41–50 of 138 posts
I think the answer is Datalog. It is simple, simpler than SQL but powerful like Prolog. Why hasn't it caught on?
(I mean, the "semantic web" has foundered so completely and utterly on the problem of even barely working at all that it hasn't hardly had to face up to the simplest spam attacks of the early 2000s, and it's not even remotely capable of playing in the 2022 space.)
Agreement here includes not just abstract agreement in a meeting about what a schema is, but complete agreement when the rubber hits the road such that one can rely on the data coming from multiple providers as if they all came from one.
Nothing else matters. It doesn't matter what the serialization of the schema that can't exist is. It doesn't matter what inference you can do on the data that doesn't exist. It doesn't matter what constraints the schema that can't exist specifies. None of that matters.
Next in line would be the economic impracticality of expecting everyone to label their data out of the goodness of their hearts with this perfectly-agreed-upon schema, but the Semantic Web can't even get far enough for this to be its biggest problem!
Semantic web is a whole bunch of clouds and wishes and dreams built on a foundation that not only does not exist, but can not exist. If you want to rehabilitate it, go get people to agree (even in principle!) on a single schema. You won't rehabilitate it. But you'll understand what I'm saying a lot more. And you'll get to save all the time you were planning on spending building up the higher levels.
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…
This has no benefit for the person who has to pay to do the work. Why would I pay someone to mark up all my data, just for the greater good? When humans are looking/using my products, none of this is visible. It's not built into any tools, it doesn't get me more SEO, and it doesn't get me any more sales.
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.
Suppose we had the perfect technology to define ontologies over real data.
This doesn't address the fact that Anglo-American culture is hostile to alternative ontologies. The idea of "one Truth" is baked into the national consciousness, from classical Western religion+philosophy to the liberal-democratic Constitution to Wikipedia and the current Fact-Checking™ Brought To You By Lockheed-Martin™ news-media regime.
With this worldview, there is no reason to invest in designing or implementing Semantic Web technologies. It's like building a a monument to a god that you don't believe exists. Waste of time.
To be clear, I spend a lot of time thinking about the technical side too and implementing enterprise solutions. I just think it's naive to frame it as primarily a technical problem when it comes to wider public deployment.
The reason why the semantic web is even more fundamental: You can't get everyone to agree on one schema. Period. Even if everyone is motivated to, they can't agree, and if there is even a hint of a reason to try to distinguish oneself or strategically fail to label data or label it incorrectly, it becomes even more impossible. (I mean, the "semantic web" has foundered so completely and utterly on the problem of even…
The point here is that in semantic web there're supposed to be lots and lots of different ontologies/schemas by design, often describing the same data. SW spec stack has many well-separated layers. To address that problem, an OWL/RDFS is created.
The reason why the semantic web is even more fundamental: You can't get everyone to agree on one schema. Period. Even if everyone is motivated to, they can't agree, and if there is even a hint of a reason to try to distinguish oneself or strategically fail to label data or label it incorrectly, it becomes even more impossible. (I mean, the "semantic web" has foundered so completely and utterly on the problem of even…
Schema.org has become very popular and Google is backing this project. Wordpress and others are already using it.
Governments are requiring not just "open data", but also "open linked-data" (which can then be ingested into a SPARQL engine), because they want this data to be usable across organizations.
The financial industry are moving to the FIBO ontology, and on and on...
The reason why the semantic web is even more fundamental: You can't get everyone to agree on one schema. Period. Even if everyone is motivated to, they can't agree, and if there is even a hint of a reason to try to distinguish oneself or strategically fail to label data or label it incorrectly, it becomes even more impossible. (I mean, the "semantic web" has foundered so completely and utterly on the problem of even…
There're a lot of wrong perspectives on the topic in this thread, but this one I like the most. When someone starts to talk about "agreeing on a single schema/ontology" it's a solid indicator that that someone needs to get back to rtfm (which I agree a bit too cryptic). The point here is that in semantic web there're supposed to be lots and lots of different ontologies/schemas by design, often describing the same dat…
Then that is just another reason it will fail. We already have islands of data. The problem with those islands of data is not that we don't have a unified expression of the data, the problem is the meaning is isolated. The lack of a single input format is little more than annoyance and the sort of thing that tends to resolve itself over time even without a centralized consortium, because that's the easy part.
Without agreement, there is no there there, and none of the promised virtues can manifest. If what you say is the semantic web is the semantic web (which certainly doesn't match what everyone else says it is), then it is failing because it doesn't solve the right problem, though that isn't surprising because it's not solvable.
If what you describe is the semantic web, the Semantic Web is "JSON", and as solved as it ever will be.
A "knowing wizard correcting the foolish mortals" pose would be a lot more plausible if the "semantic web" had more to show for its decades, actual accomplishments even remotely in line with the promises constantly being made.
The main factor in my choice of technologies for my project was the ability to reason data from other data. OWL was the defining solution for my project. This is mainly because I am only one person so I needed the computer to extrapolate data that was logically implied but I would be forced to encode by hand otherwise. OWL actually allowed my project to be tractable for a single person (or a couple of people) to work on.
The author brings up several points that I have also run into myself. The Open World Assumption makes things difficult to reason about and makes understanding what is meant by a URL hard. Another problem that I have run into is that debugging OWL is a nightmare. I have no way to hold the reasoner to account so I have no way when I run a SPARQL query to be able to know if what is presented is sane. I cannot ask the reasoner "how did you come up with this inference?" and have it tell me. That means if I run a query, I must go back to the MS sources to double check that something has not gone wrong and fix the database if it has.
Another problem that the author discusses and what I call "Academic Abandonware". There are things out there but only the academic who worked on it knows how to make it work. The documentation is usually non-extant and trying to figure things out can take a lot of precious time.
I will probably have another look at TerminusDB in due course but it will need to have a reasoner as powerful as the OWL ones and an ease of use factor to entice me to shift my entire project at this point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> The benefit is ontological cohesion across the whole web This has no benefit for the person who has to pay to do the work. Why would I pay someone to mark up all my data, just for the greater good? When humans are looking/using my products, none of this is visible. It's not built into any tools, it doesn't get me more SEO, and it doesn't get me any more sales.