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What happened to the Semantic Web? (2017) [pdf]

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Re: What happened to the Semantic Web? (2017) [pdf]

#5

Post by thelazydogsback »

I think we missed the boat -- the focus on fancy rendering rather than on the actual data/content set us back years in functionality and helped create free and for-pay walled gardens where actionable data stays server-side and rendering is forced upon us, rather than just having reasonable defaults and then having rendering (incl. multi-modal interaction, etc.) further guided by user-defined settings and heuristics. Even if data happens to be rendered client-side in an SPA, it's done though application-specific means. I suppose deep-learning based data-extraction from free-form pre- and post-rendered content will eventually make up for this, but at least part of that road may have been avoided -- and of course we're probably going to have to pay someone (one way or another) for the privilege of having the content un-rendered back into actionable data at scale...

Re: What happened to the Semantic Web? (2017) [pdf]

#6

Post by donatj »

Google for many years did not execute JavaScript as part of it's indexing. This had the very positive effect of making the contents of the web far more accessible, as otherwise you simply did not show in search results.

They're kind of bringing this back around with AMP but in a shitty walled garden way.

Re: What happened to the Semantic Web? (2017) [pdf]

#8

Post by xnx »

This is the classic struggle between structured and unstructured data. As difficult as the task of creating AI that can make sense of unstructured data and pages is, that task is still more tractable than getting millions of people around the world to sufficiently coordinate on a common standard.

Re: What happened to the Semantic Web? (2017) [pdf]

#9

Post by echelon »

I was replying to another commenter, but they deleted their post. I still think my response is legitimate, and I'd like to discuss. I'm including the post and my response to it:

> This might be an unpopular opinion, but the Semantic Web was yet another idea that only could've come from Architecture Astronauts. Neither web developers nor web users wanted or needed it, but the Astronauts just kept pushing forward, with no support whatsoever, until people with actual skin in the game of the future of the Web got fed up and sidelined the W3C in favor of WHATWG/HTML5.

> When the Architecture Astronauts produce a product no one wants/needs at a big megacorp like Microsoft, it's easy to make fun of them, but for whatever reason when it happens in an open-source environment or in academia, people are a lot more likely to lament "Oh, why couldn't they understand?", which has it backwards: it's your job to understand them, and in your arrogance you deliberately didn't do that.

The Semantic Web flew in the face of enterprises like Google. It posited to put all information into a queryable ontology. With a rich and expressive grammar, who needs Google's algorithms to rank anything? All you need to do is ingest and you can weight the edges based on who else consumes them.

Google actually knee-capped the web with the WHATWG's focus on less semantic documents. The platforms with their army of engineers are what did the technology in.

If the Semantic Web had a chance to grow before the giants of tech emerged, we might be looking at a vastly superior internet today.

Re: What happened to the Semantic Web? (2017) [pdf]

#10

Post by cratermoon »

Simple. Nobody needs it to sell things and make money, or spread ideas and grab power. Amazon isn't going to spend a penny of its income on things that don't have a profitable ROI. Misinformation sources would prefer things not be cataloged accurately an sensibly. The actual portion of the web dedicated to information based on fact and useful content is dwarfed by everything control by actors who are only there to make money or control people.
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