21–30 of 65 posts
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.
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…
Semantic web is still here, it's just not a dominant headline. 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 g…
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…
This is a good analysis.
Oftentimes the answer to why some technology succeeds or fails is more than just purely technical. It can be really useful to think in these kinds of materialist terms ("Who benefits?") to get a fuller picture.
"The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation." Linked Data is the use of all that information in a manner that essentially treats the entire web as one virtual database, allowing data to be pulled and manipulated from multiple sites as a single query and, beyond that, allows the sites queried to point to other locations that might have useful information.
Linked Data Ventures is a graduate-level class that combines traditional academics with practitioner perspectives and practical hands-on experience, to empower students to launch new ventures using this technology. From the instructor team, students will learn the technical components that are needed to produce Linked Data offerings, will learn business skills fundamental to growing and sustaining a venture. Weekly guest lecturers will provide insights into how they use the technology in their business and their experience launching a venture. This is a unique course in which teaching is shared between EECS and the MIT Entrepreneurship Center and learning is a cooperative effort between EECS and Sloan students. A team-based project will culminate in sustainable prototypes that could be freeware or have the potential to be commercialized in the future, and will serve as a good launching point for entering into the MIT 100k competition. At the end of the semester, each project team will do a business presentation in front of the whole class and a panel of outside experts and judges, as well as a technical presentation as the conclusion of the lab.
The faculty were clearly interested in encouraging adoption/development of commercial applications. To that end we had several speakers from industry showing off some early-stage applications, and the project teams had to build simple apps based on the technology.
One of the teams actually did achieve success, building a prototype restaurant database using Semantic Web technologies we learned in class. It eventually grew into a commercial service and was acquired by GoDaddy about five years ago. However, to scale it beyond the prototype they had to move beyond Semantic Web concepts and use a different technology approach; IIRC the founder said it just wasn't ready for prime time. He mentioned latency was a huge issue.
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.
My impression is that hashtags grew from people on Twitter. A group of people started putting # in front of keywords in their tweets, to mark them as central to the topic of the tweet, so that others could search for those keywords with the # in front and find only tweets that were specifically about that thing rather than happening to use the same word while talking about something else. Twitter staff noticed and the hashtag was turned into a feature. Other sites then adopted the hashtag feature too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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. My impression is that hashtags grew from people on Twitter. A group of people started putting # in front of keywords in their tweets, to mark them as central to the topic of the tweet, so that others could search for those keywords with the # in front a…
Twitter was the first to introduce inline tags with the hashtag, and I believe you're correct that it was user-driven behavior.
SPAs, mobile apps and Zelenials killed it.
Anyway this claim seems to reverse cause and effect. SPAs started getting hyped a lot after it became apparent that big tech institutions weren't really going to pursue semantic web.
There's no real meaning in the claim that "Zelenials" did semantic web in. As far as I know, Zelenials never took a vote and decided not to pursue semantic web. The relevant agents here are huge institutions with the power and desire to shape developments in web technology. Google and whoever.
Semantic web is still here, it's just not a dominant headline. 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 g…
At what scale are you using RDFox with reasoning?
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…
There were probably always limits to how widely useful (or adopted) a single coherent set of resource definitions / markup conventions could have been, but for all the early value demonstrated by Google itself it sure seems like there really wasn't enough thought about the value proposition.
> Neither web developers nor web users wanted or needed it,
Users want search, first without having to put too much thought into modeling what they're looking for, then maybe with some additional options with an intuition or understanding of how results might be improved. They might not know how the semantic web could help with that any more than they know how Ruby helps their application exist, and it makes about as much sense to say users don't care about the semantic web as they don't care about Ruby. Both are potential waiting to be realized into an experience.
Developers, on the other hand, don't have anywhere near as good an excuse.