51–60 of 65 posts
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…
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…
However, lots of use scenarios found it useful to adopt semantic web technologies (RDF, Ontology), including the web services such as searching and recommendation, the technologies like AI and NLP, and the domain-specific requirements like drugs and lawsuit.
The semantic web may not seem useful to us, but definitely affect us.
In some ways it's similar to what we see in certain news sites. They only link to other pages on their own site even though it would be trivial to link out to the original information pages. Sites will even host public documents in in-line PDF readers in order to not link back to completely publicly available government sites -- scientific and engineering advancements are often vaguely and imprecisely talked about with no link to the original paper or announcement from the source. By living on ad revenue, these sites want to roach motel you into their hypertext jail and the result is information gets twisted and misreported where it propagates and is repeated in other places. News sites will even reference each other without linking back to the other site's original content.
Ads killed the Semantic Web.
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 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."
creating a globally agreed on well defined meaning for everything is impossible. sure it can be done and it is done for a very limited set of things, but i can't even agree on a meaning of something with my own self from 10 years ago.
i have yet to see any tagging system that worked consistently. take flickr for example. tags are all over the place.
i have been working on tagging my own photo collection, and it's the same problem, because tagging is so much work that i end up applying only the most important keywords in order to categorize an image, keywords that matter to me at the time.
and the semantic web wants to expand that to everything published? who is going to do sll that work? and how are we going to make sure it's consistent and well defined?
again, as someone else here said[2], the semantic web works in restricted, well defined areas of application. but not globally.
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…
[Source/disclaimer: I was working on a number of these markup parsing & unstructured data mining projects at Google in the 2009-2014 timeframe, and also wrote an HTML5 parser with the cooperation of the WHATWG. I left for about 6 years during the time period when Google began to be seen as this evil goliath, but I'm back now. My views are my own and don't represent my employer.] You've got the cause & effect backward…
Mm yes, much like XMPP and Google Chat/Facebook. Pay lip-service to a standard when you _don't_ own the mindshare, drive mindshare to you, then sunset the standard for your implementation when you have the mindshare. An innocent play, for sure.
That said, of course Google was not a founding member of WHATWG. The reason the association is so stubbornly believed is because WHATWG's Ian Hickson went to Google. At the risk of an aside, one of my "favorite" Ian Hickson quotes goes as follows:
"The Web is, and should be, driven by technical merit, not consensus. The W3C pretends otherwise, and wastes a lot of time for it. The WHATWG does not."
I suspect in today's world this phrase would be out of place. But of course, this was a more innocent time.
> before ultimately concluding that web developers cannot be trusted to get markup right, and most don't want to do it in the first place
I think a massive conflict of interest needs to be disclosed here: ad revenue. Microdata and schema.org was a change from the original promise of the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web was about exposing semantic data on pages so that search engines and other data processors could compete on discovery. Microdata and schema.org took a lighter-weight approach that _specifically focused_ on fields relevant to incumbent search engines, a la Google. The legacy lives on as Microdata today is only used as a form of SEO ranking boosting.
> Customer desires - in the form of what people will actually do, not what they claim they want to do - ultimately decide the structure of a market
I'm going to disagree here. Customer desires dictated nothing of the sort. (From what I remember (though I was young at the time), the general public really didn't have much desire or education about the net or the web as a whole at the time.) The big web companies started to understand the value of data. Even a decade ago, the FAANG equivalents (Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, et al) were already very open internally about how much of their value was in their data or in their network. It wasn't customer desire that drove any of this, it was monetary desire.
> When it became clear that there would be a few dominant companies, the priority shifted to being one of them rather than investing in (and getting screwed by) an open ecosystem that was disappearing.
What a sad sentiment. I disagree. This reads like something out of Machiavelli's The Prince.
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…
> Google actually knee-capped the web with the WHATWG's focus on less semantic documents. There's one teensy problem with your thesis: Google came late to the WHATWG. The WHATWG started initially as a joint Mozilla-Opera project [1] to basically standardize what you had to do to parse the crap that passes for webpages (including de-facto standard behavior for DOM at the time). At the same time, it also included a var…
Oh of course, Google didn't have a horse in the race for the application web at all until 2008. Except wait, they had released GMail in 2004 and Google Maps in 2005. In fact, WHATWG made frequent references to GMail and Google Maps as examples of the application web and deficiencies that W3C was not addressing in its XHTML standard.
Then Ian Hickson, the main editor behind the WHATWG HTML5 standardization process, went to Google. One of my favorite quotes from Hickson about the whole process (as I noted in a sibling comment):
"The Web is, and should be, driven by technical merit, not consensus. The W3C pretends otherwise, and wastes a lot of time for it. The WHATWG does not."
This says a lot both about the outlook of the WHATWG of the time and the way the development community of the time saw web corporations at the time. And now we have 2 major browsers as of this writing. It's funny how much flak Berners-Lee gets over his acquiescence to DRM and yet the WHATWG discussions of the time are completely glossed over. I was fairly young when the WHATWG and W3C power struggle occurred, but it was a great lesson for me as a teenage programmer in the power of value capture.
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…
> 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. Nah. Those platforms had years or decades to make their overengineered crap work, and they never could. XHTML2.0 was never finished, all those RDF ontologies never got anywhere, and all the semantic search engines couldn't find anything. Google made a sea…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Nah. Those platforms had years or decades to make their overengineered crap work, and they never could. XHTML2.0 was never finished, all those RDF ontologies never got anywhere, and all the semantic search engines couldn't find anything. Google made a sea…
Yep instead of xlst we now have a dozen javascript or server side solutions. HTML5 was pragmatic but to a fault.
And not one of them is harder to work with than XSLT. I'm all for declarative transformations in theory, but XSLT just sucks so bad if you actually try to use it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep instead of xlst we now have a dozen javascript or server side solutions. HTML5 was pragmatic but to a fault.
> instead of xlst we now have a dozen javascript or server side solutions. And not one of them is harder to work with than XSLT. I'm all for declarative transformations in theory, but XSLT just sucks so bad if you actually try to use it.