The semantic web is now widely adopted • Hacker News Board

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#81

Post by vasco » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 9:13 AM UTC

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…

> There hasn't been a Wikipedia-like event for many decades

I'll give you two examples: Internet Archive. Let's Encrypt.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#82

Post by debarshri » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 9:13 AM UTC

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…

At TU delft, I was supposed to do my PhD in semantic web especially in the shipping logistics. It was funded by port of Rotterdam 10 years ago. Idea was to theorize and build various concepts around discrete data sharing, data discovery, classification, building ontology, query optimizations, automation and similar usecases. I decided not to pursue phd a month into it.

I believe in semantic web. The biggest problem is that, due to lack of tooling and ease of use, it take alot of effort and time to see value in building something like that across various parties etc. You dont see the value right away.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#83

Post by est » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 9:15 AM UTC

I've playing with RSS feeds recently, suddently it occured to me, XML can be transformed into anything with XSL, for static hosting personal blogs, I can save articles into the feeds directly, then serve frontend single-page application with some static XSLT+js. This is content-presentation separation at best.

Is JSON-LD just reinventation of this?

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#84

Post by KolmogorovComp » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 9:20 AM UTC

vasco wrote: post #81

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…

> There hasn't been a Wikipedia-like event for many decades I'll give you two examples: Internet Archive. Let's Encrypt.

Hardly a good reference, Internet Archive is older than Wikipedia.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#85

Post by anonymous344 » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 9:20 AM UTC

Well worth, for whom? as a blogger, these things are 99% for the companies making profit by scraping my content, maybe 1% of the users will need them. Or am I wrong?

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#86

Post by viraptor » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 9:22 AM UTC

mg wrote: post #25

menzoic wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Product Chart use LLMs?

We research all product data manually and then have AI cross-check the data and see how well it can replicate what the human has researched and whether it can find errors. Actually, building the AI agent for data research takes up most of my time these days.

Have you seen https://superagent.sh/ ? It's an interesting one and not terrible in the test cases I tried. (Requires pretty specific descriptions for the fields though)

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#87

Post by DrScientist » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 9:26 AM UTC

kkfx wrote: post #15

Ehm... The semantic web as an idea was/is a totally different thing: the idea is the old libraries of Babel/Bibliotheca Universalis by Conrad Gessner (~1545) [1] or the ability to "narrow"|"select"|"find" just "the small bit of information I want". Observing that a book it's excellent to develop and share a specific topic, it have some indexes to help directly find specific information but that's not enough, a librar…

The problem I find with semantic search is first I have to read and understand somebody elses definitions before I can search within the confines of the ontology.

The problem I have with ML guided search is the ML takes web average view of what I mean, which sometimes I need to understand and then try and work around if that's wrong. It can become impossible to find stuff off the beaten track.

The nice thing about keyword and exact text searching with fast iteration is it's my mental model that is driving the results. However if it's an area I don't know much about there is a chicken and egg problem of knowing which words to use.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#88

Post by dspillett » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 9:29 AM UTC

rfl890 wrote: post #28

zaik wrote: post #22

Earlier 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 ?

That definitely seems to be getting less reliable these days. A number of times I've found it refusing to work, or redirecting me to the primary UI arbitrarily, a few months ago there was a time when you couldn't login via that UI (though logging in on main and going back worked for me).

These instances seem to be temporary bugs, but they show that it isn't getting any love (why would it? they only maintain it at all under sufferance) so at some point it'll no doubt be cut off as a cost cutting exercise during a time when ad revenue is low.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#89

Post by openrisk » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 9:30 AM UTC

DrScientist wrote: post #77

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…

You point out a real problem but it does not feel like an unsurmountable and terminal one. By that argument we would never have a human language unless everybody spoke the same language. Turns out once you have well developed languages (and you do, because they are useful even when not universal) you can translate between them. Not perfectly, but generally good enough.

Developing such linking tools between ontologies would be worthwhile if there are multiple ontologies covering the same domain, provided they are actually used (i.e., there are large datasets for each). Alas, instead of a bottom-up, organic approach people try to solve this with top-down, formal (upper-level) ontologies [1] and Leibnizian dreams of an underlying universality [2], which only adds to the cognitive load.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_ontology

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#90

Post by Retr0id » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 9:34 AM UTC

vasco wrote: post #81

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…

> There hasn't been a Wikipedia-like event for many decades I'll give you two examples: Internet Archive. Let's Encrypt.

Let's Encrypt is very good but it's not exactly a web app, semantic-web or otherwise.