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A Review of the Semantic Web Field

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Re: A Review of the Semantic Web Field

#41

Post by ivansavz »

Wow, what a great summary with lots of realism and nuances. I agree with the author's conclusions that what is missing is consolidation and interoperability between standards (e.g. make Protégé easier to use and ensure libraries for RDF parsing and serializations exist for all languages). No technology will be adopted if it requires PhD-level ability to handle jargon and complexity... but if there were tutorials and HOWTOs, we could see big progress.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of the "fancy" layers of the Semantic Web Stack like OWL (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web_Stack ), but the basic layers of RDF + SPARQL as a means for structured exchange of data seem like a solid foundation to build upon.

It's really simple in the end: we've got databases and identifiers. INTERNALLY to any company or organization, you can setup a DB of your choosing and ensure data follows a given schema, with data linked through internal identifiers. When you want to publish data EXTERNALLY, you need to have "external identifiers" for each resource, and URIs are a logical choice for this (this is also a core idea of REST APIs of hyperlinked resources). Similarly, communicating data using the a generic schema capable of expressing arbitrary entities and relations like RDF and JSON-LD is also a logical next step, rather than each API using it's own bespoke data schema...

As for making web data machine-readable, the key there is KISS: efforts like schema.org with opt-in, progressive enhancements annotations are very promising.

For anyone wanting to know more about this domain, there is an online course here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoOmvuyo5UAeihlKcWpzV... The whole course is pretty deep (would take a month to go through it all), but you can skip ahead to lectures of specific interest.

Re: A Review of the Semantic Web Field

#42

Post by nut-hatch »

LukeEF wrote: post #11

We built a new semantic database first in university and then commercial open source (TerminusDB). We use the web ontology language (OWL) as a schema language, but made two important - practical - modifications: 1) we dispense with the open world interpretation; and 2) insist on the unique name assumption. This provides us with a rich modelling language which delivers constraints on the shapes in the graph. Additiona…

I completed my PhD in the scope of Semantic Web technologies and I can share the same experience that the semantic web community is extremely closed (coming across as feeling "elite"). Having myself no supervisor from the field, it was still possible to publish my ideas (ISWC, WWW etc), but it was impossible to connect to the people and be taken seriously.

I moved on from that field now, and I don't expect to come in touch with any Semantic Web stuff in a open-world context any time soon.

I couldn't agree more with you that the strong ideology that drives this community is one of the main reason that these technologies are not widely adopted. This, and the failure to convince people outside academia that solving the problems it tries to solve is necessary in the first place.

Good luck with TerminusDB, I think I listened to you at KGC.

Re: A Review of the Semantic Web Field

#43

Post by fauigerzigerk »

tragomaskhalos wrote: post #22

My 10,000 ft layperson's view, to which I invite corrections, is broadly: - The semantic web set off with extraordinarily ambitious goals, which were largely impractical - The entire field was trumped by Deep Learning, which takes as its premise that you can infer relationships from the exabytes of human rambling on the internet, rather than having to laboriously encode them explicitly - Deep Learning is not after al…

>The entire field was trumped by Deep Learning, which takes as its premise that you can infer relationships from the exabytes of human rambling on the internet, rather than having to laboriously encode them explicitly

I don't think machine learning can ever replace data modeling, because data modeling is often creative and/or normative. If we want to express what data must look like and which relationships there should be, then machine learning doesn't help and we have no other choice than to laboriously encode or designs. And as long as we model data we will have a need for data exchange formats.

You could categorise data exchange formats as follows:

a) Ad-hoc formats with ill defined syntax and ill defined semantics. That would be something like the CSV family of formats or the many ad-hoc mini formats you find in database text fields.

b) Well defined syntax with externally defined often informal semantics. XML and JSON are examples of that.

c) Well defined syntax with some well defined formal semantics. That's where I see Semantic Web standards such as RDF (in its various notations), RDFS and OWL.

So if the task is to reliably merge, cleanse and interpret data from different sources then we can achieve that with less code on the basis of (c) type data exchange formats.

But it seems we're stuck with (b). I understand some of the reasons. The Semantic Web standards are rather complex and at the same time not powerful enough to express all the things we need. But that is a different issue than what you are talking about.

Re: A Review of the Semantic Web Field

#44

Post by kmerroll »

Honestly disconcerting to see mostly negative responses in this thread: awful community, overly complicated, research focused, academic nitwits gone wild, etc. Pretty sure there's some truth here, but would suggest the deeper argument is against semantic web as evolution of the world-wide-web. Agree this isn't likely to happen in my lifetime.

Right up there with, mostly hated, Javascript, I happen to think there are good parts of the semantic web technologies and that the pivot towards industry adoption of the graph data models related to knowledge graphs, ontologies, and SPARQL shows there are benefits outside of academic paper mills. I don't have a dog in this fight (TerminusDB), but applying some reasonable expectations and accepting the limitations of the semantic web tools has been very successful on many projects. Even more so, innovation and improvements in graph data repositories are making triple-stores and graph-based models compelling for some use cases. Not going back to CSV hell if there are better alternatives.

