11–20 of 65 posts
Wikidata was launched, so now you can just host your data there.
Wikidata has better searching than the real semantic web could ever get, since it has a team of devs and sysadmins with a view of the whole dataset.
Also, the Semantic Web had no story for how to contact authors and suggest changes to their schema. DNS does not provide sufficient identity or messaging. But Mediawiki does.
It's not that dead, google announced today extended support for it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24557027
Human's use of language is somewhere between the bag-of-word model and part-of-speech tagging. Neither a word salad nor a constructive proof based in first-order-logic.
I had a [[meeting]] with [[John Doe]] about [[Project X]].
_:meeting1 a schema:Meeting;
schema:participant [ a foaf:Person; rdfs:label "John Doe" ] ;
The semantic web wanted to make them "understandable" to computers, but made linking too difficult for people.
Even still, the task of understanding humans has nothing to do with semantics. The academic discipline that studies this is called language pragmatics.
BTW, this problem was why Wittgenstein had a nervous breakdown, trying to proof/compute the meaning of statements with other statements.
At the end of the day words mean what they mean, i mean, I have a Beatle in a box in my head and you have a Beatle in a box in your head. Mine walks and flies though the air, yours drives on the road.
We expect computers to be able to do this but I suspect that this won't happen until they can take a shit.
Maybe it's not a bad goal to have, but, even the semantic web (academic) community has given up on that question and has pivoted its effort to saving the web and giving people back control of their data with the power of a digital twin, whatever that is.
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…
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…
However the semantic web didn't have a business model to drive adoption. It assumed web content would be authored with semantic indicators that could later be harvested usefully (including commercially), but failed to consider what incentive or economic paradigm would compel content authors to embed semantic indicators.
Meanwhile, the problem/opportunity was solved in other ways.
Consider this example:
- - -
The promise: machine intelligence
“At the doctor's office, Lucy instructed her Semantic Web agent through her handheld Web browser. The agent promptly retrieved information about Mom's prescribed treatment from the doctor's agent, looked up several lists of providers, and checked for the ones in-plan for Mom's insurance a 20 mile radius of her home and with a rating of excellent or very good on trusted rating services. It then began trying to find a match between available appointment times (supplied by the agents of individual providers through their Web sites) and Pete's and Lucy's busy schedules.”
(The emphasized keywords indicate terms whose semantics, or meaning, were defined for the agent through the Semantic Web.)
- - -
The problem was solved by commercial services e.g. google maps in which the semantic layer is provided, retained and exploited by the service aggregator, google, which monetises the service through advertising.
Ironically, "machine intelligence" has not come to mean semantically enriched source documents, but rather, elaborate computationally intensive processes applied to harvest commercial opportunities from unenriched web content.
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…
I am not knowlegeable in semantic web but isn't a hashtag a form of semantic categorizing of data? If so the hashtag movement is very recent. I always wondered who the hastags serve: humans or machines? I think it was machines firstly but then it got appropriated by social dynamics of people and business.
You could build an ontology in RDF [1] or OWL [2] and link the grammars together.
FOAF [3] was a means of describing your friends and social connections, and it allowed rich annotation.
No tools were ever built around this because by the time it started taking off, Facebook and MySpace were already a thing.
The great thing about these technologies is that the graph is public and you could write tools to ingest, export, and exchange the information. We never got to that, though.
The technology was centered around graphs and triple stores, allowing you to apply subject-predicate labels to anything. The URI became a central node, document, and ontology identification scheme.
There were languages like SPARQL for querying rich triplestore databases, but they never really took off. Again, Google and Facebook were already huge by the time these started to mature.
If you think the promise of blockchain is exciting, you should take a look at what the Semantic Web could have been...
[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/
As an enterprise architect I've evaluated most of the major AWS and GCP offerings. We still decided to look into semantic web for many use cases, and it was still the best solution.
Semantic web is many things, so I'll narrow it down to one of the most impressive offerings; RDFox. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpB_tl1Vc0A
You use RDFox when you want a graph database but you also want reasoning. You can do logical deduction to infer new information. Just like programming languages evolved to have modules and namespace systems, semantic web allows you to namespace entities to more easily share data. It's based on descriptive logic, a subset of first order logic.
The alien features I don't see anywhere else;
* I can add logic to my graph database and have it execute as soon as I insert data into the database
* Recursive queries is way easier than SQL
* Forget materialized views and generated columns, RDFox can automatically apply descriptive logic to update facts as soon as you insert data into the database "incremental reasoning"
* The magical declarative syntax that gets reconciled that have made tools popular, like, kubernetes, terraform, graphQL, react, it's now generalized for you to use in any app at almost any scale
* You can put business rules in your database, and even if they heavily chain off other rules, it's lightening fast. You can also just type "explain" to see how data was derived
* If you have streaming pipelines that you were sending to ETL and import back, in many cases you can use the streaming inference to do this all for you without separate apps
* You can import data from Wikidata and other massive RDF based sources. This abstract wikipedia project coming up may have broad implications to the availability of RDF, especially if they're successful and it's heavily copied everywhere for other domains
in my world anyway
The idea behind semantic web was to embed intelligence in web content through semantic markup, so that downstream agents could make sense of the content. However the semantic web didn't have a business model to drive adoption. It assumed web content would be authored with semantic indicators that could later be harvested usefully (including commercially), but failed to consider what incentive or economic paradigm wou…