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Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

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Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#191

Post by rwallace »

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…

> Somewhere there's a great in-depth series of blog posts from someone who describes just trying to get libraries to agree upon and correctly use an author field or set of author fields for libraries.

That sounds interesting! Don't suppose you remember any more terms that might enable a Google search to find it?

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#192

Post by danShumway »

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?

It's important to distinguish between the semantic web and semantic HTML. They are different things.

The criticisms this article levies about the semantic web are pretty much straight on as far as I can tell.

Semantic HTML is pretty straightforward though - it's using HTML to describe content, rather than purely for layout. Some sites do it better than others, but it's certainly not dead or abnormal -- and many static HTML generators are... decent.. ish. Semantic HTML is using stuff like article tags and sections, using actual links instead of just putting a click handler on a div, stuff like that. The stuff that makes it easy to parse and understand a web page.

It's very useful - semantic HTML is the reason that sites like Pocket work, it's the reason why reader mode in Firefox/Safari works. It's the reason why screenreaders on the web work so much better than on native apps (at least as far as my experience on Linux has gone, maybe other people have better apps than me :)) It also (opinion me) makes styling easier, because light descriptive DOM structures tend to be easier to manipulate in CSS than large ones.

The semantic web, to the extent that it's well-defined at all is more about the metadata associated with a webpage. Very different concepts.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#193

Post by danShumway »

pjmlp wrote: post #178
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…

Same can be told about native apps that don't bother with layout managers, specially if they are part of the OS frameworks to start with.

It's a double-edged sword. I get why some apps say, "I want to handle everything myself", because then you don't have to debug which versions of a framework you're compatible with, and you don't have deal with these massive layers of abstractions. I hate working with frameworks, if I was building a Linux app I would be very tempted to just directly call into X or Wayland.

On the other hand, the last time I launched Braid on Linux, I had to manually change my resolution back afterwards and it removed my desktop background.

And I just felt like, "I'm sure there was a really good, sensible reason for whatever hack this game relied on when it originally launched on Linux. But... come on, if you had used some common framework, for all of the terrible problems that might have brought, when I launched it years later it would have at least full-screened properly."

So I dunno. The number of really big Linux apps that end up using their own custom display code is surprising to me. Even Emacs isn't fully using GTK. I assume developers of those apps are smart, so I assume there must be a good reason for it.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#195

Post by ppeetteerr »

brennebeck wrote: post #129
ppeetteerr wrote: post #128

I am surprised that the author did not mention the semantic web we did get. It's in his source, after all. If you look at the header of the page, you'll see the lines below. Sure they are not the utopian version of the semantic web we were promised. Instead, it's even better: it's the pragmatic semantic web we need: " />

The author specifically mentioned opengraph, or are you referencing something else?

The author does but as an aside. I think OpenGraph is the practical application of a more utopian semantic web and it deserves a lot more recognition.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#196

Post by jerf »

phlakaton wrote: post #62
jerf wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'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…

I don't think a "universal semantic" was ever a design goal of the semantic web. What's needed is not one semantic, but the ability to map between competing/complementary semantics. Which is still a hard problem, to be sure, but which admits varying degrees of partial progress.

"I don't think a "universal semantic" was ever a design goal of the semantic web."

And I'm pretty sure it was the whole point. Nobody would ever have written as many reams of marketing material if the pitch was "Hey, someday, you'll be able to reach out to the web, and with specialized software for your particular domain you can access specialized web sites with specialized tags that give you access to specialized data sets that can be fed to your specialized artificial intelligence engines!"

Because that pitch is basically a "yawn, yeah, duuuuuh", and dozens of examples could have been produced even ten years ago. The whole point was to have this interconnected web of everything linking to everything, and that's what's not possible.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#197

Post by geezerjay »

arcbyte wrote: post #53
lmm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two problems here are that XML/XSLT are horrible to work with (to the extent that you want to achieve what they were supposed to, you do it with the modern "single page app" style where you write javascript that retrieves data from an API and renders it into a UI) and that no-one actually wants to separate the content from the presentation anyway.

Except you just contradicted yourself. If everyone wants to use JavaScript frameworks and APIs for data they they ARE separating the content from the presentation.

> If everyone wants to use JavaScript frameworks and APIs for data they they ARE separating the content from the presentation.

That's not true. The DOM that the javascript frameworks mangle around isn't data but UI elements, some of which happen to be data.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#199

Post by phlakaton »

zmix wrote: post #190
phlakaton wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in a web app that used XSLT transformations of XML-formatted domain models to render HTML pages. You ended up doing the same sort of thing that React does, but with _far_ more cumbersome programming constructs. Functions done in XSLT were a nightmare. The idea behind the whole thing was that the "web devs" could be hired for their HTML/CSS skills and never have to touch code. The reality was, they had to bec…

> Functions done in XSLT were a nightmare. Did you "push" or did you "pull"?

> Did you "push" or did you "pull"?

I think you're proving my point. :-)

More specifically, we defined parameterized components that could be composed to form the output. The definition of those components was incredibly verbose, as was the instantiation, and it was tightly coupled to parts of the domain model in surprising ways. IIRC WebDevs ended up having to work a step removed from the final XSLT, using some DSL for components that transformed down to XSLT.

Further, deponent sayeth not.

Re: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

#200

Post by phlakaton »

jerf wrote: post #196
phlakaton wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think a "universal semantic" was ever a design goal of the semantic web. What's needed is not one semantic, but the ability to map between competing/complementary semantics. Which is still a hard problem, to be sure, but which admits varying degrees of partial progress.

"I don't think a "universal semantic" was ever a design goal of the semantic web." And I'm pretty sure it was the whole point. Nobody would ever have written as many reams of marketing material if the pitch was "Hey, someday, you'll be able to reach out to the web, and with specialized software for your particular domain you can access specialized web sites with specialized tags that give you access to specialized da…

These two visions you present lie on extreme ends of a continuum. They're both complete strawmen. The folks behind semantic web were aware of both of them, and were careful not to let their work be pigeonholed into either one.

Consider these passages, from "The Semantic Web," Tim Berners-Lee et al, Scientific American, May 2001:

"Like the Internet, the Semantic Web will be as decentralized as possible. Such Web-like systems generate a lot of excitement at every level, from major corporation to individual user, and provide benefits that are hard or impossible to predict in advance. Decentralization requires compromises: the Web had to throw away the ideal of total consistency of all of its interconnections, ushering in the infamous message 'Error 404: Not Found' but allowing unchecked exponential growth."

"Semantic Web researchers... accept that paradoxes and unanswerable questions are a price that must be paid to achieve versatility. We make the language for the rules as expressive as needed to allow the Web to reason as widely as desired. This philosophy is similar to that of the conventional Web: early in the Web's development, detractors pointed out that it could never be a well-organized library; without a central database and tree structure, one would never be sure of finding everything. They were right. But the expressive power of the system made vast amounts of information available, and search engines... now produce remarkably complete indices of a lot of the material out there. The challenge of the Semantic Web, therefore, is to provide a language that expresses both data and rules for reasoning about the data and that allows rules from any existing knowledge-representation system to be exported onto the Web."

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