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The semantic web is now widely adopted

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Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#251

Post by safety1st »

Spivak wrote: post #238
safety1st wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bringing an LLM into the picture is just silly. There's zero need. The author (and much of HN?) seems to be unaware that it's not just thousands of websites using JSON-LD, it's millions. For example: install WordPress, install an SEO plugin like Yoast, and boom you're done. Basic JSON-LD will be generated expressing semantic information about all your blog posts, videos etc. It only takes a few lines of code to exten…

I guess where do you go from basic info that can be machine generated, to rich information that's worth consuming for things other than link previews and specific Google Search integrations?

It depends, are we pontificating as technologists, or addressing real market needs? Given that the framework is already there and widely adopted, I think the moment there is a viable commercial scenario where a company sees a profit opportunity, additional JSON-LD schemas will take off. I don't think Great Thinker technologists are likely to alter the behavior of the market at scale by themselves

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#252

Post by 3np »

hanniabu wrote: post #194
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…

Web 1.0 = read Web 2.0 = read/write Web 3.0 = read/write/own

> Web3 = read/write/own

This is "reminagined" and more commonly known as just "Web3". Entirely different from the older conceptual "Web 3.0" in context of semantic web.

So more like:

Web 3.0 = read/write/describe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

The resolution to this conondrum is of course to do both simultaneously and refer to it as "Web 5". Ask my friend Jack.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#253

Post by nottorp »

everforward wrote: post #223
nottorp wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

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

Even precious metal coins became endorsed by one authority or another (the cities/banks/little kingdoms stamping the coins). Because you as a normal person don't have the resources to validate every single piece of gold/silver you are paid with.

There has also been a short period when every 3rd bank had its own paper currency. That seems to be gone too. Perhaps because as a normal person maintaining a list of banks you could trust was too much.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#254

Post by MrVandemar »

Eisenstein wrote: post #115
MrVandemar wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see it as anything religious. I see the comment about something having an intrinsic, instinctive quality, which we can categorise as having "soul".

> intrinsic, instinctive quality, What are a few examples of things with an 'intrinsic, instinctive quality'?

How about a Peanuts comic script by Charles M. Schulz. Oozes humanity in both the writing, and the shakey, loose penmanship.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#255

Post by swiftcoder »

MrVandemar wrote: post #250
swiftcoder wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Neither were microformats, up until a handful of aggregators started parsing them. We're still kind of stuck in the infancy of semantic markup it seems.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#256

Post by dspillett »

nottorp wrote: post #218
dspillett wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point is whatever you said in defense of blockchain/crypto applies or does not apply to neural networks/LLMs in equal measure. 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…

> whatever you said in defense of blockchain/crypto

You seem to be labouring under the impression that blockchain and cryptocurrencies are one in the same. The point you seem to be missing is that I'm saying they are not the same. Blockchains (usually actually trees like merkle trees) are a thing that has existed long before cryptocurrencies which are one application of technique.

> I for one fail to see the difference between these two kinds of snake oil.

The gaggle of quackish sales people with miracle cures based on LLMs is pretty much the same sort of quackish sales people that touted miracle cures based on crypto currencies, yes. But LLMs are one use of neural networks and crypto/proof-of-work is one use of blockchains.

This all started with me correcting “And for blockchain... it was launched with the promise of decentralized currency.” — which is the incorrect equivalency of blockchain/cryptocurrency writ large.

> > Some theoretical work on artificial neurons was done in the 40s.

> "The perceptron was invented in 1943 by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts.

Exactly. You've just repeated my sentence with a little more detail.

40s: theory

50s: attempts at practical implementation

early 70s: backprop methods (as we currently mean the term wrt neural networks, backpropagation as a more general concept existed before that) first published, starting that decades' big excitement over the potential for neural networks.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#257

Post by makkes »

etimberg wrote: post #183
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

That's why ENTSO-E has just completed a software vendor interoperability workshop. :-) And import/export/validation worked just fine for all participants.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#258

Post by lambdaba »

tossandthrow wrote: post #168
lambdaba wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of work do you do?

various. Notable I, some years ago, had a project that considered automatic consolidation of ontologies based on meta-ontologies and heuristics. The idea being that everyone have their own ontology for the data they release and the system would make a consolidated ontology that could be used to automatic integration of data from different datasources. regardless, that project did not get traction, so now it sits.

Thanks! Is it possible for you to share more details about the domain and problem?

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#259

Post by kkfx »

DrScientist wrote: post #190
kkfx wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 top…

> there is also a difference between finding an answer to a particular question and finding web pages around a particular topic.

That's exactly the Gessner's problem and unimplementable so far solution: we have information packed in various form, when we want specific bits it's hard do narrow enough available information packages (books, articles, post etc).

For common stuff in the vast see of the web we tend to end up very frequently on exactly or nearly exactly what we want, but for less common stuff there is a big problem. Just knowing the historical temperature of a small place where many have recorded temperatures, but still no one have create a table and a graph or daily minima and maxima for let's say the 10 years period we want it's hard to find an answer. For some kind of data we have wikidata, for some others we have public datasets from various sources, but still no easy way to locate and narrow them.

LLM are in theory an answer, unfortunately not in practice first for freshness problem (you have to train a model, ingesting new information is still training, far longer than a search engine crawler) and training itself witch is like the opposite of semantic web: instead of having the author prepare the information for machines we have third party who do it en masse, unfortunately they tend to be even less precise than semantic web mean authors PLUS models hallucinations and essentially no ability to tell where their answer came from.

That's why we still miss semantic search...

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#260

Post by lukev »

lolinder wrote: post #182
lukev wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They are _used_ very extensively, but not in web pages. Many industry domains rely heavily on linked data and ontologies.

It's true that they are less commonly embedded as semantic data in web pages. There's a real bootstrapping problem there: no reason to embed data if no tools will read it, no reason to build tools if there's no data to read.

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