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The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web

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Re: The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web

#2

Post by PaulHoule »

Semweb people got burned out by the stress of making new standards which means that standards haven't been updated. We've needed a SPARQL 2 for a long time but we're never going to get it.

One thing I find interesting is that description logics (OWL) seem to have stayed a backwater in a time when progress in SAT and SMT solvers has been explosive.

Re: The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web

#3

Post by ggleason »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

Semweb people got burned out by the stress of making new standards which means that standards haven't been updated. We've needed a SPARQL 2 for a long time but we're never going to get it. One thing I find interesting is that description logics (OWL) seem to have stayed a backwater in a time when progress in SAT and SMT solvers has been explosive.

That's a very good point re SAT/SMT. F* (https://www.fstar-lang.org/) has done truly amazing things by making use of them, and it's great to be able to get sophisticated correctness checks while doing basically non of the work.

I'm going to have to go away and think about how one could effectively leverage this in a data setting, but I'd love to hear ideas.

Re: The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web

#4

Post by bawolff »

Funnily enough, the why semantic web is good section is the section that actually identifies why it failed.

We are going to have an ultra flexible data model that everyone can just participate in?

That never works. Protocols work by restricting possibilities not allowing everything. The more possibilities you allow, the more room for subtle incompatibilities and the more effort you have to spend massaging everything into compatibility.

Re: The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web

#5

Post by PaulHoule »

ggleason wrote: post #3
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

Semweb people got burned out by the stress of making new standards which means that standards haven't been updated. We've needed a SPARQL 2 for a long time but we're never going to get it. One thing I find interesting is that description logics (OWL) seem to have stayed a backwater in a time when progress in SAT and SMT solvers has been explosive.

That's a very good point re SAT/SMT. F* ( https://www.fstar-lang.org/ ) has done truly amazing things by making use of them, and it's great to be able to get sophisticated correctness checks while doing basically non of the work. I'm going to have to go away and think about how one could effectively leverage this in a data setting, but I'd love to hear ideas.

It doesn't have anything directly to do with SAT but I'd say the #1 deficiency in RDFS and OWL is this.

Somebody might write

   :Today :tempF 32.0 .
or

   :Today :tempC 0.0 .
The point of RDFS and OWL is not to force people into a straightjacket the way people think it is but rather make it possible to write a rulebox after the fact that merges data together. You might wish you could write

   :tempC rdfs:subPropertyOf :tempF .
but you can't, what you really want is to write a rule like

   ?x :tempC ?y -> ?x :tempF ?y*1.8 + 32.0
but OWL doesn't let you do that. You can do it with SPIN but SPIN never got ratified and so far all the SPIN implementations are simple fixed point iterators and don't take advantage of the large advances that have happened with production rules systems since they fell out of fashion (e.g. systems in the 1980s broke down with 10,000 rules, in 2022 1,000,000 rules is often no problem.)

Re: The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web

#6

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Very well written introduction to some of the problems with semantic web dev.

Personally I think the reason it died was there were no obvious commercial applications. There are of course commercial applications, but not in a way that people realize what they're using is semantic web. Of all the 'note keepers' and 'knowledge bases' out there, none of them are semantic web. Thus it has languished in academia and a few niche industries in backend products, or as hidden layers, ex. Wikipedia. Because there wasn't something we could stare at and go "I am using the semantic web right now", there was no hype, and no hype means no development.

Re: The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web

#8

Post by ggleason »

bawolff wrote: post #4

Funnily enough, the why semantic web is good section is the section that actually identifies why it failed. We are going to have an ultra flexible data model that everyone can just participate in? That never works. Protocols work by restricting possibilities not allowing everything. The more possibilities you allow, the more room for subtle incompatibilities and the more effort you have to spend massaging everything…

That's discussed in the article though. The open world assumption is untenable. Having shareable interoperable schemata that can refer to each-other safely would be a god send however. And that's what is currently very hard but needn't be.

Re: The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web

#9

Post by ggleason »

jxramos wrote: post #7

That github was created 2 days ago, wasn't this article discussed elsewhere someplace? It looks very recognizable. Was it on a blog or something and just made a new home in github or was it some other similar article I may be thinking about.

I wrote it from scratch 2 days ago.
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