A lot of the semantic web has evolved, spurred on by SEO and the need to accurately scrape data from web pages. The old semantic web seemed to be more of a solution in search of every problem. I'm not surprised that searches for "semantic web" are down - as most interest now is focused on structured data via microformats, LD-JSON and standards published at schema.org.
The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web
131–138 of 138 posts
Re: The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Reasoning" capability can be added to any conventional database via the use of views, and sometimes custom indexes. The real problem is that it's computationally expensive for non-trivial cases.
As you put the word Reasoning in quotation marks, I might misunderstand your bottom line here (I am Autistic, so please do not get quirky on natural language semantics), but the bare statement: "Reasoning can be added to any conventional database" is just not right. Reasoning is a well-defined notion from logic, that is based on formal languages, semantics and a relation called entailment (inference in proof theory)…
You can think of views as modelling a particular sort of implication, which is nevertheless somewhat restricted. Despite the restriction, it may be sufficient to cover many usages of OWL, but you may need to squint a bit -- what I mean to say there is it is not exactly an implementation of implication, but it may be used to model it and so some degree of reinterpretation of the resulting set of tables and views may be needed. The type of implication supported is roughly "a result to given SQL query based on (a combination of) existing tables and views => new record in a fresh table/relation".
Re: The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web
#133[deleted]
Re: The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web
#134The reason why the semantic web is even more fundamental: You can't get everyone to agree on one schema. Period. Even if everyone is motivated to, they can't agree, and if there is even a hint of a reason to try to distinguish oneself or strategically fail to label data or label it incorrectly, it becomes even more impossible. (I mean, the "semantic web" has foundered so completely and utterly on the problem of even…
I don't think it's impossible to agree on one schema but it's very expensive to do so and requires tools from the study of philosophy.
While I don't work in the domain, the ontologies in the OBO Foundry and all the ones deriving from Basic Formal Ontology[0] have some level of compatibility that make their integration possible. Still far from "one schema to rule them all" but it shows that agreement can be achieved.
There are other initiatives that I'm aware of that could also qualify as a step in the right direction: "e-Government Core Vocabularies" and the "European Materials Modelling Ontology".
I hope and want to believe that, sooner than later, we will have formalized definitions for most practical aspects of our lives.
Re: The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web
#135I think the answer is Datalog. It is simple, simpler than SQL but powerful like Prolog. Why hasn't it caught on?
The semantic web is notion for defining data relationships. Datalog and SQL are languages for queries . These have little to do with one another. It's like saying that HTML is failing as a format, so the answer is HTTP.
> Datalog and SQL are languages for queries
SQL is not only for queries, it includes a Data Definition Language as part of it I believe. You use SQL to define the schema to which the data in the database must confirm.
Similarly for Prolog and Datalog. You can define the form, the schema of data in a simple way and then the relations between the data by declaring simple inference rules between them.
Datalog has the benefit of being simpler, than Prolog. Simpler is better if that is all we need.
This has nothing to do with http :-)
Re: The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web
#136I think the answer is Datalog. It is simple, simpler than SQL but powerful like Prolog. Why hasn't it caught on?
I am of the same opinion. TerminusDB uses a data log for query and update. I think it will catch on. And in the future we will even be able to add constraints - which can be a real superpower in querying graphs.
Got to check out TerminusDB, thanks
Re: The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web
#137I think the answer is Datalog. It is simple, simpler than SQL but powerful like Prolog. Why hasn't it caught on?
Nit: Datalog isn't as powerful as Prolog, that's the whole point of it as a decidable fragment of first order logic (and it's seeing increased use in SMT/fixpoint solvers and databases) But yeah, if getting rid of the whole SemWeb stack, triples, and their many awful serialization formats, design-by-committee query and constraint languages (keeping just the good parts) means we can finally return to focus on Prolog,…
One could argue that Datalog is more "powerful" -- because it is decidable.
Re: The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web
#138I'm building a front end app for Wikipedia & Wikidata called Conzept encyclopedia ( https://conze.pt ) based on semantic web pillars (SPARQL, URIs, various ontologies, etc.) and loving it so far. The semantic web is not dead, its just slowly evolving and and growing. Last week I implemented JSON-LD (RDF embedded in HTML with a schema.org ontology), super easy and now any HTTP client can comprehend what any page is ab…
That looks cool, thank you!