There's a project [0] that parses Commoncrawl data for various schemas, it contains some interesting datasets.
The semantic web is now widely adopted
61–70 of 269 posts
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#62Is that really what Discord, Whatsapp & co are using to display the embed widgets they have or is it just tags like I would expect...?
There are several methods they may use:
- OpenGraph (by Facebook, probably used by Whatsapp) – https://ogp.me/
- Schema.org markup (the main point of this blog) – https://schema.org/
- oEmbed (used to embed media in another page, e.g. YouTube videos on a WordPress blog) – https://oembed.com/
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#63The author gives two reasons why AI won't replace the need for metadata: 1: LLMs "routinely get stuff wrong" 2: "pricy GPU time" 1: I make a lot of tests on how well LLMs get categorization and data extraction right or wrong for my Product Chart ( https://www.productchart.com ) project. And they get pretty hard stuff right 99% of the time already. This will only improve. 2: Loading the frontpage of Reddit takes hundr…
Only slightly tongue in cheek, but if your measure of success is Reddit, perhaps a better example may serve your argument?
The argument for "LLMs get it right 99% of the time" is also very generalized and doesn't take into account smaller websites
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#64The semantic web standards are sorely lacking (for decades now) a killer application. Not in a theoretical universe of decentralized philosopher-computer-scientists but in the dumbed down, swipe-the-next-30sec-video, adtech oligopolized digital landscape of walled gardens. Providing better search metadata is hardly that killer app. Not in 2024.
The lack of adoption has, imho, two components.
1. bad luck: the Web got worse, a lot worse. There hasn't been a Wikipedia-like event for many decades. This was not pre-ordained. Bad stuff happens to societies when they don't pay attention. In a parallel universe where the good Web won, the semantic path would have been much more traveled and developed.
2. incompleteness of vision: if you dig to their nuclear core, semantic apps offer things like SPARQL queries and reasoners. Great, these functionalities are both unique and have definite utility but there is a reason (pun) that the excellent Protege project [1] is not the new spreadsheet. The calculus of cognitive cost versus tangible benefit to the average user is not favorable. One thing that is missing are abstractions that will help bridge that divide.
Still, if we aspire to a better Web, the semantic web direction (if not current state) is our friend. The original visionaries of the semantic web where not out of their mind, they just did not account for the complex socio-economics of digital technology adoption.
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#65If even the semantic web people are declaring victory based on a post title and a picture for better integration with Facebook, then it's clear that Semantic Web as it was envisioned is fully 100% dead and buried. The concept of OWL and the other standards was to annotate the content of pages, that's where the real values lie. Each paragraph the author wrote should have had some metadata about its topic. At the very…
The blog post does not address why the Semantic Web failed:
1. Trust: How should one know that any data available marked up according to Sematic Web principles can be trusted? This is an even more pressing question when the data is free. Sir Berners-Lee (AKA "TimBL") designed the Semantic Web in a way that makes "trust" a component, when in truth it is an emergent relation between a well-designed system and its users (my own definition).
2. Lack of Incentives: There is no way to get paid for uploading content that is financially very valuable. I know many financial companies that would like to offer their data in a "Semantic Web" form, but they cannot, because they would not get compensated, and their existence depends on selling that data; some even use Semantic Web standards for internal-only sharing.
3. A lot of SW stuff is either boilerplate or re-discovered formal logic from the 1970s. I read lots of papers that propose some "ontology" but no application that needs it.
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#66The argument about LLMs is wrong, not because of reasons stated but because semantic meaning shouldn't solely be defined by the publisher. The real question is whether the average publisher is better than an LLM at accurately classifying their content. My guess is, when it comes to categorization and summarization, an LLM is going to handily win. An easy test is: are publishers experts on topics they talk about? The…
> because semantic meaning shouldn't solely be defined by the publisher
LLMs are not that great at understanding semantics though
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#67> Before JSON-LD there was a nest of other, more XMLy, standards emitted by the various web steering groups. These actually have very, very deep support in many places (for example in library and archival systems) but on the open web they are not a goer. If archival systems and library's are using XML, wouldn't it be preferable to follow their lead and whatever standards they are using? Since they are the ones who ar…
If by that the author means JSON-LD has replaced MarcXML, BibTex records, and other bibliographic information systems, then that's very much not the case.
They recognise that in the quoted paragraph. The JSON-LD thing was only about the open web:
> [MarcXML, BibTex etc] actually have very, very deep support in many places (for example in library and archival systems) but on the open web they are not a goer.
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's hope you never write articles about court cases then: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Copilot-turns-a-court-reporter-... The alleged low error rate of 1% can ruin your day/life/company, if it hits the wrong person, regards the wrong problem, etc. And that risk is not adequately addressed by hand-waving and pointing people to low error rates. In fact, if anything such claims would make me less confident in your pro…
This is the thing with errors and automation. A 1 % error rate in a human process is basically fine. A 1 % error rate in an automated process is hundreds of thousands of errors per day. (See also why automated face recognition in public surveillance cameras might be a bad idea.)
Exactly. If your system monitors a place like a halfway decent railway station half a million people per day is a number you could expect. Even with an amazingly low error rate of 1% that would result in 5000 wrong signals a day. If we make the assumption that the people are uniformly spread out througout a 24 hour cycle that means a false alarm every 20 seconds.
In reality most of the people are there during the day (false alarm every 10 seconds) and the error percentages are nowhere near 1%.
If you do the math to figure out the staff needed to react to those false alarms in any meaningful way you have to come to the conclusion that just putting people there instead of cameras would be a safer way to reach the goal.
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#69> The Semantic Web is the old Web 3.0. Before "Web 3.0" meant crypto-whatnot, it meant "machine-readable websites".
Using contemporary AI models aren't all websites machine-readable? - or potentially even more readable than semantic web unless an ai model actually does the semantic classification while reading it?
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Reddit takes hundreds of http requests, parses megabytes of text, image and JavaScript code [...] to show some links to articles Yes, and I hate it. I closed Reddit many times because the wait time wasn't worth it.
https://old.reddit.com ?
Gets buggier for every year.