of XML-formatted domain models to render HTML pages. You ended up doing the same sort of thing that React does, but with _far_ more cumbersome programming constructs. Functions done in XSLT were a nightmare.

The idea behind the whole thing was that the "web devs" could be hired for their HTML/CSS skills and never have to touch code. The reality was, they had to become experts in a peculiar, clunky, XSLT-based programming language of their own.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#86

Post by deckard1 »

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…

> That's why HTML failed as descriptive language

I think HTML and the web failed in general. Modern HTML is really nothing more than div tags everywhere, with a handful of span tags. We went from abusing tables to abusing the entire document. We, in effect, eliminated all semantic meaning from a document by making everything generic tag soup.

The DOM + JS has largely supplanted HTML as the source of a web page. Especially when using tools such as React or Angular.

In terms of vision, the rise of native phone apps and the fact that every major site has a mobile version and a separate desktop version really highlights how the web failed.

I do node/React dev for a living. I'll be the first to admit this pile of hacks is total garbage. Mobile web is almost unusable. I hate it. I hate the sites I work on. Their UX is horrid. Native apps are so far superior that they make the web look like an embarrassing relic. But web development pays the bills and keeps the lights on.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#88

Post by danans »

Someone commented recently in another thread that you can make software from order (via languages) or from chaos (ML), or often a combination of the two.

Perhaps determining "meaning" on the web is similar, where the synthetic "order" approach is semantic markup, but the analytical "chaos" approach is NLP, image object recognition, etc.

I think you need both, since human produced content doesn't always follow discrete predefined categories, but also has patterns that can be pre-classified to solve real problems more easily.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#89

Post by steerpike »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #51
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?

Different data store types are used to solve different problems. An RDF store is designed to help solve the problem of ontological relationships. I wouldn't use an RDF store if I wanted to store information about who has the current high score on my video game or who has signed up to my site for a username and password.

Unfortunately some developers think that once you've chosen one particular storage technology (RDF, relational DB, document storage) that's the bucket you hae to put everything into in order to do anything in your application. I suspect that was the mental model of the other devs in the story above.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#90

Post by StillBored »

The only way this works is if there is some central agency enforcing and standardizing the tags/APIs.

People (and programmers) are lazy, and ignorant. If its not in their face broken it frequently won't get fixed. I used to have html validator default enabled in firefox, which would point out HTML errors for every page I landed on. The percentage of web pages that had in your face HTML errors despite all the tools to check for broken HTML still didn't mean people put in the effort to assure their pages were error free. Basically, if the page rendered "correctly" in the developers browser and maybe another test browser or two, then it was job done.

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