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The semantic web is now widely adopted

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Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#221

Post by rchaud »

> 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.

Google has been pushing JSON-LD to webmasters for better SEO for at least 5 years, if not more: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu...

There really isn't a need to do it as most of the relevant page metadata is already captured as part of the Open Graph protocol[0] that Twitter and Facebook popularized 10+ years ago as webmasters were attempting to set up rich link previews for URLs posted to those networks. Markup like this:

is common on most sites now, so what benefit is there for doing additional work to generate JSON-LD with the same data?

[0]https://ogp.me/

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#222

Post by IshKebab »

gostsamo wrote: post #131
IshKebab wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Prompt injection is highly relevant because you end up achieving the same as the publisher choosing the metadata, but on a much higher price for the user. How does price affect the relevance of prompt injection? That doesn't make sense. > nitch Niche. Pronounced neesh.

My question is: how price does not matter? If you are given the choice to pay either a dollar or a million dollars for the same good from an untrustworthy merchant, why would you pay the million? And the difference between parsing a json and sending a few megabytes of a webpage to chatgpt is the same if not bigger. For a dishonest seo engineer it does not matter if they will post boasting metadata or a prompt convinc…

Price matters, but you said prompt injection is relevant because of price. Maybe a typo...

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#223

Post by everforward »

nottorp wrote: post #100
dspillett wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I get that people here prefer For many of us it isn't that we think the status quo is the RightWay™ - we just aren't convinced that crypto as it currently is presents a better answer. It fixes some problems, but adds a number of its own that many of us don't think are currently worth the compromise for our needs. As you said yourself: > The crypto ecosystem is shady, I know, but the tech is great That but is no…

The main problem with blockchain is identical to the one with LLMs. When snake oil salesmen try to apply the same solution to every problem, you stop wasting your time with those salesmen. Both can be useful now and then, but the legit uses are lost in the noise. And for blockchain... it was launched with the promise of decentralized currency. But we've had decentralized currency before in the physical world. Until t…

Gold is and has been a decentralized currency for a very long time. It’s mostly just very inconvenient to transport.

> Then we abandoned it in favor of centralized currency for some reason. I don't know, reliability perhaps?

The global economy practically requires a centralized currency, because the value of your currency vs other countries becomes extremely important for trading in a global economy (importers want high value currency, exporters want low).

It’s also a requirement to do financial meddling like what the US has been doing with interest rates to curb inflation. None of that is possible on the blockchain without a central authority.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#224

Post by rchaud »

Lutger wrote: post #192
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…

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 li…

Why should anybody do that though? It doesn't benefit individual users, it benefits web scrapers mostly. Search bots are pretty sophisticated at parsing HTML so it isn't an issue there.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#225

Post by lo_zamoyski »

dboreham wrote: post #201
recursivedoubts wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wast…

I take the other side of this trade, and have since c. 1980. I say that semantics is a delusion our brains creates. Doesn't really exist. Or conversely is not the magical thing we think it is.

How are you oblivious of the performative contradiction that is that statement?

Please tell me you're not an eliminativist. There is nothing respectable about eliminativism. Self-refuting, and Procrustean in its methodology, denying observation it cannot explain or reconcile. Eliminativism is what you get when a materialist refuses or is unable to revise his worldview despite the crushing weight of contradiction and incoherence. It is obstinate ideology.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#226

Post by jancsika »

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…

> There hasn't been a Wikipedia-like event for many decades.

Off the top of head...

OpenStreetMap was in 2004. Mastodon and the associated spec-thingy was around 2016. One/two decades is not the same as many decades.

Oh, and what about asm.js? Sure, archive.org is many decades old. But suddenly I'm using it to play every retro game under the sun on my browser. And we can try out a lot of FOSS software in the browser without installing things. Didn't someone post a blog to explain X11 where the examples were running a javascript implementation of the X window system?

Seems to me the entire web-o-sphere leveled up over the past decade. I mean, it's so good in fact that I can run an LLM clientside in the browser. (Granted, it's probably trained in part on your public musing that the web is worse.)

And all this while still rendering Berkshire Hathaway website correctly for many decades. How many times would the Gnome devs have broken it by now? How many upgrades would Apple have forced an "iweb" upgrade in that time?

Edit: typo

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#227

Post by mcswell »

codelion wrote: post #103

I started this thread on the w3c list almost 20 years ago - https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2005Dec/00... Unfortunately, it is unlikely we will ever get something like a Semantic web. It seemed like a good idea in the beginning of 2000s but now there is honestly no need for it as it is quite cheap and easy to attach meaning to text due to the progress in LLMs and NLP.

Exactly. Afaik, there are certain corners of the Web that benefit from some kind of markup. I think real estate is one, where you can generate searches of the MLS on sites like Redfin or Zillow (or any realtor's site, really) such that you can set parameters: between 1000 and 1500 square feet (or meters in Europe), with a garage and no basement. That's very helpful (although I don't know whether that searching is done over indexed web pages, or on the MLS itself). But most of the Web, afaict, have nothing like that---and don't need it, because NLP can distinguish different senses of 'bank' (financial vs. river), etc.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#228

Post by ftlio »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #188
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 wast…

> The semantic web has been, in my opinion, a category error.

Hard agree.

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

I think about it as:

- Hypermedia controls were been deemphasized, leading to a ton of workarounds to REST

- REST is a perfectly suitable interface for AI Agents, especially to audit for governance

- AI is well suited to the task of mapping the web as it exists today to REST

- AI is well suited to mapping this layout ontologically

The semantic web is less interesting than what is traversable and actionable via REST, which may expose some higher level, reusable structures.

The first thing I can think of is `User` as a PKI type structure that allows us to build things that are more actionable for agents while still allowing humans to grok what they're authorized to.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#229

Post by mcswell »

ttepasse wrote: post #204
est wrote: post #83

I'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?

Back in the optimistic 2000s there was the brief idea of GRDDL – using XSLT stylesheets and XPath selectors for extracting stuff from HTML, e.g. microformats, HTML meta, FOAF, etc, and then transforming it into RDF or other things: https://www.w3.org/TR/grddl/

But why? Isn't most of the information you can extract from those tags stuff that's pretty obvious, like title and author (the examples the linked page uses)? How do you extract really useful information using that methodology, supporting searches that answer queries like "110 volt socket accepting grounding plugs"? Of course search engines can (and do) get such info, but afaik it doesn't require or use XSLT beyond extracting the plain text.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#230

Post by tsimionescu »

jerf wrote: post #171
tsimionescu wrote: post #27

If even the semantic web people are declaring victory based on a post title and a picture for better integration with Facebook, then it's clear that Semantic Web as it was envisioned is fully 100% dead and buried. The concept of OWL and the other standards was to annotate the content of pages, that's where the real values lie. Each paragraph the author wrote should have had some metadata about its topic. At the very…

Yeah, this is hiking the original Semantic Web goal post over the horizon, across the ocean, up a mountain, and cutting it down to a little stump downhill in front of the kicker compared to the original claims. "It's going to change the world! Everything will be contained in RDF files that anyone can trivially embed and anyone can run queries against the Knowledge Graph to determine anything they want!" "We've achiev…

Beautifully said.

I'll also add that I wouldn't even call what he's showing "semantic web", even in this limited form. I would bet that most of the people who add that metadata to their pages view it instead as "implenting the nice sharing link API". The fact that Facebook, Twitter and others decided to converge on JSON-LD with a schema.org schema as the API is mostly an accident of history, rather than someone mining the Knowledge Graph for useful info.

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