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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

#91

Post by oofbey »

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

Exactly.

A refinement on your second point is that the groups who would have benefited the most from semantic web were the googles of the world, but they were also the ones who needed it the least. Because they were well ahead of everybody else at building the NLP to extract structure from the existing www. In fact the existence of semantic web would have eroded their key advantage. So the ones in a position to encourage this and make it happen didn’t want it at all. So it was always DOA.

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

#92

Post by oofbey »

leoxv wrote: post #85
jll29 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural language processing (NLP) may indeed understand the unstructured text, then according to (2), the "Semantic Web" is not needed, except for perhaps caching NLP outputs in machine-readable form. (1) is more fundamental: a lot of value-add annotation (in RDF or other forms) would be valuable, but because there is work involved those that have it don't give it away for free. This part was not sufficiently address…

"No Semantic Web until the Incentive Problem and the Trust Problem are solved." No. The semweb is already functional as is (see my other comments here). Trust is orthogonal and can/is being solved in different ways (centralized/decentralized as in Wikidata/ORCIDs/org-ID-URIs).

Talking about “the incentive problem” as if it’s some minor fixable issue ignores all of human psychology and economics.

The climate crisis is a somewhat comparable example - it requires changing behavior on a massive scale for abstract benefit. In the climate case the benefit is much more fundamental than what semweb promises. And despite massive pain and effort we are very very far from addressing it. Thinking semweb would happen just cuz it sounds cool is super naive.

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

#93

Post by closewith »

cyocum wrote: post #49

The author of this post mentions the Humanities at the end of their post and TerminusDB. I work on a Humanities based project which uses the Semantic Web ( https://github.com/cyocum/irish-gen ) and I have looked at TerminusDB a couple of times. 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 becaus…

> I work on a Humanities based project which uses the Semantic Web (https://github.com/cyocum/irish-gen) and I have looked at TerminusDB a couple of times.

I had never come across anything like this before, but this is a wonderful project.

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

#95

Post by zozbot234 »

cyocum wrote: post #49

The author of this post mentions the Humanities at the end of their post and TerminusDB. I work on a Humanities based project which uses the Semantic Web ( https://github.com/cyocum/irish-gen ) and I have looked at TerminusDB a couple of times. 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 becaus…

"Reasoning" capability can be added to any conventional database via the use of views, and sometimes custom indexes. The real problem is that it's computationally expensive for non-trivial cases.

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

#96

Post by zozbot234 »

wrnr wrote: post #58
lyxsus wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've been part of 4 commercial project that used the semantic web in one way or another. All these project or at least their semantic web part where a failure. I think that I have a good idea on where the misunderstanding about the semantic web originate. The author does seem to have a good understanding and is right about the semantic web forcing everything into a single schema. Academia sells the straight jacked of…

RDF is just an interoperability format. You aren't supposed to use it as part of your own technology stack, it just allows multiple systems to communicate seamlessly.

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

#97

Post by lolive »

zozbot234 wrote: post #95
cyocum wrote: post #49

The author of this post mentions the Humanities at the end of their post and TerminusDB. I work on a Humanities based project which uses the Semantic Web ( https://github.com/cyocum/irish-gen ) and I have looked at TerminusDB a couple of times. 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 becaus…

"Reasoning" capability can be added to any conventional database via the use of views, and sometimes custom indexes. The real problem is that it's computationally expensive for non-trivial cases.

I hardly see how you can define in a RDBMS that a resource that both have an engine and four wheels should be seen as a car. Without going into a nightmare of unbearable SQL...

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

#98

Post by lolive »

iamwil wrote: post #72

On our podcast, The Technium, we covered Semantic Web as a retro-future episode [0]. It was a neat trip back to the early 2000s. It wasn't a bad idea, pre se, but it depended on humans doing-the-right-thing for markup and the assumption that classifying things are easy. Turns out neither are true. In addition, the complexity of the spec really didn't help those that wanted to adopt its practices. However, there are b…

I was hired by a BIG company to help their data governance, and a pragmatic semantic web is giving pretty interesting results. Just to add some hotness/trollness to the discussion, Neo4J was a mind opener for many people [both technical and non-technical]

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

#99

Post by lolive »

leoxv wrote: post #18

I'm building a front end app for Wikipedia & Wikidata called Conzept encyclopedia ( https://conze.pt ) based on semantic web pillars (SPARQL, URIs, various ontologies, etc.) and loving it so far. The semantic web is not dead, its just slowly evolving and and growing. Last week I implemented JSON-LD (RDF embedded in HTML with a schema.org ontology), super easy and now any HTTP client can comprehend what any page is ab…

The future of the semantic web is in big companies. Where handling data exchanges at scale is becoming a massive waste of time, resources and sanity.

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

#100

Post by tannhaeuser »

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?

Nit: Datalog isn't as powerful as Prolog, that's the whole point of it as a decidable fragment of first order logic (and it's seeing increased use in SMT/fixpoint solvers and databases)

But yeah, if getting rid of the whole SemWeb stack, triples, and their many awful serialization formats, design-by-committee query and constraint languages (keeping just the good parts) means we can finally return to focus on Prolog, Datalog, and simple term encodings of logic, I'm all for it.

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