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The semantic web is now widely adopted

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Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#101

Post by jl6 »

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…

Killer applications solve real problems. What is the biggest real problem on the web today? The noise flood. Can semantic web standards help with that? Maybe! Something about trust, integrity, and lineage, perhaps.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#102

Post by rapnie »

openrisk wrote: post #89
DrScientist wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You point out a real problem but it does not feel like an unsurmountable and terminal one

In our spoken language the agents doing the parsing are human AI's (actual intelligences) able to deal with most of the finer nuances in semantics, and still making numerous errors in many contexts that lead to misunderstanding, i.e. parse errors.

There was this hand-waving promise in semantic web movement of "if only we make everything machine-readable, then .." magic would happen. Undoubtedly unlocking numerous killer apps, if only we had these (increasingly complex) linked data standards and related tools to define and parse 'universal meaning'.

An overreach, imho. Semantic web was always overpromising yet underdelivering. There may be new use cases in combinations of SM with ML/LLM but I don't think they'll be a vNext of the web anytime soon.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#103

Post by codelion »

I started this thread on the w3c list almost 20 years ago - https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2005Dec/00...

Unfortunately, it is unlikely we will ever get something like a Semantic web. It seemed like a good idea in the beginning of 2000s but now there is honestly no need for it as it is quite cheap and easy to attach meaning to text due to the progress in LLMs and NLP.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#104

Post by M2Ys4U »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #80

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.

JSON-LD isn't the only way one can embed these metadata (though I think most tooling prefers it now).

For example, Microdata[0] is one in-line way to do it, and RDFa[1] is another.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdata_(HTML)

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

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#105

Post by IshKebab »

gostsamo wrote: post #43
IshKebab wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but do hallucinations matter then much just for categorisation? Hardly the end of the world if they make up a published date occasionally. And prompt injection is irrelevant because the alternative we're considering is letting publishers directly choose the metadata.

Prompt injection is highly relevant because you end up achieving the same as the publisher choosing the metadata, but on a much higher price for the user. Price which needs to be paid by each user separately instead of using one already generated. LLMs are much better when the user adapts the categories to their needs or crunches the text to pull only the info relevant to them. Communicating those categories and the…

> Prompt injection is highly relevant because you end up achieving the same as the publisher choosing the metadata, but on a much higher price for the user.

How does price affect the relevance of prompt injection? That doesn't make sense.

> nitch

Niche. Pronounced neesh.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#107

Post by conzept »

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.

Not true: Wikidata, Open Alex, Europeana, ... and many smaller projects making use of all that data, such as my project Conzept (https://conze.pt)

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#109

Post by klabb3 »

ramon156 wrote: post #63
intended wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s baffling how defeatist and ignorant engineering culture has become when someone else’s non-deterministic, proprietary and non-debuggable code, running on someone else’s machine, that uses an enormous amount of currently VC-subsidized resources, is touted as a general solution to a data annotation problem.

Back in my day people used to bash on JavaScript. Today one can only dream of a world where JS is the worst of our engineering problems.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#110

Post by kkfx »

DrScientist wrote: post #87
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 ke…

Personally I think the limitation of keyword search it's not in the model per se but in the human langue: we have synonymous witch are relatively easy to handle but we also have gazillion of different way to express the very same concept that simply can't be squeezed in some "nearby keyword list".

Personally I notes news, importing articles in org-mode, so I have a "trail" of the news I think are relevant in a timeline, sometimes I remember I've noted something but I can't find it immediately in my own notes with local full-text search on a very little base compared to the entire web, simply because a title does express something with very different words than another and at the moment of a search I do not think about such possible expression.

For casual searches we do not notice, but for some specific searches emerge very clear as a big limitation, however so far LLMs does not solve it, they are even LESS able to extract relevant information, and "semantic" classifications does not seems to be effective either, a thing even easier to spot if you use Zotero and tags and really try to use tags to look for something, in the end you'll resort on mere keyword search for anything.

That's why IMVHO it's an unsolved so far problem.

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