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The semantic web is now widely adopted

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Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#241

Post by atoav »

Retr0id wrote: post #99
kqr wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the thing with errors and automation. A 1 % error rate in a human process is basically fine. A 1 % error rate in an automated process is hundreds of thousands of errors per day. (See also why automated face recognition in public surveillance cameras might be a bad idea.)

Human error rates are also not a constant. If you're about to publish a career-ending allegation, you're going to spend some extra time fact-checking it.

Can you point to where that claim was made? I can't find it. The parent post assumes 1% for the sake of argument to underline that the impact of the 1% error depends on the number to which the 1% are applied — automation reduces the effort and increases the number.

Hypothetical example: Cops shoot the wrong person in x% of cases. If we equipped all surveillance cameras with guns that also shoot the wrong person in x% of cases the world would be a nightmare pandemonium, simply because there is more cameras and they are running 24/7.

Mind that the precise value of x and whether is constant or not does not impact the argument at all.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#242

Post by openrisk »

jancsika wrote: post #226
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…

The web browser (or an app with a vague likeness to a browser) would indeed be in the epicenter of a "semantic" leap if that happens.

The technical capability of the browser to be an OS within an OS is more than proven by now, but not sure I am impressed with the utility thus far.

At the same time even basic features in the "right direction", empowering the users information processing ability (bookmarks, rss, etc) have stagnated or regressed.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#243

Post by yen223 »

kqr wrote: post #60
atoav wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's hope you never write articles about court cases then: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Copilot-turns-a-court-reporter-... The alleged low error rate of 1% can ruin your day/life/company, if it hits the wrong person, regards the wrong problem, etc. And that risk is not adequately addressed by hand-waving and pointing people to low error rates. In fact, if anything such claims would make me less confident in your pro…

This is the thing with errors and automation. A 1 % error rate in a human process is basically fine. A 1 % error rate in an automated process is hundreds of thousands of errors per day. (See also why automated face recognition in public surveillance cameras might be a bad idea.)

Isn't this just saying "humans are slow" in a different way?

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#244

Post by openrisk »

glenstein wrote: post #235
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…

I am not sure I understand the fixation on a "killer app" in the context of web standards. We are talking about things like, say, XML, or SVG or HTTP/2. They can have their rationale and their value simply by serving to enable organic growth of a web ecosystem. I think I agree most with your last sentence and should define success more in those terms, aspiring to a better web.

The idea (or hope) is that apps based on semantic standards would kick off a virtuous cycle where publishers of information keep investing in both generating metadata and evolving the standards themselves. As many have mentioned in the thread, thats not a trivial step.

People sort of try. A concrete example are the Activitypub/Fediverse standards which dared to use json-ld. To my knowledge so far the social media experience of mastodon and friends is not qualitatively different from the old web stuff.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#245

Post by cpdomina »

trainyperson wrote: post #30

Are there any tools that employ LLMs to fill out the Semantic Web data? I can see that being a high-impact use case: people don’t generally like manually filling out all the fields in a schema (it is indeed “a bother”), but an LLM could fill it out for you – and then you could tweak for correctness / editorializing. Voila, bother reduced! This would also address the two reasons why the author thinks AI is not suited…

Semantic Web is now revived into its new marketing incarnation, called Knowledge Graphs. There's actually a lot of work on building KGs with LLMs, specially in the RAG space e.g., Microsoft's GraphRag and llama_index's KnowledgeGraphIndex

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#246

Post by thomastjeffery »

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…

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

If you say "AI" in 2024, you are probably talking about an LLM. An LLM is a program that pretends to solve semantics by actually entirely avoiding semantics. You feed an LLM a semantically meaningful input, and it will generate a statistically meaningful output that just so happens to look like a semantically meaningful transformation. Just to really sell this facade, we go around calling this program a "transformer" and a "language model", even though it truthfully does nothing of the sort.

The entire goal of the semantic web was to dodge the exact same problem: ambiguous semantics. By asking everyone to rewrite their content as an ontology, you compel the writer to transform the semantics of their content into explicit unambiguous logic.

That's where the category error comes in: the writer can't do it. Interesting content can't just be trivially rewritten as a simple universally-compatible ontology that is actually rooted in meaningfully unambiguous axioms. That's precisely the hard problem we were trying to dodge in the first place!

So the writer does the next best thing: they write an ontology that isn't rooted. There are no really useful axioms at the root of this tree, but it's a tree, and that's good enough. Right?

What use is an ontology when it isn't rooted in useful axioms? Instead of dodging the problem of ambiguous semantics, the "semantic web" moves that problem right in front of the user. That's probably useful for something, just not what the user is expecting it to be useful for.

---

I have this big abstract idea I've been working on that might actually solve the problem of ambiguous semantics. The trouble is, I've been having a really hard time tying the idea itself down to reality. It's a deceptively challenging problem space.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#247

Post by dwaite »

kitsune_ wrote: post #159
codewithcheese wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.?

The point of RDF is to raise the problem to the greatest common divisor level of complexity - a hypermedia graph of arbitrary predicates about arbitrary objects.

OWL is a modeling language to describe ontologies, e.g. some constraints people have agreed to follow about how to structure the information they publish in graphs. It can also be considered an advanced schema language.

The idea of a bounded context in DDD is that it is not a good use of time (or indeed may not be feasible at all) to get a single ontology for an entire domain, so different subdomains may be unified by some concepts but have differing or overlapping concepts that they use internally. Two contexts know they are talking about a product called "New Shimmer", even if understands it as a floor wax and the other uses it as a dessert topping.

The two pillars of the semantic web are public data and machine understanding, which IMHO pushes strongly toward the (often unachievable) goal of a single kitchen-sink schema.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#248

Post by throwme_123 »

dspillett wrote: post #94
throwme_123 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scams and bad actors haven't changed sadly. But zk-based really decentralized consensus now does 400 tps and it's extraordinary when you think about it and all the safety and security properties it brings. And that's with proof-of-stake of course with decentralized sequencers for L2. But I get that people here prefer centralized databases, managed by admins and censorship-empowering platforms. Your bank stack looks l…

> 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…

> I don't think you are getting downvoted for supporting crypto

Still, every of my post that is more or less supportive of crypto gets downvoted. And I am the first to tell the ecosystem is one of the worst in tech so that's always mild support.

But yes, you're right it's probably sem web people overreacting to _my_ rant :)

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#249

Post by throwme_123 »

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…

> 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.

+100

Rule in blockchain: Whenever there is money beyond paying for services/infra like AWS, there is a problem.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#250

Post by MrVandemar »

swiftcoder wrote: post #179
MrVandemar wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microformats feel like they're ugly retrofitted kludges, where it would have been way more elegant if in among all the crazy helter-skelter competing development of HTML, someone thought to invent a tag, maybe a tag. That would have solved a few problems that certainly didn't.

I mean, is anything actually stopping one from adding something like those tags today? Web components use custom tags all the time

Nothing at all. I believe you don't even need to use web components. You can just throw in Joe Bloggs and that's valid HTML-whatever.

But it's not a standard that is recognised, and so is no kind of metadata format.

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