The semantic web is now widely adopted • Hacker News Board

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#161

Post by klntsky » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 12:56 PM UTC

codewithcheese wrote: post #157

tossandthrow wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked in this field for a bit, this uncovers an even more fundamental flaw: The idea that we can have a single static ontology.

Domain driven design is well aware that is not feasible to have a single schema for everything, they use bounded contexts. Is there something similar for the semantic web?

In the Semantic Web, things like ontologies and namespaces play a role similar to bounded contexts in DDD. There’s no exact equivalent, but these tools help different schemas coexist and work together

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#162

Post by eadmund » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 12:56 PM UTC

Embedding data as JSON as program text inside a tag inside a tagged data format just seems like such a terrible hack. Among other things, it stutters: it repeats information already in the document. The microdata approach seems much less insane. I don’t know if it is recognised nearly as often.

TFA mentions it at the end: ‘There is also “microdata.” It’s very simple but I think quite hard to parse out.’ I disagree: it’s no harder to parse than HTML, and one already must parse HTML in order to correctly extract JSON-LD from a script tag (yes, one can incorrectly parse HTML, and it will work most of the time).

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#163

Post by ryukoposting » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 1:01 PM UTC

Pardon my naivetée, but what exactly is JSON-LD doing that the HTML meta tags don't do already? My blog doesn't implement JSON-LD but if you link to my blog on popular social media sites, you still get a fancy link.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#164

Post by maxerickson » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 1:04 PM UTC

tossandthrow wrote: post #153

ubertaco wrote: post #150

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 with…

Having worked in this field for a bit, this uncovers an even more fundamental flaw: The idea that we can have a single static ontology.

There is also the problem that structure doesn't guarantee meaning.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#165

Post by Vinnl » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 1:10 PM UTC

KolmogorovComp wrote: post #84

vasco wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There hasn't been a Wikipedia-like event for many decades I'll give you two examples: Internet Archive. Let's Encrypt.

Hardly a good reference, Internet Archive is older than Wikipedia.

Wikipedia itself is only a little over two decades old. I don't think anyone would parse "many decades" as "two decades".

There's also OpenStreetMap, exactly two decades old and thus four years younger than Wikipedia.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#166

Post by pessimizer » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 1:16 PM UTC

amarant wrote: post #113

MrVandemar wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see it as anything religious. I see the comment about something having an intrinsic, instinctive quality, which we can categorise as having "soul".

That's even more interesting! The only non-religious meaning of soul I've ever heard is a music genre, but then English is my second language. I tried googling it and found this meaning I wasn't aware of: emotional or intellectual energy or intensity, especially as revealed in a work of art or an artistic performance. "their interpretation lacked soul" Is this the definition used? I'm not sure how a JSON document is…

It's early 20th century (and later) black American dialect to say things "have soul" or "don't have soul." In the West, Black Americans are associated with a mystical connection to the Earth, deeper understandings, and suffering.

So LLMs are not gritty and down and dirty, and don't get down. They're not the real stuff.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#167

Post by kayo_20211030 » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 1:17 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #158

kayo_20211030 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Link counting being reliable for search. After going through people's not-so-noble qualities and how they make the semantic web impossible, he declares counting links as an exception. It was to a comical degree not an exception.

Yes. There is that. Ignobility wins out again.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#168

Post by tossandthrow » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 1:19 PM UTC

lambdaba wrote: post #156

tossandthrow wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked in this field for a bit, this uncovers an even more fundamental flaw: The idea that we can have a single static ontology.

What kind of work do you do?

various. Notable I, some years ago, had a project that considered automatic consolidation of ontologies based on meta-ontologies and heuristics.

The idea being that everyone have their own ontology for the data they release and the system would make a consolidated ontology that could be used to automatic integration of data from different datasources.

regardless, that project did not get traction, so now it sits.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#169

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 1:21 PM UTC

lukev wrote: post #155

ubertaco wrote: post #150

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 with…

That's only schema.org! Linked data is so much bigger than that. Many ontologies have a "poem" type (for example dbpedia ( https://dbpedia.org/ontology/Poem ) has one), as well as other publishing or book-oriented ontologies.

[deleted]

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#170

Post by fabianholzer » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 1:24 PM UTC

MrVandemar wrote: post #146

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.

They certainly are retrofitted, but the existing semantic tags are largely abandoned for div soups that are beaten into shape and submission by lavish amounts of JS and a few sprinkles of CSS (and the latter often as CSS-in-JS). For microformats there is at least a little ecosystem already, and the vendor-driven committees don't need to be involved.