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Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

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Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#111

Post by themodelplumber »

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…

This is really fascinating. It seems there's an interfacing problem at a level, with a sort of depth-expectation on one end of the problem (real-world / technology application), and a more exploratory breadth-expectation on the other (pure academia / science). It'd be cool to develop some standards to create a sort of bridge between the two.

On the breadth end there may be a need for a sort of "contract of depth commitment" to provide insurance against the flighty hijinks of the ever-expanding mind, and at the real-world level you need a sort of "grant of exploration" which allows academia to bring its own type of surface-level one-night-stand concern or even ADHD to the game. Without the latter there's probably too much risk of repeating history while someone else is blazing the trails you won't try.

Anyway thanks for that comment, it's really interesting.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#112

Post by floren »

dwighttk wrote: post #15
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #3

With regard to the first example, lowering volume of playing media when you get a phone call, I had that set up on my Nokia N900 a decade ago (Dbus on the N900 would trigger a script to ssh into my computer and pause mpd). Naturally this was a nerdy thing and not something accessible for the general public, but I mention it here just to encourage my fellow nerds to realize how much power they might already have with…

OSM is open, but it is still centralized. It doesn't come to your webpage and get the information about your hours from you (as far as I can tell)

A hybrid approach seems sensible: the OSM data contains a vetted/known URL for your business, then your client uses that URL to fetch the hours from the website. In a perfect world, anyway.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#113

Post by ChuckMcM »

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…

That is so sad. I proposed, and worked briefly on with a handful of really awesome engineers, a project that would use an LDA to try to ascertain the topic for a web page, then use NLP to pull apart the sentences for their contextual components, the next step was to slot the values into an ontology framework to store alongside the web page text. Its initial goal was web content scoring with respect to ontological coherence but later for building knowledge bases dynamically.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#114

Post by samuell »

themodelplumber wrote: post #111
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…

This is really fascinating. It seems there's an interfacing problem at a level, with a sort of depth-expectation on one end of the problem (real-world / technology application), and a more exploratory breadth-expectation on the other (pure academia / science). It'd be cool to develop some standards to create a sort of bridge between the two. On the breadth end there may be a need for a sort of "contract of depth comm…

Somewhat related, I suggested how the Semantic Web (aka "Linked Data") and the more real-lifeish Data Science field could be merged, at a Linked Data event in Sweden earlier this year:

TLDR; What semweb / linked data lacks the most, is a practical logic / reasoning layer, so that facts can more easily be inferred form existing plain data. I further suggest this is already available in a rock-solid proven technology; Prolog.

Blog post: http://bionics.it/posts/linked-data-science

Slides and video: http://bionics.it/posts/semantic-web-data-science-my-talk-at...

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#115

Post by acdha »

AznHisoka wrote: post #2

What happened to the semantic web? Well... it happened. 1) We got schema data for Job Postings that companies like Google reads to build a job search engine. 2) We got schema for recipes. https://schema.org/Recipe 3) We got the Open Graph schema for showing headlines/preview images in social networks. http://ogp.me/ 4) We got schema for reviews: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/review 5) We got sc…

The semantic web happened but the Semantic Web didn’t. Schema.org is used because it a) solves a problem which exists in reality and b) works well with very modest requirements.

All of the crazy bikeshedding about labyrinthine XML standards, triples, etc. or debating what a URL truly means has very little to show for the immense time investment.

The main lesson I take away is that you absolutely need to start with real consumers and producers, and never get in the state where a long period of time goes by where a spec is unused. Most of the semweb specs spent ages with conflicting examples, no working tooling, etc. which was especially hazardous given the massive complexity and nuance being built up in theory before anyone actively used it.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#117

Post by xamuel »

nradov wrote: post #60
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?

Sorry, I only worked with FMA, with some tangentially related ontologies like CHEBI, and some custom in-house ontologies.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#118

Post by acdha »

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…

Every time I am forced to work with XML, I wonder how differently it would have turned out had 10% of the resources devoted to building increasingly complex and tangled specs had been instead directed towards making tools and documentation which aren’t terrible. Little things like the user-hostile APIs for namespaces, validation, extension, etc. and often horrible error messages, not to mention the lack of updates for common open source libraries like libxml2 really cemented the XML=pain reputation by the time JSON came along.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#119

Post by zackmorris »

The $64,000 question is: how do you implement the semantic web without changing any HTML or backend code?

Because the web is never going to change to adopt a semantic web standard. What we have now are facsimiles of the semantic web, things like Open Graph (which only provides the gist of page media, if that), proprietary search engine results, and proprietary APIs for walled gardens like Facebook.

It's looking like machine learning is going to provide richer gists and then manually-coded directories will provide user interface controllers for those gists in Alexa and other agents. It's a far cry from a truly semantic web but most people won't know the difference.

This is actually a pretty easy problem to solve, but to do it, we'd be running against the wind of capitalism. The semantic web is running behind the scenes at Google, ad agencies, even the NSA. Except they've built it around people's private data instead of publicly accessible documents.

Just to throw some ideas out there, I would start with the low-lying fruit: we need a fully-indexed document store that doesn't barf on mangled data. We need a compelling reason for people to have public profiles again (or an open and secure web of trust for remote API access). We need annotated public relationship graphs akin to ImageNet or NIST for deriving the most commonly-used semantics (edit: DBpedia is a start). Totally doable, but developers gotta pay rent.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#120

Post by xamuel »

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?

Well for one thing, with triple-stores it's not uncommon to expose an unsanitized read-only query engine (usually SPARQL), usually harmless because none of the data is secret. That goes out the window if you're actually storing business-sensitive stuff in there.

Aside from that, I guess there's theoretically nothing stopping you from using the triplestore for usernames/passwords (I hope you mean salted passwords) but sheesh, talk about killing a fly with a bazooka.

To be fair to those colleagues, it might have been less about them being clueless, and more about them wanting to offload work to my team, lol.

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