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I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me

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Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me

#21

Post by coddle-hark »

zozbot234 wrote: post #8
AndrewStephens wrote: post #3

I have some low-level hate for the Semantic Web. I run a small personal blog that I maintain using a relatively simple static site generator that I created that turns markdown files into clean(ish) html. A couple of months ago I got interested in adding semantic information to my posts so I modified the generator to add some of the common semantic tags. It was an annoying job, since the semantic information pollutes…

> Does it really matter that a book review (for instance, I have a few) is tagged properly? If the semantic web was better supported, you could have a semantic annotation precisely identifying the books you are reviewing (whether by ISBN edition or otherwise), and reusers of your content (users, search engines or others) would be able to programmatically associate your review with similar content.

That seems like it would be abused to the point of the semantic information being completely useless.

Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me

#22

Post by zmix »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #3

I have some low-level hate for the Semantic Web. I run a small personal blog that I maintain using a relatively simple static site generator that I created that turns markdown files into clean(ish) html. A couple of months ago I got interested in adding semantic information to my posts so I modified the generator to add some of the common semantic tags. It was an annoying job, since the semantic information pollutes…

"Semantic Web" is a wide area. What technologies did you use? Care to post a little example, as to what and how it pollutes the HTML structure?

Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me

#23

Post by [deleted] »

at_a_remove wrote: post #17

At an old job, I knew some very idealistic folks who kept pushing semantic web business. "Let's do that everywhere!" As an exercise, I would have them open a browser, visit various sites, and then look at the source. "Go on, check to see if it validates," I would say with an anticipatory grin. Whether hand-crafted HTML or generated by any number of frameworks, many sites can barely manage to close their tags, asking…

[deleted]

Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me

#24

Post by abathur »

coddle-hark wrote: post #21
zozbot234 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does it really matter that a book review (for instance, I have a few) is tagged properly? If the semantic web was better supported, you could have a semantic annotation precisely identifying the books you are reviewing (whether by ISBN edition or otherwise), and reusers of your content (users, search engines or others) would be able to programmatically associate your review with similar content.

That seems like it would be abused to the point of the semantic information being completely useless.

I guess by abuse you mean ~black-hat SEO?

It seems likely (and perhaps obvious) that:

- people will try to abuse it

- abuse will keep it from supporting naive trust of semantic information published by untrusted third parties

But we're also already roughly in this scenario, and it seems like it might be easier to model and spot/discard abuse of semantic information.

Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me

#25

Post by ansible »

I had a lot of interest in the semantic web when I first started learning about it.

However, the efforts I've seen seem to be missing some critical factors for longer-term success. I think we've got a lot of work to do with regards to knowledge representation in general.

One of the big things for me is that the context for any fact is critical for it to be true or not.

You can have a fact like "Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple", represented in a graph like you would expect. However, that is only true today. Ten years ago it was Steve Jobs. Without explicit context encoded in the information graph, this web of data isn't as useful as it could be.

Context is important for reasoning in all kinds of situations. "What if Steve Ballmer was CEO of Apple?", is a hypothetical context, where it may be useful to do reasoning about. The context of "Who is the most distinguished captain of the Enterprise?" could be about the real world US Navy, or a fictional Star Trek universe (of which there are multiple).

Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me

#26

Post by abathur »

lazyjones wrote: post #5
AndrewStephens wrote: post #3

I have some low-level hate for the Semantic Web. I run a small personal blog that I maintain using a relatively simple static site generator that I created that turns markdown files into clean(ish) html. A couple of months ago I got interested in adding semantic information to my posts so I modified the generator to add some of the common semantic tags. It was an annoying job, since the semantic information pollutes…

> Can anyone tell me what the semantic web does for me as a small-time publisher? Is it for search engines? Yes, in practice it is mostly for bigger fish in the pond to easily identify and steal your content as needed. For example, Google was using reviews from small competitors' sites in Google Shopping.

I think this is one of the big issues. The semantic information does make it easier for end users to find what they're looking for, but it also made denial of traffic possible.

In a lot of cases, the information was there to get eyeballs--so this is undesirable.

I guess if you don't really care about the eyeballs it can be "useful" for the big fish to pay most of the cost of serving the fraction of your server response that the end user was looking for...

Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me

#27

Post by abathur »

I'm really interested in semantic authoring (not really structuring data with semantics--but marking semantics within running text), though I guess I'm disinterested in the semantic web.

I agree with a lot of the problems noted in other posts, and would add two other problems from the authoring side:

1. Identifying and employing sound semantics requires a level of thought and clarity that I don't think most people are habituated to working at. It raises the bar somewhat on who can be contributing (either they have to understand and take care with the semantics, or you need a separate person to handle them?)

2. I may be missing some good tools, but I haven't been able to find a good low-friction semantic authoring experience. Even if you are mentally prepared to write with explicit semantics, it still adds a lot of friction to the writing process (or requires subsequent semantic-edit passes).

Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me

#28

Post by gwern »

riffraff wrote: post #20
at_a_remove wrote: post #17

At an old job, I knew some very idealistic folks who kept pushing semantic web business. "Let's do that everywhere!" As an exercise, I would have them open a browser, visit various sites, and then look at the source. "Go on, check to see if it validates," I would say with an anticipatory grin. Whether hand-crafted HTML or generated by any number of frameworks, many sites can barely manage to close their tags, asking…

I would argue the problem is not the broken tags, but the business disadvantage to exposing semantic data. Remember when microformats were all the rage, and you could get hReview or hRecipe or XFN data everywhere? Then every host in turn realized that actually, it's _better_ if people can't scrape your site, and it's even better if they can't even see it and it's behind a login wall.

Indeed. Why would you expose all of your data to your competitors like Google, so they can commoditize you? (Incidentally, note that the big tech companies like the search engines are some of the major proponents of microformats, like for restaurants or local businesses... As always, 'commoditize your complement': https://www.gwern.net/Complement )

Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me

#29

Post by zozbot234 »

riffraff wrote: post #20
at_a_remove wrote: post #17

At an old job, I knew some very idealistic folks who kept pushing semantic web business. "Let's do that everywhere!" As an exercise, I would have them open a browser, visit various sites, and then look at the source. "Go on, check to see if it validates," I would say with an anticipatory grin. Whether hand-crafted HTML or generated by any number of frameworks, many sites can barely manage to close their tags, asking…

I would argue the problem is not the broken tags, but the business disadvantage to exposing semantic data. Remember when microformats were all the rage, and you could get hReview or hRecipe or XFN data everywhere? Then every host in turn realized that actually, it's _better_ if people can't scrape your site, and it's even better if they can't even see it and it's behind a login wall.

Well, whether it's better depends on local incentives. But it's true that in many cases these push against making machine-readable data available, thus "semantic" tech becomes mostly irrelevant. Similarly, Linked Data has been most successful as Linked Open Data, where these incentives are explicitly aligned.

Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me

#30

Post by rbosinger »

at_a_remove wrote: post #17

At an old job, I knew some very idealistic folks who kept pushing semantic web business. "Let's do that everywhere!" As an exercise, I would have them open a browser, visit various sites, and then look at the source. "Go on, check to see if it validates," I would say with an anticipatory grin. Whether hand-crafted HTML or generated by any number of frameworks, many sites can barely manage to close their tags, asking…

Agreed. Poetically written as well!
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