Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?

news.ycombinator.com

1–10 of 72 posts

Re: Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?

#3
Onthologies are hard. Curation is harder. People are lazy.

The ideas are still around; some [1] were lifted by Facebook [2], for example. There's also continuation work that's related, like web annotations [3], but generally the commercial web is moving even more away from neatly-organized resources [4] and towards Javascript state machines [5].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160713021037/http://dig.csail.... [2] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/overview/ [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729525#13740110 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12206846#12207459 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345693#12346371

Re: Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?

#7

It happened. We got meta tags that tell us the published date, author and type of web page. We got schema for job ads. We got schema for recipes. We got schema for thumbnails and images associated with a webpage. We got schema for ecommerce products

This is all speculation and I have no idea of the actual roadmap for the specs. As I was reading this comment it gave me another reason to love component based architecture... I would think it would make sense just to allow users to self define stuff like that rather than try to do everything top down.

https://www.w3.org/standards/techs/components#w3c_all

Re: Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?

#8
The Semantic Web is incompatible with the commercial incentives of most technology companies. For instance, it would currently be irrational for Facebook to voluntarily publish their social network using the friend of a friend schema. Their profit is derived from their centralized, private ownership of this data. Hopefully we can move towards a decentralized or federate, public web.

Re: Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web?

#9

It happened. We got meta tags that tell us the published date, author and type of web page. We got schema for job ads. We got schema for recipes. We got schema for thumbnails and images associated with a webpage. We got schema for ecommerce products

This is all speculation and I have no idea of the actual roadmap for the specs. As I was reading this comment it gave me another reason to love component based architecture... I would think it would make sense just to allow users to self define stuff like that rather than try to do everything top down. https://www.w3.org/standards/techs/components#w3c_all

Google guides for SEO show you how the semantic web happened.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/product

Noone knows it's called the semantic web these days. It's just what you have to do to have you page get picked up and highly ranked by google, and to get more links from direct product traffic.

Post reply on HN