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The semantic web is now widely adopted

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Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#181

Post by swiftcoder »

giantrobot wrote: post #147
swiftcoder wrote: post #33

As much as I like the ideas behind the semantic web, JSON-LD feels like the least friendly of all semantic markup options (compared to something like, say, microformats)

I think the main issue with microformats is most CMSes don't really have a good way of adding them. You need a very capable rich editor to add semantic data inline or edit the output HTML by hand. Simple markup like WikiText and Markdown don't support microformat annotation. JSON-LD in a page's header is much easier for a CMS to present to the page author for editing. It can be a form in the editing UI. Wordpress et…

That's a good point. I adopted microformats in a static site generator, with a handful of custom shortcodes. It would be much harder to adopt in a WYSIWYG context

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#182

Post by lolinder »

lukev wrote: post #155
ubertaco wrote: post #150

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.

Every time I've read up on semantic web it's been treated as more or less synonymous with schema.org. Are these other ontologies used by anything?

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#183

Post by etimberg »

makkes wrote: post #145

Semantic Web technology (RDF, RDFS, OWL, SHACL) is widely used in the European electricity industry to exchange grid models: https://www.entsoe.eu/data/cim/cim-for-grid-models-exchange/

I have experience using this back when I worked for a startup that did distribution grid optimization. The specs are unfortunately useless in practice because while the terminology is standardized the actual use of each object and how to relate them is not.

Thus, every tool makes CIM documents slightly differently and there are no guarantees that a document created in one tool will be usable in another

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#185

Post by bawolff »

Vinnl wrote: post #165
KolmogorovComp wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wikipedia itself is only a little over two decades old. I don't think anyone would parse "many decades" as "two decades". There's also OpenStreetMap, exactly two decades old and thus four years younger than Wikipedia.

> Wikipedia itself is only a little over two decades old

The world wide web (but not the internet) is only 3 decades old!

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#186

Post by [deleted] »

hoosieree wrote: post #129

> 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…

[deleted]

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#187

Post by mandmandam »

thuuuomas wrote: post #134
mandmandam wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans do something very similar, fwiw. It's called spontaneous trait association: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221...

> fwiw What do you think this sort of observation is worth?

Really depends on what sort of person you are I guess.

Some people appreciate being shown fascinating aspects of human nature. Some people don't, and I wonder why they're on a forum dedicated to curiosity and discussion. And then, some people get weirdly aggressive if they're shown something that doesn't quite fit in their worldview. This topic in particular seems to draw those out, and it's fascinating to me.

Myself, I thought it was great to learn about spontaneous trait association, because it explains so much weird human behavior. The fact that LLMs do something so similar is, at the very least, an interesting parallel.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#188

Post by recursivedoubts »

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…

The semantic web has been, in my opinion, a category error. Semantics means meaning and computers/automated systems don't really do meaning very well and certainly don't do intention very well.

Mapping the incredible success of The Web onto automated systems hasn't worked because the defining and unique characteristic of The Web is REST and, in particular, the uniform interface of REST. This uniform interface is wasted on non-intentional beings like software (that I'm aware of):

https://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.h...

Maybe this all changes when AI takes over, but AI seems to do fine without us defining ontologies, etc.

It just hasn't worked out the way that people expected, and that's OK.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#189

Post by PaulHoule »

bawolff wrote: post #184

If this counts as the "semantic web", then In which case we have all been on it since the mid 90s.

It's real RDF. You can process this with RDF tools. Certainly do SPARQL queries. Probably add a schema and have valid OWL DL and do OWL inference if the data is squeaky clean. Certainly use SPIN or Jena rules.

It leans too hard on text and doesn't have enough concepts defined as resources but what do you expect, Python didn't have a good package manager for decades because 2 + 2 = 3.9 with good vibes beats 2 + 2 = 4 with honest work and rigor for too many people.

The big trouble I have with RDF tooling is inadequate handling of ordered lists. Funny enough 90% of the time or so when you have a list you don't care about the order of the items and frequently people use a list for things that should have set semantics. On the other hand, you have to get the names of the authors of a paper in the right order or they'll get mad. There's a reasonable way to turn native JSON lists into RDF lists

https://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld11/#lists

although unfortunately this uses the slow LISP lists with O(N) item access and not the fast RDF Collections that have O(1) access. (What do you expect from M.I.T.?)

The trouble is that SPARQL doesn't support the list operations that are widespread in document-based query languages like

https://www.couchbase.com/products/n1ql/

https://docs.arangodb.com/3.11/aql/

or even Postgresql. There is a SPARQL 1.2 which has some nice additions like

https://www.w3.org/TR/sparql12-query/#func-triple

but the community badly needs a SPARQL 2 that catches up to today's query languages but the semantic web community has been so burned by pathological standards processes that anyone who can think rigorously or code their way out of a paper bag won't go near it.

A substantial advantage of RDF is that properties live in namespaces so if you want to add a new property you can do it and never stomp on anybody else's property. Tools that don't know about those properties can just ignore them, but SPARQL, RDFS and all that ought to "just work" though OWL takes some luck. That's got a downside too which is that adding namespaces to a system seems to reduce adoption by 80% in many cases because too many people think it's useless and too hard to understand.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#190

Post by DrScientist »

kkfx wrote: post #110
DrScientist wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 timeli…

For me the search problem isn't so much about making sure I get back all potentially relevant hits ( more than I could ever read ) , it's how I get the specific ones I want...

So effective search more about excluding than including.

Exact phrases or particular keywords are great tools here.

Note there is also a difference between finding an answer to a particular question and finding web pages around a particular topic. Perhaps LLM's are more useful for the former - where there is a need to both map the question to an embedding, and summarize the answer - but for the latter I'm not interested in a summary/quick answer, I'm interested in the source material.

Sometimes you can combine the two - LLM's for a quick route into the common jargon, which can then be used as keywords.

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