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The semantic web is now widely adopted

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Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#71

Post by austin-cheney »

openrisk wrote: post #64

The 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…

A killer app is still not enough.

People can’t get HTML right for basic accessibility, so something like the semantic web would be super science that people will out of their way to intentionally ignore any profit upon so long as they can raise their laziness and class-action lawsuit liability.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#72

Post by npunt »

atoav wrote: post #38
npunt wrote: post #11

The 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…

Yet LLMS fail to make these simple but sometimes meaningful differentiation. See for example this case in which a court reporter is described as being all the things he reported about by Copilot: a child molester, a psychatric escapee, a widow cheat. Presumably because his name was in a lot of articles about said things and LLMS simply associate his name with the crimes without making the connection that he could in…

Absolutely! Today's LLMs can sometimes(/often?) enormously suck and should not be relied upon for critical information. There's a long way to go to make them better, and I'm happy that a lot of people are working on that. Finding meaning in a sea of information is a highly imperfect enterprise regardless of the tech we use.

My point though was that the core problem we should be trying to solve is overcoming the fundamental misalignment of incentives between publisher and reader, not whether we can put a better schema together that we hope people adopt intelligently & non-adversarially, because we know that won't happen in practice. I liked what the author wrote but they also didn't really consider this perspective and as such I think they haven't hit upon a fundamental understanding of the problem.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#73

Post by npunt »

pickledoyster wrote: post #59
npunt wrote: post #11

The 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…

>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 truth of the internet is no, they're not usually. LLMs are not experts either. Furthermore, from what I gather, LLMs are trained on: >The entire world of SEO hacks, blogspam, etc

This is an excellent rebuttal. I think it is an issue that can be overcome but I appreciate the irony of what you point out :)

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#74

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

tsimionescu wrote: post #27

If 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…

> title (redundant, as HTML already has a tag for that)

Note that `title` isn't one of the properties that BlogPosting supports. It supports `headline`, which may well be different from the ``. It's probably analogous to the page's ``, but more reliable.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#75

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

lynx23 wrote: post #44
tsimionescu wrote: post #27

If 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…

I had pretty much the same reacon while reading the article. "BlogPosting" isn't particularily informative. The rest of the metadata looked like it could/should be put in tags, done. A very bad example if the intention was to demonstrate how cool and useful semweb is :-)

The schema.org data is much more rich than meta tags, though. Using the latter, an author is just a string of text containing who-knows-what. The former lets you specify a name, email address, and url. And that's just for the Person type—you can specify an Organization too.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#76

Post by MrVandemar »

amarant wrote: post #39
monero-xmr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs have no soul, so I like content and curation from real people

Huh, it's not often you hear a religious argument in a technical discussion. Interesting viewpoint!

I don't see it as anything religious. I see the comment about something having an intrinsic, instinctive quality, which we can categorise as having "soul".

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#77

Post by DrScientist »

openrisk wrote: post #64

The 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…

I think the problem with any sort of ontology type approach is the problem isn't solved when you have defined the one ontology to rule them all after many years of wrangling between experts.

As what you have done is spend many years generating a shared understanding of what that ontology means between the experts. Once that's done you have the much harder task for pushing that shared understanding to the rest of the world.

ie the problem isn't defining a tag for a cat - it's having a global share vision of what a cat is.

I mean we can't even agree on what is a man or a women.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#78

Post by CaptArmchair »

I'm a bit surprised that the author doesn't mention key concepts such as linked data, RDF, federation and web querying. Or even the five stars of linked open data. [1] Sure, JSON-LD is part of it, but it's just a serialization format.

The really neat part is when you start considering universal ontologies and linking to resources published on other domains. This is where your data becomes interoperable and reusable. Even better, through linking you can contextualize and enrich your data. Since linked data is all about creating graphs, creating a link in your data, or publishing data under a specific domain are acts that involves concepts like trust, authority, authenticity and so on. All those murky social concepts that define what we consider more or less objective truths.

LLM's won't replace the semantic web, nor vice versa. They are complementary to each other. Linked data technologies allow humans to cooperate and evolve domain models with a salience and flexibility which wasn't previously possible behind the walls and moats of discrete digital servers or physical buildings. LLM's work because they are based on large sets of ground truths, but those sets are always limited which makes inferring new knowledge and asserting its truthiness independent from human intervention next to impossible. LLM's may help us to expand linked data graphs, and linked data graphs fashioned by humans may help improve LLM's.

Creating a juxtaposition between both? Well, that's basically comparing apples against pears. They are two different things.

[1] https://5stardata.info/en/

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#79

Post by throwme_123 »

ashkankiani wrote: post #23
throwme_123 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For my part, I stopped reading at the free bashing of blockchain•. Reminded me of the angst and negativity of these original "Web3" people, already bashing everything that was not in their mood back then. • The crypto ecosystem is shady, I know, but the tech is great

As someone who stopped getting involved in blockchain "tech" 12 years ago because of the prevalence of scams and bad actors and lack of interesting tech beyond the merkle tree, what's great about it? FWIW I am genuinely asking. I don't know anything about the current tech. There's something about "zero knowledge proofs" but I don't understand how much of that is used in practice for real blockchain things vs just bei…

Scams and bad actors haven't changed sadly.

But zk-based really decentralized consensus now does 400 tps and it's extraordinary when you think about it and all the safety and security properties it brings.

And that's with proof-of-stake of course with decentralized sequencers for L2.

But I get that people here prefer centralized databases, managed by admins and censorship-empowering platforms. Your bank stack looks like it's designed for fraud too. Manual operations and months-long audits with errors, but that is by design. Thanks everyone for all the downvotes.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#80

Post by ThinkBeat »

I dont like the use of a Json "script" inside an HTML page. I understand the flexibility it grants but markup tags is what HTL is based on and the design would be more consistent by using HTML tags as we have had them for decades to also handle this extra meta data.
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