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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

#31

Post by rch »

ggleason wrote: post #21
rch wrote: post #13

JSON-LD has some traction, but the author seems to prefer a slightly different syntax. I don't see a material difference, but I'm curious to know what others think. -- https://w3c.github.io/json-ld-bp/#contexts -- https://w3c.github.io/json-ld-bp/#example-example-typed-rela... -- https://terminusdb.com/docs/index/terminusx-db/reference-gui...

Well, in one sense the are directly interconvertable. The documents in TerminusDB are elaborated to JSON-LD internally during type-checking and inference. However, it's not just a question of whether one can be made into another. The use of contexts is very cumbersome, since you need to specify different contexts at different properties for different types. It makes far more sense to simply have a schema and perform…

> contexts at different properties for different types

It seems like I could use syntax from HOCON to achieve this in a less verbose way, perhaps with minor changes to the parser.

> have a schema and perform the elaboration from there

I like your schema approach. I'll have to experiment a bit.

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

#33

Post by galaxyLogic »

k8si wrote: post #20
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #6

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…

Very hard to make a business case because for the reasons you mentioned + the costs are very front-loaded because ontologies are so damn hard to build, even for very well-contained problems. Without a clear payoff, why bother

Yes because that is about formalizing all human thought and knowledge. In principle that has nothing to do with computers and is something everybody working in science and humanities has been always trying to do starting with Socrates or was it Pythagoras. It is about "building theories".

Now computers can help in that of course but it doesn't really make it easy to create a consistent stable "theory of everything". As we used to say "garbage in garbage out".

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

#34

Post by pornel »

Semantic Web lost itself in fine details of machine-readable formats, but never solved the problem of getting correctly marked up data from humans.

In the current web and apps people mostly produce information for other people, and this can work even with plain text. Documents may lack semantic markup, or may even have invalid markup, and have totally incorrect invisible metadata, and still be perfectly usable for humans reading them. This is a systemic problem, and won't get better by inventing a nicer RDF syntax.

In language translation, attempts of building rigid formal grammar-based models have failed, and throwing lots of text at a machine learning has succeeded. Semantic Web is most likely doomed in the same way. GPT-3 already seems to have more awareness of the world than anything you can scrape from any semantic database.

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

#35

Post by asiachick »

I only skimmed the article so maybe I missed I but at a glance it seemed the completely miss the biggest issue. People will intentionally mislabel things. If chocolate is trending people will add "chocolate" to there tags for bitcoin.

You can see this all over the net. One example is the tags on SoundCloud.

Another issue is agreeing on categories. say women vs men or male vs female. for the purpose of id the fluidity makes sense but less so for search. to put it another way, if I search for brunettes i'd better not see any blondes. If I search for dogs I'd better not see any cats. And what to do about ambiguous stuff. What's a sandwich? A hamburger? a hotdog? a gyro? a taco?

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

#37

Post by strangattractor »

lmeyerov wrote: post #16

Very cool topic... and not the article I was expecting! I actively work with teams making sense of their massive global supply chains, manufacturing process, sprawling IT/IOT infra behavior, etc., and I personally bailed from RDF to bayesian models ~15 years ago... so I'm coming from a pretty different perspective: * The historical killer apps for semantic web were historically paired with painfully manual taxonomiza…

Generally agree. There is a lot of discussion concerning the technical difficulties, RDF flaws and road blocks little acknowledgement of other non-technical impracticalities. Making something technically feasible does insure adoption. Changing a bunch of code over time will always be preferable redefining ontologies and reprocessing the data.

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

#38

Post by leoxv »

asplake wrote: post #17

Seems to miss the obvious double whammy: 1) Because it burdens producers to no obvious benefit, a problem forever 2) Because progress over time in language processing makes it less and less necessary

1)

- SPARQL is _a lot better_ than the many different forms of SQL.

- Adding some JSON-LD can be done through simple JSON metadata. Something people using Wordpress are already able to do. All this will be more and more automated.

- The benefit is ontological cohesion across the whole web. Please take a look at the https://conze.pt project and see what this can bring you. The benefit is huge. Simple integration with many different stores of information in a semantically precise way.

2) AI/NLP is never completely precise and requires huge resources (which require centralization). The basics of the semantic web will be based on RDF (whether created through some AI or not), SPARQL, ontologies and extended/improved by AI/NLP. Its a combination of the two that is already being used for Wikipedia and Wikidata search results.

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

#39

Post by pphysch »

pornel wrote: post #34

Semantic Web lost itself in fine details of machine-readable formats, but never solved the problem of getting correctly marked up data from humans. In the current web and apps people mostly produce information for other people, and this can work even with plain text. Documents may lack semantic markup, or may even have invalid markup, and have totally incorrect invisible metadata, and still be perfectly usable for hu…

Sure, but there are still a lot of decisions being made behind the curtain, when it comes to producing a model like GPT-3. How was the training data ontologized? Where did it come from? To some extent, these are the same problems facing manual curation.

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

#40

Post by ggleason »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #36

I think the answer is Datalog. It is simple, simpler than SQL but powerful like Prolog. Why hasn't it caught on?

I am of the same opinion. TerminusDB uses a data log for query and update. I think it will catch on.

And in the future we will even be able to add constraints - which can be a real superpower in querying graphs.

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