The Semantic Web is more about the semantics of schemas than amount the semantics of data.
This is very poorly explained; people tend to think it means something about computers understanding the data.
The Semantic Web Is Dead. Long Live the Semantic Web
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Re: The Semantic Web Is Dead. Long Live the Semantic Web
#22Welcome to the party pal.
Love, RSS
Re: The Semantic Web Is Dead. Long Live the Semantic Web
#23> The Semantic Web means different things to different people. There is no better way of expressing why "the semantic web" as it was originally conceived failed, and will always fail. This is not to say that automated processing to extract higher-level information of the kind the article argues for might not be both helpful and possible, but it will always be awkward, difficult and imperfect. The awkwardness and diff…
The great idea of semantic web, as conceived in the early beginnings, was mostly visionary and rather impossible to build. This doesn't mean the that whole concept has failed. It advanced many fields of AI and created many initiatives which are quite vibrant to this day (e.g. Linked Data). The illusion of failure of the semantic web is mostly due to the fact that today there are less semantic web projects funded. The money goes to other things that are now on the rise, the same as it was with semantic web 10 years ago. However semantic web is still here, with many tools mature enough to be applied in the industry. I don't expect it to dissapear completely.
Re: The Semantic Web Is Dead. Long Live the Semantic Web
#24The approach currently used is in its death throes, to be sure. But a working Semantic Web is a huge deal (think: bigger than Google) and will happen, make no mistake. But when it happens, it will be via a different approach. Edit: spelling (thx Joshua)
The Semantic Web is about the semantics of schema, not the actual semantics of the data. THIS is why it failed: you guessed what the thing was from the name instead of actually learning about it. Also: "death throes"
Nicely put, but I think there's more to its failure than just that.
You might find this interesting: https://vimeo.com/92351230
When anyone can query anything, the SW will build itself -- a sort of new web, but of data, not text.
Re: The Semantic Web Is Dead. Long Live the Semantic Web
#25The Semantic Web is more about the semantics of schemas than amount the semantics of data. This is very poorly explained; people tend to think it means something about computers understanding the data.
Any linking provides context thus semantics. Linking to a schema makes this explicit and enhances latent semantics. So it's both right?
Re: The Semantic Web Is Dead. Long Live the Semantic Web
#26All I want from the Semantic Web is to know if I see that an API follows the standard, things with the same name will be the same kind. For all I care, that API's underlying model could output to HTML, rendered PNGs, ASCII art or 3D plastic.
In particular, scraping the View is pretty much a last resort. If you have to, it's likely that either the source doesn't have the manpower to become semantic anytime soon, or it's hostile to providing easy to parse data anyway.
Re: The Semantic Web Is Dead. Long Live the Semantic Web
#27The semantic web as I understood it was just using the right HTML tags. Most importantly, no tables for layout and using semantic names for CSS classes rather than names like "blue". This has completely failed, imo. Tables are no longer constructed with , and but with a combination of and tags with classes that are not semantic at all :( Edit: Not sure why this got downvoted, just trying to illustrate what I thought…
> The semantic web as I understood it was just using the right HTML tags.
Using semantic HTML (rather than presentational HMTL) for content is somewhat related to the Semantic Web, but not equivalent to it -- the Semantic Web is/was about open, composable ways of extracting and processing meaning from content on the web. HTML itself (even HTML5 or the current state of the HTML Living Standard) -- even when used in a cleanly semantic way -- isn't expressive enough to do much with that without building additional ontological structure on top of that, hence things like RDF and Microformats.
Re: The Semantic Web Is Dead. Long Live the Semantic Web
#28The semantic web as I understood it was just using the right HTML tags. Most importantly, no tables for layout and using semantic names for CSS classes rather than names like "blue". This has completely failed, imo. Tables are no longer constructed with , and but with a combination of and tags with classes that are not semantic at all :( Edit: Not sure why this got downvoted, just trying to illustrate what I thought…
That sense of the term was actually co-opted from what people are talking about in this discussion, i.e., rdf, microdata, etc. They are related though, as using the correct HTML tags was meant to be a first step into adding a layer of meaning to web content that wasn't there before. But "the semantic web" includes a whole, whole lot more than just semantic markup. Hope that clarifies a bit!
Re: The Semantic Web Is Dead. Long Live the Semantic Web
#29When I got exposed to semantic web probably 4 years ago, I realized what a huge mistake it was/is. My take is that it is a bunch of ideas to make it easier for search engines to crawl and use your data about all kinds of things. On one hand, that is great. However, the huge problem with using it is that you end up creating your own search engine to crawl data sources to do anything useful. That is to say, you have to…
I agree, the crawling / indexing problems you describe are definitely true for Linked Data. But there are still other use cases for semantic web technology.
> The use case many people have is that they want to use and API to get some particular bit of data out and that's it.
In theory, that's what SPARQL and SPARQL endpoints are for. Plus you get things like federated queries and an open data model (RDF), that allows to combine multiple data sources without "wrapping" schemas.
But well, this is kind of utopia and yes, I doubt it will ever be "a thing".
Re: The Semantic Web Is Dead. Long Live the Semantic Web
#30I have some personal insights from following the SW world for some time:
1. Most of the implementations and formats and everything really boil down to a great way to publish graph data on the web, and query it using a pretty nice graph query language, and for most general cases everything just works.
2. A lot of the web is implementing incomplete select parts of SW technologies even if they don't realize it, and then promptly putting it all behind an API key and shared secret. When SW takes hold, that will all have to be different, IE a common mechanism for authentication / authorization, and some kind of way to quantify what is supported by a service, and all of that exists but again, every service is different it seems right now, and they all fear unfettered access.
3. You can use all of it today if you want, and the library ecosystem is very rich, IMHO. Plop it all into Neo4J / Jena / rdflib (etc etc) and have at it.