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Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

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Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#131

Post by tokyodude »

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…

Third, you can't force people to use the correct semantics. They'll use them wrong on purpose for fun and profit. Mark some disturbing content as wholesome, mark it as whatever is popular at the moment to get it in front of more eyeballs, mark it as something only tangentially related in the hope there's a cross over of market, mark it wrong because they don't actually know better.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#132

Post by josephg »

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've been recently wondering if there's another, better way. The big usability win of the web is that you can run applications without installing anything. Is there a way we could build a new platform that would get us the advantages of the web without all the awful cruft?

I'm imagining starting with webassembly for sandboxing. We can then expose through to webassembly a useful set of API primitives from the underlying OS for text boxes, widgets and stuff.

Apps would live in a heavily sandboxed container and because of that they could be launched by going to the right URL in a special browser. We could use the same security model as phone apps - apps have a special place to store their own files. They have some network access, and can access the user's data through explicit per-capability security requests.

That would allow a good, secure webapp style experience for users. But the apps themselves would feel native (since they could use native UX primitives, and they would have native performance).

Developers could write code in any language that can compile to webassembly. We could make a bundler that produced normal applications (by compiling the app out of the sandbox). Or we could run the application in a normal web browser if we wanted, by backing the UX primitives with DOM calls, passed through to WASM.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#133

Post by Latteland »

heinrichhartman wrote: post #38
augustocallejas wrote: post #9

I 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.

You can still download the data at https://developers.google.com/freebase/. Looks like the data is available there and the license is "Creative Commons Attribution (aka CC-BY)". Wonder why someone hasn't created a new company starting with their dataset? It's "only" 2gb compressed, 8gb uncomp, 63 million entries. That is smaller than I expected.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#134

Post by Latteland »

Latteland wrote: post #133
heinrichhartman wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can still download the data at https://developers.google.com/freebase/ . Looks like the data is available there and the license is "Creative Commons Attribution (aka CC-BY)". Wonder why someone hasn't created a new company starting with their dataset? It's "only" 2gb compressed, 8gb uncomp, 63 million entries. That is smaller than I expected.

I guess wikidata/wikipedia is the offshoot.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#135

Post by dangrover »

josephg wrote: post #132
deckard1 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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've been recently wondering if there's another, better way. The big usability win of the web is that you can run applications without installing anything. Is there a way we could build a new platform that would get us the advantages of the web without all the awful cruft? I'm imagining starting with webassembly for sandboxing. We can then expose through to webassembly a useful set of API primitives from the underlyi…

Didn't we try this in the 90's with Java applets?

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#137

Post by gibsonf1 »

There is great power in rdf graph databases (Allegrograph) and the rapidly growing collection of valuable ontologies https://lov.linkeddata.es/dataset/lov/

The barrier to entry is thinking in “graph” instead of relational dB, which is a big cultural change, and then shifting focus and attention to the information science of building valuable ontologies. Once you make the leap, it’s hard to go back - it’s an order of magnitude productivity gain.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#138

Post by flukus »

josephg wrote: post #132
deckard1 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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've been recently wondering if there's another, better way. The big usability win of the web is that you can run applications without installing anything. Is there a way we could build a new platform that would get us the advantages of the web without all the awful cruft? I'm imagining starting with webassembly for sandboxing. We can then expose through to webassembly a useful set of API primitives from the underlyi…

XWindows?

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#139

Post by nightski »

josephg wrote: post #132
deckard1 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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've been recently wondering if there's another, better way. The big usability win of the web is that you can run applications without installing anything. Is there a way we could build a new platform that would get us the advantages of the web without all the awful cruft? I'm imagining starting with webassembly for sandboxing. We can then expose through to webassembly a useful set of API primitives from the underlyi…

How are you crossing the bridge from webassembly to having access to the native UX primitives? Are you directly making C calls to native libraries like win32?

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#140

Post by josephg »

dangrover wrote: post #135
josephg wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been recently wondering if there's another, better way. The big usability win of the web is that you can run applications without installing anything. Is there a way we could build a new platform that would get us the advantages of the web without all the awful cruft? I'm imagining starting with webassembly for sandboxing. We can then expose through to webassembly a useful set of API primitives from the underlyi…

Didn't we try this in the 90's with Java applets?

What is the essential difference between the success of browsers and the failure of X-Windows and Java applets?

For my money its that Java applets and X-Windows didn't have a distribution mechanism and security model. They simply didn't do anything I couldn't already do with desktop apps and HTML.

Also, frankly, they were kind of slow and not very good. I think thats the biggest problem with this sort of idea - the breadth of surface area for GUI toolkits is crazy huge. Building something that works well, and works cross-platform is a seriously huge amount of work.

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