Re: A Review of the Semantic Web Field

#45

Post by namedgraph »

jerf wrote: post #32
LukeEF wrote: post #11

We built a new semantic database first in university and then commercial open source (TerminusDB). We use the web ontology language (OWL) as a schema language, but made two important - practical - modifications: 1) we dispense with the open world interpretation; and 2) insist on the unique name assumption. This provides us with a rich modelling language which delivers constraints on the shapes in the graph. Additiona…

"Our feeling on interacting with the semantic web community is that innovation - especially when it conflicts with core ideology - is not welcome." I wasn't a big fan of the "semantic web" community when it first came out, and the years have only deepened my disrespect, if not outright contempt. The entire argument was "Semantic web will do this and that and the other thing!" "OK, how exactly will it accomplish this?…

It's not what you have to do, or how, it's that for the first time we have a common model for data interchange (RDF) with which you can model concepts and things in your domain, or more-importantly across domains, and simply merge the datasets. Try that with the relational model or JSON. Integration is the main value proposal of RDF today, nobody sane is trying to build a single global ontology of the world .

You can despise the fringe academic research, but how do you explain Knowledge Graph use by FAANG (including powering Alexa and Siri) as well as a number of Fortune 500 companies? Here are the companies looking for SPARQL (RDF query language) developers: http://sparql.club

Re: A Review of the Semantic Web Field

#46

Post by namedgraph »

krallistic wrote: post #7
tammet wrote: post #3

The whole field has been dominated by research, i.e. the wish to make simple things complicated (in order to publish papers) as opposed to engineering, i.e. making complicated things simple (in order to produce usable software efficiently). As a result the standards are horrendously - and needlessly - complicated. The few major practical outcomes like the schema.org, json-ld and the google annotation system, are resu…

Maybe a good indicator that there is only minor (industry) need/benefit. The "biggest" Knowledge Graph is Google, but it is unclear, how much there is actually Semantic Web and how much search, ML, NLP etc.. They are all nice ideas, but the practical usecases are rare. I am skeptical of the often touted usecase in Medicine/Drug Interactions. The only time i saw it in the industry, it was not really used by the lab te…

Explain this Knowledge Graph usage by Fortune 500 companies then: http://sparql.club/

Re: A Review of the Semantic Web Field

#47

Post by namedgraph »

actsofthecla wrote: post #16

I'm only a hobbyist in this area, but I wonder why the review wouldn't mention some of the graph databases as, at least, semantic web adjacent. Their relative success seems to lend credence to the overall vision of the semantic web and its supporting technologies. For example, are there really more than surface syntactical differences between SPARQL and Cypher? Even though it was over-hyped, I like the semantic web b…

Check our SPARQL-driven Knowledge Graph management system :) https://atomgraph.github.io/LinkedDataHub/

Re: A Review of the Semantic Web Field

#48

Post by namedgraph »

xkvhs wrote: post #4

Maybe for its time it seemed like a good idea.. Like SOAP or manual features for image classification. Today, it's clear that languages and knowledge don't really work like that, and it's not practical to approach them this way. I've learned about the OWL and SPARQL 12 years ago, and it already felt like a very dated idea. But then who knows... Everybody have given up on NNs once too.

Right... except that Uber, Boeing, JP Morgan Chase, Nike, Electronic Arts etc. etc. are looking for SPARQL developers right now: http://sparql.club/

Re: A Review of the Semantic Web Field

#49

Post by namedgraph »

smarx007 wrote: post #33

I do research in this field but I am a programmer by training before I entered this research field. I have talked to many academics and they agree that industry needs something simpler, more approachable and something that solves their problems in a more direct way, so it's definitely not an "academic exercise" for many researchers. However, I failed to convince people that we need to implement the 2001 SciAm use cas…

We wasted 20 years by trying to replace one form of brackets with the other (XML vs. JSON). WHATWG and the browser vendors are responsible for this. Just like for the fact that we still don't have a machine-readable web. FAANG crawls the structured schema.org metadata like nobody else can and profits from it, and the rest of use are left with the HTML5 and Javascript crap.

Re: A Review of the Semantic Web Field

#50

Post by namedgraph »

j-pb wrote: post #5
hyperion2010 wrote: post #2

The reason why tools like Protégé have not been sufficiently developed is because of infighting in the academic ontology community in addition to the reasons listed by the author. It has set the whole community back at least 5 years.

I think that's a symptom, not the cause. The complexity of web standards in general smother it with it's own weight. The common web has enough raw financial and person backing to grind through that. The semantic web does not. CURIEs and the depending standards alone are well over 100 pages. Language tags alone has 90. RDF has like 100, Sparql has a combined of more than 300, and OWL has more than 500, even though it…

OWLAPI, Protege - that's it? RDF libraries broken? Dude what rock are you living under? What about Jena, RDF4J, rdflib, redland, dotNetRDF etc? Most of these libraries have been developed and tested for 20+ years and are active. See for yourself: https://github.com/semantalytics/awesome-semantic-web#progra...

Why are you spreading FUD?

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