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Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

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Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#141

Post by josephg »

nightski wrote: post #139
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…

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?

Through a privileged security barrier, which in practice would look like a separate API. That API would in turn make win32 (or UWP or whatever) calls.

At a minimum we'd need a separate API to enforce a web / mobile style security boundary.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#142

Post by [deleted] »

subhobroto wrote: post #101

Companies that don't have pressing revenue issues and a large petty cash allowance use it. A LOT. As a result, most BigCo and BigGovts use a lot of Semantic Web. There are full time employees at these places where all they do, full time, is write pages of documents about applying the Semantic Web to solving a problem. For example, thousands of man hours are spent by the U.S. Military on the Semantic Web every year. T…

[deleted]

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#143

Post by smadge »

tokyodude wrote: post #131
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.

I don’t really understand this argument, because there already are lies published on the internet. What difference does it make if those lies are published in a standardized machine readable format or not?

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#144

Post by chickenfries »

mycall wrote: post #126
pmontra wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 57m used by phone calls You are an unusual smartphone user. For most people, it is 0m.

Do you have stats? You might be projecting.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#145

Post by mickael-kerjean »

The potential of the semantic web is massive. It's hard to understand why it hasn't been a massive game changer. I remind a few years ago making crazy query to answers questions that still today has no equivalent like: Find companies CEO that has less than 100k employees and was created before Neil Amstrong walked on the moon. The winner take all approach we have today with all those sillos doesn't benefit human kind in any way.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#147

Post by pbhat »

bhuga wrote: post #73

I was involved in the semweb community ~7 years ago, particularly the "RDF knowledge graph" end, and it's still a bewitching idea. A lot of smart people have/still do work in it, but it never reached any kind of success on the commercial (as opposed to academic) web, because: Serialization is not the hard part. The semweb community was obsessed with ontologies and OWL and schemas and taxonomies. If we can just break…

I worked for semantic web startup. The idea was we'd build private "knowledge graphs" for companies especially Pharma and Biotech. We experienced something similar to what you describe. We had a nice RDF generator and a query engine. The idea was we'd parse data from clients' DB and unstructured stuff and generate semantic graphs - whcih would be used for semantic graph apps like search and inferences. Looking back, it was never going to work. Most clients came to us for "analytics dashboard". They were happy with giant tables to power these dashboards (and they were right!)

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#148

Post by flukus »

josephg wrote: post #140
dangrover wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

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

Timeline is one of the key ones. According to chrome task manager (because browsers need task managers now) the page I'm typing this reply on the contains a text area and your comment is consuming 30MB of RAM. Back when Java applets were getting their reputation for being slow I would have been lucky to have a computer with 32MB of RAM, 8 and 16MB were still common at that time. Now there were some other things that made applets awful, but if they were introduced today they wouldn't seem nearly as bad as we remember, on the same computer this page would be clunky.

For x-windows, it was never really a contender because there was no MS compatibility, but the potential was there.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#149

Post by riku_iki »

subhobroto wrote: post #105
keepper wrote: post #71

It couldn't make money... One of the best examples of the semantic web was Daylife[1], and they wound up being "acquired" by two bit players[2] that figured out how to monetize things better.. :-/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylife [2] https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/17/content-licensing-service-...

Yup! I made a few observations in my own comment. One being that there is no usable graph store you and I can use as of 2018. Another being about monetizing the Semantic Web when playing the role of the data/ontology provider. You provide all the data while the consumers (Siri, Alexa and Google Home) get the glory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036041

Store is easy, you put your triples to linearly scaleable cassandra. What you want is some fancy query language on top of that, right?

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#150

Post by nchuhoai »

mickael-kerjean wrote: post #145

The potential of the semantic web is massive. It's hard to understand why it hasn't been a massive game changer. I remind a few years ago making crazy query to answers questions that still today has no equivalent like: Find companies CEO that has less than 100k employees and was created before Neil Amstrong walked on the moon. The winner take all approach we have today with all those sillos doesn't benefit human kind…

I just had to try this with Wikidata. Unfortunately did not work well

https://query.wikidata.org/#SELECT%20%3FpresLabel%20%3Fcompa...

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