211–220 of 269 posts
I do wonder how any of this is better than using the meta tags of the html, though? Especially for such use cases as the preview. Seems the only thing that isn't really there for the preview is the image? (Well, title would come from the title tag, but still...)
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…
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.
Not only has this gotten much worse; even when you put in the stop gaps for developers such as linters or other plugins, they willfully ignore them and will actually implement code they know is determinantal to accessibility.
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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.
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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"?
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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.
You don't see many geocities style sites nowadays, even though there's many older sites with quality (and original) content. Maybe mobile friendliness plays into that though.
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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?
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> And for blockchain... it was launched with the promise of decentralized currency. Cryptocurrencies were launched with that promise. They are but one use¹ of block-chains / merkle-trees, which existed long before them². ---- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree#Uses [2] 1982 for blockchains/trees as part of a distributed protocol as people generally mean when they use the words now³, hash chains/trees thems…
But if you put it that way neural networks were defined in the 70s too :)
In fact it is only the 70s if you mean networks that learn via backprop & similar methods. Some theoretical work on artificial neurons was done in the 40s.
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But if you put it that way neural networks were defined in the 70s too :)
Very much so. Is there a problem with that? To what time period would attribute their creation? In fact it is only the 70s if you mean networks that learn via backprop & similar methods. Some theoretical work on artificial neurons was done in the 40s.
I for one fail to see the difference between these two kinds of snake oil.
> Some theoretical work on artificial neurons was done in the 40s.
"The perceptron was invented in 1943 by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts. The first hardware implementation was Mark I Perceptron machine built in 1957"
But it is true, if you can't make sense of your data, then the Semantic Web probably isn't for you. (It's the least of your problems.)
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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…
> An interesting read in itself... Indeed a good read, thanks for the link! > [Cory Doctorow's] seven insurmountable obstacles I think his context is the narrower "Web of individuals" where many of his seven challenges are real (and ongoing). The elephant in the digital room is the "Web of organizations", whether that is companies, the public sector, civil society etc. If you revisit his objections in that light they…
It's also very important to think in macro systems and societies, as you point out, rather than at the individual level