The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web

Well, in one sense the are directly interconvertable. The documents in TerminusDB are elaborated to JSON-LD internally during type-checking and inference.

However, it's not just a question of whether one can be made into another. The use of contexts is very cumbersome, since you need to specify different contexts at different properties for different types. It makes far more sense to simply have a schema and perform the elaboration from there. Plus without an infrastructure for keys, Ids become extremely cumbersome. So beyond just type decorations on the leaves, It's the difference between:

  {
    "general_variables": {
      "alternative_name": ["Sadozai Kingdom", "Last Afghan Empire" ],
      "language":"latin"
    },
    "name":"AfDurrn",
    "social_complexity_variables": {
      "hierarchical_complexity": {"admin_levels":"five"},
      "information": {"articles":"present"}
    },
    "warfare_variables": {
      "military_technologies": {
        "atlatl":"present",
        "battle_axes":"present",
        "breastplates":"present"
      }
    }
  }

And

  {
    "@id":"Polity/7286b191f5f62a05290b8961fd8836a26ddc8399611b216fae4aaacc58ba6c11",
    "@type":"Polity",
    "general_variables": {
      "@id":"Polity/7286b191f5f62a05290b8961fd8836a26ddc8399611b216fae4aaacc58ba6c11/general_variables/GeneralVariables/e4360ee3766c2863f06a34ffcdd9869d41b03d04c6f6af5f94b0a14a47e8e704",
      "@type":"GeneralVariables",
      "alternative_name": ["Last Afghan Empire", "Sadozai Kingdom" ],
      "language":"latin"
    },
    "name":"AfDurrn",
    "social_complexity_variables": {
      "@id":"Polity/7286b191f5f62a05290b8961fd8836a26ddc8399611b216fae4aaacc58ba6c11/social_complexity_variables/SocialComplexityVariables/191353c4b7138842ec4029dd07fbd63c9dda752f0cd72b1584f046a274cf024c",
      "@type":"SocialComplexityVariables",
      "hierarchical_complexity": {
        "@id":"Polity/7286b191f5f62a05290b8961fd8836a26ddc8399611b216fae4aaacc58ba6c11/social_complexity_variables/Polity/7286b191f5f62a05290b8961fd8836a26ddc8399611b216fae4aaacc58ba6c11/social_complexity_variables/SocialComplexityVariables/191353c4b7138842ec4029dd07fbd63c9dda752f0cd72b1584f046a274cf024c/hierarchical_complexity/HierarchicalComplexity/d6a772c5c6919cc511a24ab89f908032aa32b1e3e939d2e0c32044b3a5d9151d",
        "@type":"HierarchicalComplexity",
        "admin_levels":"five"
      },
      "information": {
        "@id":"Polity/7286b191f5f62a05290b8961fd8836a26ddc8399611b216fae4aaacc58ba6c11/social_complexity_variables/Polity/7286b191f5f62a05290b8961fd8836a26ddc8399611b216fae4aaacc58ba6c11/social_complexity_variables/SocialComplexityVariables/191353c4b7138842ec4029dd07fbd63c9dda752f0cd72b1584f046a274cf024c/information/Information/2f557c1016552f30b8d8bb1bdd9a8584791dd06d32f25bded86a7eb59788ea7f",
        "@type":"Information",
        "articles":"present"
      }
    },
    "warfare_variables": {
      "@id":"Polity/7286b191f5f62a05290b8961fd8836a26ddc8399611b216fae4aaacc58ba6c11/warfare_variables/WarfareVariables/704a2c1854a2fe80616fbea0ef0dcd6ce47f5174529ca191617e42397108c437",
      "@type":"WarfareVariables",
      "military_technologies": {
        "@id":"Polity/7286b191f5f62a05290b8961fd8836a26ddc8399611b216fae4aaacc58ba6c11/warfare_variables/Polity/7286b191f5f62a05290b8961fd8836a26ddc8399611b216fae4aaacc58ba6c11/warfare_variables/WarfareVariables/704a2c1854a2fe80616fbea0ef0dcd6ce47f5174529ca191617e42397108c437/military_technologies/MilitaryTechnologies/80a91b3e5381154387bde4afc66fdd38834de16c671c49c769f5244475cbbb1b",
        "@type":"MilitaryTechnologies",
        "atlatl":"present",
        "battle_axes":"present",
        "breastplates":"present"
      }
    }
  }

I think the general message here is that complex and complete architectures tend to fail in favor of simpler solutions that people can understand and use to get things done in the here and now.

Its interesting to me that the recent uptick in the personal knowledge management space (aka tools for thought)[0] is all around the bi-directional graph which is basically a 2-tuple simplified version of the RDF 3-tuple. You lose the semantics of a labelled edge, but its easier for people to understand.

[0] See Roam Research, Obsidian, LogSeq, Dendron et al.

For a year and a half, I worked on a project called OSLC: Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration [0] which became an Oasis Open Project. It's an open community building practical specifications for integrating software. For software tools that adopt and provide OSLC enabled APIs, data integration and supported use cases become really easy.

As an example, if your department prefers Tool A for defining requirements (Aha, etc ...), Tool B for change management (bugzilla, etc ...) and Tool C for test management and they aren't already a unified platform, it can be hard to gain semantic context across them. I've seen many situations where dev teams prefer a specific FOSS/vendor change management tracking tool while testers prefer a different thing and are unwilling to change because of historical test automation investment. To illustrate, imagine I run a test and it fails. I want to open a bug and have it linked to this failing test and also associate it with an existing requirement. If all 3 tools are OSLC API enabled consumers/producers, then their data can be integrated together trivially and experiences can be far more seamless and pleasant to all involved (e.g. testers can have popups to query (find/select reqmnts) or delegated creates (open new bug)) without leaving their own familiar test tool's UI. Nice. Anything can have an OSLC enabled API adapter from existing servers to spreadsheets (with an associated proxy server). It has great promise in bringing FOSS/vendor tooling together.

In a nutshell, it's a set of standards around building a digital thread for tools to integrate together. Workstreams are focused per domain (quality management, change management, requirements management, etc ...) [1]. Linked Data and RDF are its core tech underpinning [2]

[0] https://open-services.net/

[1] https://open-services.net/specifications/#active-publication...

[2] https://oslc.github.io/developing-oslc-applications/technica...

What is "unsafe, untenable or hard" about embedding some JSON-LD (which is just some JSON metadata, transformed using a small JS library), like I did here: https://twitter.com/conzept__/status/1552719001826074625

Whether you trust the URIs or the data that was placed there is not a problem for the semantic web. The fact that you _can_ state these things and relate to other resources and concepts on the web is already wonderful and useful in itself. Google is reading this metadata and relating it to their trust/ranking-graph. The semantic web 'community' could do the same later also, in a more decentralized way (blockhain web IDs perhaps?). For now it all works fine.