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The semantic web is now widely adopted

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Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#141

Post by 8organicbits »

mg wrote: post #8

The author gives two reasons why AI won't replace the need for metadata: 1: LLMs "routinely get stuff wrong" 2: "pricy GPU time" 1: I make a lot of tests on how well LLMs get categorization and data extraction right or wrong for my Product Chart ( https://www.productchart.com ) project. And they get pretty hard stuff right 99% of the time already. This will only improve. 2: Loading the frontpage of Reddit takes hundr…

Oh nice, Product Chart looks like a great fit for what LLMs can actually do. I'm generally pretty skeptical about LLMs getting used, but looking at the smart phone tool: this is the sort of product search missing from online stores.

Critically, if the LLM gets something wrong, a user can notice and flag it, then someone can manually fix it. That's 100x less work than manually curating the product info (assuming 1% error rate).

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#142

Post by openrisk »

rakoo wrote: post #114
openrisk wrote: post #64

The semantic web standards are sorely lacking (for decades now) a killer application. Not in a theoretical universe of decentralized philosopher-computer-scientists but in the dumbed down, swipe-the-next-30sec-video, adtech oligopolized digital landscape of walled gardens. Providing better search metadata is hardly that killer app. Not in 2024. The lack of adoption has, imho, two components. 1. bad luck: the Web got…

Over on lobste.rs, someone cited another article retracing the history of the Semantic Web: https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html An interesting read in itself, and also points to Cory Doctorow giving seven reasons why the Semantic Web will never work: https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm . They are all good reasons and are unfortunately still valid (although one of his observations tow…

> An interesting read in itself...

Indeed a good read, thanks for the link!

> [Cory Doctorow's] seven insurmountable obstacles

I think his context is the narrower "Web of individuals" where many of his seven challenges are real (and ongoing).

The elephant in the digital room is the "Web of organizations", whether that is companies, the public sector, civil society etc. If you revisit his objections in that light they are less true or even relevant. E.g.,

> People lie

Yes. But public companies are increasingly reporting online their audited financials via standards like iXBRL and prescribed taxonomies. Increasingly they need to report environmental impact etc. I mentioned in another comment common EU public procurement ontologies. Think also the millions of education and medical institutions and their online content. In institutional context lies do happen, but at a slightly deeper level :-)

> People are lazy

This only raises the stakes. As somebody mentioned already, the cost of navigating random API's is high. The reason we still talk about the semantic web despite decades of no-show is precisely the persistent need to overcome this friction.

> People are stupid

We are who we are individually, but again this ignores the collective intelligence of groups. Besides the hordes of helpless individuals and a handful of "big techs"(=the random entities that figured out digital technology ahead of others) there is a vast universe of interests. They are not stupid but there is a learning curve. For the vast part of society the so-called digital transformation is only at its beginning.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#143

Post by kayo_20211030 »

rakoo wrote: post #114
openrisk wrote: post #64

The semantic web standards are sorely lacking (for decades now) a killer application. Not in a theoretical universe of decentralized philosopher-computer-scientists but in the dumbed down, swipe-the-next-30sec-video, adtech oligopolized digital landscape of walled gardens. Providing better search metadata is hardly that killer app. Not in 2024. The lack of adoption has, imho, two components. 1. bad luck: the Web got…

Over on lobste.rs, someone cited another article retracing the history of the Semantic Web: https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html An interesting read in itself, and also points to Cory Doctorow giving seven reasons why the Semantic Web will never work: https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm . They are all good reasons and are unfortunately still valid (although one of his observations tow…

Every time I read a post like this I'm inclined to post Doctorow's Metacrap piece in response. You got there ahead of me. His reasoning is still valid and continues to make sense to me. Where do you think he's "comically wrong"?

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#144

Post by 8organicbits »

atoav wrote: post #46
mg wrote: post #8

The author gives two reasons why AI won't replace the need for metadata: 1: LLMs "routinely get stuff wrong" 2: "pricy GPU time" 1: I make a lot of tests on how well LLMs get categorization and data extraction right or wrong for my Product Chart ( https://www.productchart.com ) project. And they get pretty hard stuff right 99% of the time already. This will only improve. 2: Loading the frontpage of Reddit takes hundr…

Let's hope you never write articles about court cases then: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Copilot-turns-a-court-reporter-... The alleged low error rate of 1% can ruin your day/life/company, if it hits the wrong person, regards the wrong problem, etc. And that risk is not adequately addressed by hand-waving and pointing people to low error rates. In fact, if anything such claims would make me less confident in your pro…

Is product search a high risk activity? LLMs could be the right tool for building a product search database while also being libelously terrible for news reporting.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#146

Post by MrVandemar »

swiftcoder wrote: post #33

As much as I like the ideas behind the semantic web, JSON-LD feels like the least friendly of all semantic markup options (compared to something like, say, microformats)

Microformats feel like they're ugly retrofitted kludges, where it would have been way more elegant if in among all the crazy helter-skelter competing development of HTML, someone thought to invent a tag, maybe a tag. That would have solved a few problems that certainly didn't.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#147

Post by giantrobot »

swiftcoder wrote: post #33

As much as I like the ideas behind the semantic web, JSON-LD feels like the least friendly of all semantic markup options (compared to something like, say, microformats)

I think the main issue with microformats is most CMSes don't really have a good way of adding them. You need a very capable rich editor to add semantic data inline or edit the output HTML by hand. Simple markup like WikiText and Markdown don't support microformat annotation.

JSON-LD in a page's header is much easier for a CMS to present to the page author for editing. It can be a form in the editing UI. Wordpress et al have SEO plugins that make editing the JSON-LD data pretty straightforward.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#148

Post by giantrobot »

dangoodmanUT wrote: post #123
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #106

The article talks about JSON-LD, but there is also shema.org and open graph. What which one should you use, and why? Should you use several? How does that impact the site?

JSON-LD uses schema.org schema

But very helpfully Google supports...mostly schema.org except when they don't when they feel like it.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#149

Post by MrVandemar »

knallfrosch wrote: post #40

Here I was, thinking the machines would make our lives easier. Now we have to make our websites Reader-Mode friendly, ARIA[1]-labelled, rendered server-side and now semantic web on top, just so that bots and non-visitors can crawl around? [1] This is also something the screen assist software should do, not the publisher.

ARIA is something that really shouldn't have been necessary, but today it is absolutely crucial that content publishers make sure is right. Because the screen assist software can't do it.

Why? Because a significant percentage of people working on web development think a webpage is composed as many and as you like, styled with CSS and the content is injected into it with JavaScript.

These people don't know what an tag is, let alone alt-text, or semantic heading hierarchy. And yet, those are exactly the things that Screen Reader software understands.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#150

Post by ubertaco »

Well, the immediate initial test failed for me: I thought, "why not apply this on one of my own sites, where I have a sort of journal of poetry I've written?"...and there's no category for "Poem", and the request to add Poem as a type [1] is at least 9 years old, links to an even older issue in an unreadable issue tracker without any resolution (and seemingly without much effort to resolve it), and then dies off without having accomplished anything.

[1] https://github.com/schemaorg/suggestions-questions-brainstor...

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