Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web? • Hacker News Board

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#151

Post by ako » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 5:14 AM UTC

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…

Discovery. This is the essential difference. And this is mostly based on semantic features of html.

www has 3 main ways of discovery that alternative technologies didn’t offer: 1) search (leading you to correct info in the site, instead of just to a landing page. 2) overview pages, short summary with links to the actual info (google news, etc), 3) deep hyperlinks that everyone can easily discover (browser url) and provide elsewhere (email, Facebook posts, twitter posts, etc).

The first one is very much based on the semantic qualities of html, where google can crawl a page and make some educated guess about what the page is about.

Biggest problem with mobile apps is that discovery is completely channeled through commercial app stores.

I would like to see an alternative web tech stack that doesn’t skip the discovery part. Web assembly with canvas for example is completely useless for a search crawler.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#152

Post by watersb » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 5:26 AM UTC

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…

Yes. I was trying to formalize an ontology for astronomical data sets, found that good people in Strasbourg had already done a good job there, but had no experience with unification over simple tuples. Tried to explain RDF with Prolog queries.

I tried to steer away from typical databases, but in the end I was just getting in the way.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#153

Post by pmontra » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 5:32 AM UTC

chickenfries wrote: post #144

mycall wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I checked in the Battery settings. Android 8 shows the stats there.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#154

Post by jackcosgrove » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 5:33 AM UTC

The web is just a subset of the internet, and a shrinking one as a share.

More communication over the internet is between client-server apps rather than between browsers and other open standards, as was envisaged when the web started. JavaScript apps and mobile apps are tightly coupled with their services.

Although HTTP has proven resilient, HTML/XML has not. XML's verbosity that enables semantic meaning is exactly its undoing compared to JSON. When meaning is built into both client and server, communication needs to be skinny not rich.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#155

Post by danShumway » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 5:34 AM 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…

When people say this, it feels like we're in different universes, or at least looking for different things.

I main Linux on all of my machines. Most of the native apps on it have terrible UX. Even big apps - On touch screens, Firefox doesn't support two-fingered scroll. Chrome won't snap to the side of a desktop. Neither will bring up a virtual keyboard if I click on the URL bar.

The majority of my native apps that I use don't support fractional scaling - apps like Unity3d are unusable on 13 inch screens and there's no way for me to zoom in or out on them. Even system dialogs suffer from this problem sometimes, it's like nobody on native ever learned what an 'em' unit is and they're still stuck in 1990 calculating pixel positions.

To contrast, most of the websites that I'm using, even when they're badly designed will work on smallish screens or can be individually zoomed in and out. My keyboard shortcuts work pretty much the same across every site (aside from the rare exception that tries to be all fancy and implement its own). If they break, it's not rare for me to be able to open up an inspector and add one or two CSS rules that fix the problem.

Reading Hacker News, I sometimes wonder if I'm just browsing/using entirely different sites/apps than everybody else is. I don't understand how my experience is so different.

Regarding semantic HTML, I generally don't have too much of a problem there either. I don't think semantic HTML is hard to write - I use it on every single one of my sites. If you're using React and it can't be used without spitting divs all over the place, maybe the solution is just to stop using React? Modern HTML is only going to look like div soup if you fill it with divs.

I mean, I can build you a horrible SQL database that requires 30 joins on every data call, but that doesn't necessarily mean that SQL is bad. It means that auto-generating SQL tables based on a bunch of cobbled-together frameworks and user-scripts is bad. Treat your application's DOM like you would a schema, and put some thought into it. That will also solve a great deal of the responsive design problems on mobile that people are talking about, because light DOM structures are more flexible than heavy ones.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#156

Post by gideon_b » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 5:49 AM UTC

Interesting, this post implements the og tags for social sharing (image and description) but skips the full og:article tags with author, date etc.

Edit: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/#...

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#157

Post by dehrmann » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 5:51 AM UTC

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…

My gripe with JSON winning is that we're left with competing standards for JSON paths, transformation, and JSON Schema is still a draft. Clunky as XML is, the tooling is more portable and powerful.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#158

Post by moltensyntax » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 6:03 AM UTC

smadge wrote: post #143

tokyodude wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We as humans have a lot of intuitive tools for knowing whether a source of data is trustworthy. AI could possibly approach this ability given enough training... we'd need to do something like add a "trust" score to every node in the graph.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#159

Post by PurpleRamen » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 6:07 AM 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.

So just add a layout-language to divide it from the content, as already done with style?

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#160

Post by tonyoconnell » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 7:05 AM UTC

If you ask that question in 5 years perhaps the answer will be that it came alive with AI. As AI becomes more important so should the Semantic Web since it will provide data to train the machines.