Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web? • Hacker News Board

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#91

Post by pmontra » Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 10:07 PM UTC

deckard1 wrote: post #86

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…

> 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. Espec…

I'm working on a project with a React frontend. I think I never tried it on my phone. It probably works but the site is really meant for the desktop and I don't know if it makes sense on a small display.

However... I'm writing this on my phone so HN is part of the mobile web and it works well. I read the post on twobithistory.org on my phone and that also works well. I doubt that they have an app and even if they did, why should I install it and what would happen when I follow a link from HN to them? I'll get the mobile site or would the app catch the link and open itself?

I don't even have the apps of the news sites I read most. Reading them on the phone with Firefox and uBlock is good enough. Their apps probably contain more spyware then the adblocked sites.

So the mobile web did not conpletely fail. It's still what's on the screen of my phone for about 50% of the time: since last charge 3h 55m of screen time, 57m used by phone calls, 1h 54m Firefox, 15m WhatsApp, etc.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#92

Post by zbentley » Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 10:12 PM UTC

phlakaton wrote: post #62

jerf wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'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.

> still a hard problem, to be sure, but which admits varying degrees of partial progress.

I think one of the big problems with the semantic web was that it turned "varying degrees of partial progress" into "multiple competing approaches", each of which wanted to detract from the others.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#93

Post by jeremiem » Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 10:19 PM UTC

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…

Your first point is being worked on and there are a few upper ontologies being used. I find BFO [1] quite promising.

I believe that we actually can generalize modelling. We have dictionaries filled with definitions, given enough time and discipline, I don't see why we couldn't make them formal. It's not an engineering problem though.

[1] http://basic-formal-ontology.org/

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#94

Post by bitwize » Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 10:24 PM UTC

It was supplanted by AI and machine learning.

Not only did these outbuzzword the Semantic Web, but as it turns out it's much easier to have a bunch of GPUs running CNNs to extract semantic info from the dirty data you have rather than attempting to cram that data into a well-specified ontology and enforcing that ontology on new incoming data.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#95

Post by zbentley » Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 10:26 PM UTC

arcbyte wrote: post #53

lmm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you think JS frameworks are used only for data manipulation, you're sorely mistaken. Runtime styling has been a primary aim of JavaScript code since even before the popularization of jQuery.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#96

Post by Theodores » Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 10:31 PM UTC

deckard1 wrote: post #86

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…

> 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. Espec…

> 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.

True but there is some reaction to this. On one hand there are people like yourself that just make the document from data and javascript using lots of build tools, frameworks and ever more specialist technologies.

On the other hand there are people wanting to get back to a pure document that has next to no javascript needed, using HTML5 built-ins for forms, CSS Grid for layout, no polyfills for legacy browsers and no frameworks. This is not widely given exciting buzzwords but 'intrinsic web design' is happening.

When I watch conference presentations it seems to me that there are two groups of people, those to whom the ever more complicated appeals and those to whom the make it simple appeals.

The 'make it simple' currently does not fit with existing workflows, maybe for startups but not for most web agencies where a good decade has now been spent nesting divs in more divs and making it a big mess of un-maintainable 'write only' code, with 97% unused stylesheets that have got to the stage where nobody knows what anything does, they just add new hacks to it.

With where we are with HTML5 it should be easy to markup your document semantically, however, Google have kind of given up with that and if you want to put some semantic goodness in there then you add some JSON-LD on the end rather than put property tags in everything throughout the document. It is as if Google would prefer the document to be doubled up, once with trillions of divs for some bad CSS and then done again to be machine readable.

Regarding mobile, 'progressive web apps' is widely supported and has removed the need for custom mobile applications. This is progress.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#97

Post by combatentropy » Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 10:43 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #87

Who needs the semantic web when we have machine learning to extract the information we want?

Yes, Google surprised us all and made the semantic web unnecessary, even though I doubt it would have come to pass anyway. Consider a paper in 1998 by Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and others, that showed them finding the titles of books and the names of their authors amid the sludge of the World Wide Web:

> We begin with a small seed set of (author, title) pairs [...]. Then we find all occurrences of those books on the Web [...]. From these occurrences we recognize patterns for the citations of books. Then we search the Web for these patterns and find new books. --- http://dis.unal.edu.co/~gjhernandezp/psc/lectures/MatchingMa...

Starting with a seed of just five author-title pairs, their formula found thousands more.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#98

Post by enraged_camel » Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 10:44 PM UTC

throwawaysemweb wrote: post #49

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 AJ…

>>When AJAX became a big thing, I remember the professor asking, "Why don't you add AJAX to this project?"

Sounds like something my manager at my previous job would say. He was a Pointy Haired Boss.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#99

Post by usrusr » Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 10:45 PM UTC

One core problem is that the attention economy of the conventional web has driven content creators so far away from the path of truthfulness that they would just ruin any truly distributed ontology with lies.

As soon as you start actually consuming semantic data it becomes a protocol that begs to be "hacked".

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#100

Post by teddyh » Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 10:48 PM UTC

z3t4 wrote: post #45

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".

IIRC, the (by some definition) original hypertext system, Xanadu, had this. It was supposed to (among many other things) keep track of who quoted who and how much and make sure everybody got paid fairly. It was much too complex and never got anywhere, and was completely replaced when the WWW came along with its dead simple model of URLs and HTML.