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The semantic web is now widely adopted

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Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#151
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tow…

Every time I read a post like this I'm inclined to post Doctorow's Metacrap piece in response. You got there ahead of me. His reasoning is still valid and continues to make sense to me. Where do you think he's "comically wrong"?

The implicit metrics of quality and pedigree he believed were superior to human judgement have since been gamified into obsolescence by bots.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#152
Looks like a perfect use case for LLM: generate that JSON-LD metadata from HTML via LLM, either by the website owner or by the crawler. If crawlers, website owners doesn’t need to do anything to enter Semantic Web and crawlers specify their own metadata format they want to extract. This promises an appealing future of Web 3.0, not by crypto, defined not by metadata but by LLMs.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#153

Well, the immediate initial test failed for me: I thought, "why not apply this on one of my own sites, where I have a sort of journal of poetry I've written?"...and there's no category for "Poem", and the request to add Poem as a type [1] is at least 9 years old, links to an even older issue in an unreadable issue tracker without any resolution (and seemingly without much effort to resolve it), and then dies off with…

Having worked in this field for a bit, this uncovers an even more fundamental flaw: The idea that we can have a single static ontology.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#154
post #139

> If Web 3.0 is already here, where is it, then? Mostly, it's hidden in the markup. I feel like this is so obvious to point out that I must be missing something, but the whole article goes to heroic lengths to avoid... HTML. Is it because HTML is difficult and scary? Why invent a custom JSON format and a custom JSON-to-HTML compiler toolchain than just write HTML? The semantics aren't hidden in the markup. The semant…

I think that’s what we’re doing today, and it’s a phenomenal mess. The typical HTML page these days is horrifically bloated, and whilst it’s machine parsable, it’s often complicated to actually understand what’s what. It’s random nested divs and unified everything. All the way down. But I do wonder if adding context to existing HTML might be better than a whole other JSON blob that’ll get out of sync fast.

I'm just not convinced that swapping out "" for "[]" actually addresses any of the problems.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#155

Well, the immediate initial test failed for me: I thought, "why not apply this on one of my own sites, where I have a sort of journal of poetry I've written?"...and there's no category for "Poem", and the request to add Poem as a type [1] is at least 9 years old, links to an even older issue in an unreadable issue tracker without any resolution (and seemingly without much effort to resolve it), and then dies off with…

That's only schema.org! Linked data is so much bigger than that.

Many ontologies have a "poem" type (for example dbpedia (https://dbpedia.org/ontology/Poem) has one), as well as other publishing or book-oriented ontologies.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#156

Well, the immediate initial test failed for me: I thought, "why not apply this on one of my own sites, where I have a sort of journal of poetry I've written?"...and there's no category for "Poem", and the request to add Poem as a type [1] is at least 9 years old, links to an even older issue in an unreadable issue tracker without any resolution (and seemingly without much effort to resolve it), and then dies off with…

Having worked in this field for a bit, this uncovers an even more fundamental flaw: The idea that we can have a single static ontology.

What kind of work do you do?

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#157

Well, the immediate initial test failed for me: I thought, "why not apply this on one of my own sites, where I have a sort of journal of poetry I've written?"...and there's no category for "Poem", and the request to add Poem as a type [1] is at least 9 years old, links to an even older issue in an unreadable issue tracker without any resolution (and seemingly without much effort to resolve it), and then dies off with…

Having worked in this field for a bit, this uncovers an even more fundamental flaw: The idea that we can have a single static ontology.

Domain driven design is well aware that is not feasible to have a single schema for everything, they use bounded contexts. Is there something similar for the semantic web?

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#158
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tow…

Every time I read a post like this I'm inclined to post Doctorow's Metacrap piece in response. You got there ahead of me. His reasoning is still valid and continues to make sense to me. Where do you think he's "comically wrong"?

Link counting being reliable for search. After going through people's not-so-noble qualities and how they make the semantic web impossible, he declares counting links as an exception. It was to a comical degree not an exception.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked in this field for a bit, this uncovers an even more fundamental flaw: The idea that we can have a single static ontology.

Domain driven design is well aware that is not feasible to have a single schema for everything, they use bounded contexts. Is there something similar for the semantic web?

Isn't that the point of RDF / Owl etc.?

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#160
post #8

The 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…

> 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.

In fact, what you're doing there is building a local semantic database by automatically mining metadata using LLM. The searching part is entirely based on the metadata you gathered, so the GP's point 1 is still perfectly valid.

> In the near future, nobody will see passing a text through an LLM as a noteworthy amount of compute anymore.

Even with all that technological power, LLMs won't replace most simple-searching-over-index, as they are bad at adapting to ever changing datasets. They only can make it easier.

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