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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

#31

Post by dennybritz »

tjradcliffe wrote: post #16

> 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…

I completely agree with what you are saying, but I think what you are getting is a related but slightly different problem: Interpreting/Extracting information usually leads to uncertain results, even for humans.

I think the Semantic Web doesn't try to solve this problem and doesn't need to. There are other approaches, such as probabilistic programming, that are meant to reason with uncertain data. But to do that someone must make the data available to you and tell you how uncertain it is in the first place. I think that's what the Semantic Web, or whatever you may call it, can do. Make data available, but leave open the interpretation.

Re: The Semantic Web Is Dead. Long Live the Semantic Web

#32

Post by JetSpiegel »

david927 wrote: post #24
joshu wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Text is data, just structured in a human-readable way.

Re: The Semantic Web Is Dead. Long Live the Semantic Web

#33

Post by david927 »

JetSpiegel wrote: post #32
david927 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Text is data, just structured in a human-readable way.

Text is data, just unstructured. You can't ask meaningful queries of it. That's why we have databases.

Re: The Semantic Web Is Dead. Long Live the Semantic Web

#34

Post by JetSpiegel »

david927 wrote: post #33
JetSpiegel wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Text is data, just structured in a human-readable way.

Text is data, just unstructured. You can't ask meaningful queries of it. That's why we have databases.

     ps x | grep "nginx" | wc -l

Re: The Semantic Web Is Dead. Long Live the Semantic Web

#35

Post by djulius »

Having attended ISWC numerous times, this conference is long dead. It is the perfect example of eminence-based vs evidence-based science. Technicality of paper if low, most of the paper gathers bad and useless description logic theorems from the very same guys each year. The consanguinity rate is higher than any other CS conference. The quality of the conference is in fact well disputed among academics. Core[1] ranking puts it as a B conference (later updated to A due to request based on scholar values[2]). Arnetminer[3] and Academic Search[4] put it in A+/A tier. These latter are drawn from bibliographic metrics while the first ranking is the result of a poll among australian researcher. Altough we disagree on rugby, I'm with the aussies for this one.

The industry track exists for the record. Much of semweb companies were funded using EU money and went bankrupt when the money went out. I can't believe the EU continues to inject plenty of money for the semweb in H2020 despite having wasted more than 1B in the previous decade (publicly admitted by the EU).

At ISWC 2012 in a workshop that took place the day before the conference, some guy (don't remember his name) asked the speaker "would this building explode, do you think the semweb would still exist ?". The speaker tried to find examples of people doing semweb in the industry, but did not manage to convince anyone, not sure if he did it for himself. This was (and is) a nice summary of the situation of the semantic web.

[1] http://core.edu.au/

[2] http://103.1.187.206/core/1338/

[3] http://arnetminer.org/page/conference-rank/html/All-in-one.h...

[4] http://academic.research.microsoft.com/RankList?entitytype=3...

Re: The Semantic Web Is Dead. Long Live the Semantic Web

#38

Post by drawkbox »

Humans are all unique so there will be differing views of semantics. It does exist in pockets but not to the schema or spec as imagined. For instance, hashtags and geolocation on tweets, categories/tags within wordpress blogs, the social graph within facebook and others. Small pockets of semantic culture within.

When implementation is left to a large population, there will be differentiation as that is our nature. The semantic web wanted it easy, it wanted the implementers to organize. Organizing it with all the differences is how it will have to be. Unless a system implements the standard for you and each author upon creation, there will be differences, deltas and no standard.

Probably the best semantic web / metadata system that has been built does do this and that one is at the NSA.

Re: The Semantic Web Is Dead. Long Live the Semantic Web

#39

Post by ehsanu1 »

elpachuco wrote: post #15
pacala wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are on the cusp of solving natural language understanding, which will enable natural language for humans and relational databases for computers. There will be no "Semantic Web", there will the "Web" and the machines that read it just as well as humans.

>>We are on the cusp of solving natural language understanding Why do you think this? Is it just a feel or is there some company that is really close. As another user mentioned in this thread natural language understanding seems to be the same thing as solving strong AI. Solving strong AI is a huge deal. So big that the people in control of it will probably become the most powerful people in the world.

Whether we are on the cusp really depends on what we mean by "natural language understanding" specifically. What about Watson? It seems to "understand" quite a bit of natural language just fine and can answer interesting questions posed in same. If that doesn't count as "understanding", I'd like to know what does? It probably can't do extended reasoning based on its "understanding", but that would seem to me to be moving the goal posts.

I doubt that a sufficiently well-defined notion of natural language understanding that does not specifically include strong artificial intelligence in its definition would require strong AI. Constructing such a definition is left as an exercise to the reader.

Thinking that strong AI is required for natural language understanding may end up being similar to how it was once thought that beating humans at chess would require advanced AI. Brute forse can do wonderful things, as can weak AI.

Re: The Semantic Web Is Dead. Long Live the Semantic Web

#40

Post by B5geek »

Will the KDE people get the message? Sorry I had to get that out of the way.

In all seriousness, 'Semantic Web' has always felt like a SciFi inspired version of AI intelligence. A concept that sounds cool, but in reality can't ever work.

Take movie ratings & "suggested viewings" for example. Jim, Bob, and Steve all watch the same movie. Jim thinks it's funny because of the physical gags. Bob thinks it's funny because of the dialog & jokes. Steve likes it because the hot new actress is naked. Dave likes the director and cinematography. All 4 guys give it a rating of 4/5.

With this one data point Streaming-movie-place.com cannot ever 'guess' what to suggest to these guys to offer more movies for them to watch. The hope is that once these guys start watching and rating other films a pattern will emerge. That pattern can then be marketed and offer valid suggestions.

BUT reality is too different. We like different things for different reasons, and no algorithm can ever get it 100% right. How many of you have a Netflix queue of things that you want to see, but the suggested movies are full of crappy suggestions? most or all of us I bet.

Which brings me back to my point; it's a sci-fi illusion. It can never exist in real life. Humans are too damn fickle. (Which brings me back to KDE; I wish they would give up on neopunk/symantic desktop crap. it's bloated, slows the system down and offers nothing in return. Or I am just using it wrong.)

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