I suspect that AI training data standards will make this much more prevalent.
Just today, I am working on an experimental training/consuming app pair. The training part will leverage JSON data from a backend I designed.
The semantic web is now widely adopted
191–200 of 269 posts
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#192> 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 must have missed your point, isn't the answer obviously that HTML is very, very limited and intended as a way to markup text? Semantic data is a way to go further and make machine-readable what actually is inside that text: recipes, places, people, posts, animals, etc, etc and all their various attributes and how they relate to each other.
Basically, what you are saying is already rdf/xml, except that devs don't like xml so json-ld came along as a man-machine-friendlier way to do rdf/xml.
There are also various microdata formats that allow you to annotate html in a way the machines can parse it as rdf. But that can be limited in some cases if you want to convery more metadata.
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#193The 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's another element, trusting the data. Often that may require some web scale data, like Pagerank but also any other authority/trust metric where you can say "this data is probably quality data". A rather basic example, published/last modified dates. It's well known in SEO circles at least in the recent past that changing them is useful to rank in Google, because Google prefers fresh content. Unless you're Google…
Not even Google seems to be making use of that capability, if they even have it in the first place. I'm regularly annoyed by results claiming to be from this year, only to find that it's a years-old article with fake metadata.
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#194> 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…
Web 1.0 = read
Web 2.0 = read/write
Web 3.0 = read/write/own
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#195The 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 i…
Good choice. The semantic web really brought me to the brink.
The community has its head in the sands about... just about everything.
Document databases and SQL are popular because all of the affordances around "records". That is, instead of deleting, inserting, and updating facts you get primitives that let you update records in a transaction even if you don't explicitly use transactions.
It's very possible to define rules that will cut out a small piece of a graph that defines an individual "record" pertaining to some "subject" in the world even when blank nodes are in use. I've done it. You would go 3-4 years into your PhD and probably not find it in the literature, not get told about it by your prof, or your other grad students. (boy I went through the phase where I discovered most semantic web academics couldn't write hard SPARQL queries or do anything interesting with OWL)
Meanwhile people who take a bootcamp can be productive with SQL in just a few days because SQL was developed long ago to give the run-of-the-mill developer superpowers. (imagine how lost people were trying to develop airline reservation systems in the 1960s!)
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#196The 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…
A killer app is still not enough. People can’t get HTML right for basic accessibility, so something like the semantic web would be super science that people will out of their way to intentionally ignore any profit upon so long as they can raise their laziness and class-action lawsuit liability.
I see RDF as a basis to build on. If I think RDF is pretty good but needs a way to keep track of provenance or temporality or something I can probably build something augmented that does that.
If it really works for my company and it is a competitive advantage I would keep quiet about it and I know of more than one company that's done exactly that. The standards process is so exhausting and you have to fight with so many systems programmers who never wrote an application that it's just suicide to go down that road.
BTW, RSS is an RDF application that nobody knows about
https://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/spec
you can totally parse RSS feeds with a RDF-XML parser and do SPARQL and other things with them.
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#197The 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 tow…
One major problem RDF has is that people hate anything with namespaces. It's a "freedom is slavery" kind of thing. People will accept it grudgingly if Google says it will help their search rankings or if you absolutely have to deal with them to code Java but 80% of people will automatically avoid anything if it has namespaces. (See namespaces in XML)
Another problem is that it's always ignored the basic requirements of most applications like:
1. Getting the list of authors in a publication as refernces to authority records in the right order (Dublin Core makes the 1970 MARC standard look like something from the Starship Enterprise)
2. Updating a data record reliably and transactionally
3. Efficiently unioning graphs for inference so you can combine a domain database with a few database records relevant to a problem + a schema easily
4. Inference involving arithemtic (Godel warned you about first-order logic plus arithmetic but for boring fields like finance, business, logistics that is the lingua franca, OWL comes across as too heavyweight but completely deficient at the same time and nobody wants to talk about it)
things like that. Try to build an application and you have to invent a lot of that stuff. You have the tools to do it and it's not that hard if you understand the math inside and out but if you don't oh boy.
If RDF got a few more features it would catch up with where JSON-based tools like
https://www.couchbase.com/products/n1ql/
were 10 years ago.
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
A killer app is still not enough. People can’t get HTML right for basic accessibility, so something like the semantic web would be super science that people will out of their way to intentionally ignore any profit upon so long as they can raise their laziness and class-action lawsuit liability.
I see RDF as a basis to build on. If I think RDF is pretty good but needs a way to keep track of provenance or temporality or something I can probably build something augmented that does that. If it really works for my company and it is a competitive advantage I would keep quiet about it and I know of more than one company that's done exactly that. The standards process is so exhausting and you have to fight with so…
99% of the time you'll get an RSS 2.0 feed which is an XML format. Of course you can convert, but RSS 1.0 seems, like you said, forgotten from the world.
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#199> 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…
Web 1.0 = read Web 2.0 = read/write Web 3.0 = read/write/own
You could make the case that we already are in Web 3.0, or that we have regressed into Web 1.0 territory.
Back in actual Web 2.0, the internet was not dominated by large platforms, but more spread out by ppl hosting their own websites. Interaction was everywhere and the spirit resolved around "p2p exchange" (not technologically speaking).
Now, most traffic goes over large companies which own your data, tell you what to see and severely limit genuine exchange. Unless you count out the willingness of "content monkeys", that is.
What has changed? The internet has settled for a lowest-common denominator and moved away from a space of tech savy people (primarily via the arrival of smartphones). The WWW used to be the unowned land in the wild west, but has now been colonized by an empire from another world.
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#200I 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 i…
I don't think we necessarily need new tags: they narrow down the list of possible into an immutable set and require changing the structure of your already existing content. What exists instead are microformats ( http://microformats.org/wiki/microformats2 ), a bunch of classes you sprinkle in your current HTML to "augment" it.
There is also RDFa and even more obscure Microdata to augment HTML elements. Google’s schema.org vocabulary originally used these before switching to JSON-LD.
The trick, as always, is to get people to use it.