Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

twobithistory.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 209 posts

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#161

Post by zero_shift »

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…

> 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 for individual terms and concepts in practice

It sounds like the Semantic Web failed because we tried treating a longstanding (and possibly unresolvable) ontological problem as a straightforward and technical one.

I don’t really follow academic philosophy, but is it known these days if such categorisation problems are even “solvable” in the general case?

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#162

Post by arunaugustine »

mycall wrote: post #127
samuell wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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;…

Could you use something like Google Inference API to generate inferred form from existing plan data?

Isn't Google's Inference API for time series data? Finding patterns? Prolog is more of deductive logic engine right?

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#163

Post by andybak »

danShumway wrote: post #155
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…

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…

> I don't think semantic HTML is hard to write - I use it on every single one of my sites.

Buzzword-compliant semantic HTML or semantically useful HTML? Is there any user-agent out there that benefits from the extra work you're putting in?

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#164

Post by bshanks »

acdha wrote: post #115
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 re…

"Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment." Maybe humanity had to first try "all of the crazy bikeshedding about labyrinthine XML standards, triples, etc. or debating what a URL truly means" in order to gain enough understanding about this domain to later create things like schema.org.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#165

Post by rjsw »

andybak wrote: post #163
danShumway wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I don't think semantic HTML is hard to write - I use it on every single one of my sites. Buzzword-compliant semantic HTML or semantically useful HTML? Is there any user-agent out there that benefits from the extra work you're putting in?

There used to be a plugin for Firefox that would indicate if a page contained any FOAF info.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#166

Post by econnor »

jerf wrote: post #28
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…

'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…

It's like the dictionary vs encyclopedia thing. A dictionary (vocabulary) is probably the best we can hope for.

I have a foggy recollection that Jerry Fodor (Holism) or maybe Eco had thoughts on the matter.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#167

Post by planck01 »

I worked on the Semantic Web. It has so many fatal flaws, that I am amazed in hindsight that I didn't see them back then.

Berners-Lee was successful with the Web because it was not an academic idea like Nelson's and Engelbart's hypertext, but it was a pragmatic technology (HTTP, HTML and a browser) that solved a very practical problem. The semantic web was a vague vision that started with a simplistic graph language specification (RDF) that didn't solve anything. All the tools for processing RDF were horrendous in complexity and performance and everything you could do with it could typically be solved easier with other means.

Then the AI-people of old came on board and introduced OWL, a turn for the worse. All the automatic inference and deduction stuff was totally non-scalable on even toy examples, let alone web scale. Humans in general are terrible in making formal ontologies, even many computer science students typically didn't really understand the cardinality stuff. And how it would bring us closer to Berners-Lee vision? No idea.

Of course, its basic assumptions about the openness, distributedness and democratric qualities of the Web also didn't hold up. It didn't help that the community is extremely stubborn and over confident. Still.They keep on convincing themselves it all is a big success and will point at vaguely similar but successful stories built on completely different technology as that they were right. I think this attitude and type of people in the W3C also has lead to the downfall of the W3C as the Web authority.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#168

Post by blablabla123 »

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…

Nobody is stopping people from using the relatively new article or header tags. There is not really an inherent advantage in using divs except that they are barebones maybe. Apart from that, there are data attributes which are actually used on real-world websites for annotation of texts. Indeed they go particularly well with span tags.

People forget that all these fancy frameworks produce actual HTML5 DOMs, who cares if those are static or dynamic. I someone wants to write a semantic web parser/crawler then it's a great idea, but probably it shouldn't be done using wget. :-)

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#169

Post by sacado2 »

planck01 wrote: post #167

I worked on the Semantic Web. It has so many fatal flaws, that I am amazed in hindsight that I didn't see them back then. Berners-Lee was successful with the Web because it was not an academic idea like Nelson's and Engelbart's hypertext, but it was a pragmatic technology (HTTP, HTML and a browser) that solved a very practical problem. The semantic web was a vague vision that started with a simplistic graph language…

There are different flavors of OWL nowadays. Some of them are especially dedicated to reason on huge volumes of data (polynomial algorithms), although they are not very expressive. Some are more expressive, but don't scale very well. Some are incredibly expressive, but are undecidable, so you can only use them as a formal representation of a domain, not something you can reason from.

The practice in the community is to choose a fragment of OWL/description logic that fits your needs. Different tools for different uses. In practice I'm especially fond of the simplest languages, just a little more expressive than a database schema or an UML class diagram, as they are easy to describe things with and yet very useful, with lots of efficient algorithms to infer new things.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#170

Post by dalbasal »

planck01 wrote: post #167

I worked on the Semantic Web. It has so many fatal flaws, that I am amazed in hindsight that I didn't see them back then. Berners-Lee was successful with the Web because it was not an academic idea like Nelson's and Engelbart's hypertext, but it was a pragmatic technology (HTTP, HTML and a browser) that solved a very practical problem. The semantic web was a vague vision that started with a simplistic graph language…

I agree on the problem with abstract goals.

I could never really thought understand what it was going to do in specific terms, going from a "Programs could exchange data across the Semantic Web without having to be explicitly engineered to talk to each other" to some specific cases that seemed useful.

Spolsky had a great blog about this ki d of thing. CS people looking at napster, overemphasizing the peer-to-peer aspects and endeavouring to generalized it. Generalising is what science does, so the drive was there.

Generalising a solution is... It can lead you down path to solutuon-seeking problem. The web is also hard. Lots of chicken-egg problems to solve.

When TBL released www he had a browser, server and web pages that you could use right now. The "standards" existed for a non abstract reason.

On criticisms of W3C... idk. The have an almost impossible job. The world's biggest companies control browsers. Standards are very hard to change. Very hard network effect problems, people problems. Enourmous economic, political & ideological interests are impacted by their decisions.

You could say that they not have been involved with the project until it was much more mature and they could decide whether or not to include it. That said, if they were those sorts of people I stead of academic... I'm not sure if that's better.

So.e things just don't work out.

Post reply on HN