I don't see how one can have any hope in a Semantic Web ever succeeding when we haven't even managed to get HTML tags for extremely common Internet things: pricetags, comments, units, avatars, usernames, advertisement and so on. Even things like pagination are generally just a bunch of links, not any kind of semantic thing holding multiple documents together ( exists, but I haven't seen browsers doing anything with it). Take your average website and look at all the s and s and there is a whole lot more low hanging fruit one could turn semantic, but there seems little interest in even trying to.
The semantic web is now widely adopted
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Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#112"Googlers, if you're reading this, JSON-LD could have the same level of public awareness as RSS if only you could release, and then shut down, some kind of app or service in this area. Please, for the good of the web: consider it." - lol
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
That's even more interesting! The only non-religious meaning of soul I've ever heard is a music genre, but then English is my second language. I tried googling it and found this meaning I wasn't aware of:
emotional or intellectual energy or intensity, especially as revealed in a work of art or an artistic performance. "their interpretation lacked soul"
Is this the definition used? I'm not sure how a JSON document is supposed to convey emotional or intellectual energy, especially since it's basically a collection of tags. Maybe I also lack soul?
Or is there yet another definition I didn't find?
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#114The 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…
Over on lobste.rs, someone cited another article retracing the history of the Semantic Web: https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html
An interesting read in itself, and also points to Cory Doctorow giving seven reasons why the Semantic Web will never work: https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm. They are all good reasons and are unfortunately still valid (although one of his observations towards the end of the text has turned out to be comically wrong, I'll let you read what it is)
Your comment and the two above links point to the same conclusion: again and again, Worse is Better (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better)
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
> intrinsic, instinctive quality,
What are a few examples of things with an 'intrinsic, instinctive quality'?
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main problem is that the incentive for well-intentioned people to add detailed and accurate metadata is much lower than the incentive for SEO dudes to abuse the system if the metadata is used for anything of consequence. There's a reason why search engines that trusted website metadata went extinct. That's the whole benefit of using LLMs for categorization: they work for you, not for the SEO guy... well, prompt i…
There is value-add if you can prove whatever content you are producing is from an authentic human, because I dislike LLM produced garbage
The point is that metadata lies. Intentionally, instead of just being coincidentally wrong. For example everybody who wants to spew LLM produced garbage in your face will go out of their way to attach metadata claiming the opposite. The value proposition of LLM categorization would be that the LLM looks at the same content as the eventual human (if, in fact, it does - which is a related but different problem)
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#117The 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 you're confused. the killer app is everyone following the same format, and such, capitalists can extract all that information and sell LLMs that no one wants in place of more deterministic search and data products.
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#118I'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?
That is exactly the thought behind SGML/XML and its derivatives. XSL is kind of clumsy but very powerful and the most direct way to transform documents.
JSON-LD to me looks more like trying to glue different documents together, its not about the transformation itself.
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#119Companies use open-graph because it gives them something in return (nice integration in other products when linking to your site). That’s nice and all but outside of this niche use case there is no incentives for a semantic web from the point of view of publishers. You just make it simpler to crawl your website (something you cannot really monetize) instead of offering a strict API you can monetize to access structured data.
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#120[deleted]