The semantic web is now widely adopted • Hacker News Board

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#201

Post by dboreham » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 3:06 PM UTC

recursivedoubts wrote: post #188

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…

The semantic web has been, in my opinion, a category error. Semantics means meaning and computers/automated systems don't really do meaning very well and certainly don't do intention very well. Mapping the incredible success of The Web onto automated systems hasn't worked because the defining and unique characteristic of The Web is REST and, in particular, the uniform interface of REST. This uniform interface is wast…

I take the other side of this trade, and have since c. 1980. I say that semantics is a delusion our brains creates. Doesn't really exist. Or conversely is not the magical thing we think it is.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#202

Post by ttepasse » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 3:06 PM UTC

ryukoposting wrote: post #163

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.

JSON-LD / RDFa and such can use the full type hierarchy of schema.org (and other languages) and can build a tree or even a graph of data. Meta elements are limited to property/value pairs.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#203

Post by recursivedoubts » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 3:07 PM UTC

dboreham wrote: post #201

recursivedoubts wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The semantic web has been, in my opinion, a category error. Semantics means meaning and computers/automated systems don't really do meaning very well and certainly don't do intention very well. Mapping the incredible success of The Web onto automated systems hasn't worked because the defining and unique characteristic of The Web is REST and, in particular, the uniform interface of REST. This uniform interface is wast…

I take the other side of this trade, and have since c. 1980. I say that semantics is a delusion our brains creates. Doesn't really exist. Or conversely is not the magical thing we think it is.

man

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#204

Post by ttepasse » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 3:10 PM UTC

est wrote: post #83

I've playing with RSS feeds recently, suddently it occured to me, XML can be transformed into anything with XSL, for static hosting personal blogs, I can save articles into the feeds directly, then serve frontend single-page application with some static XSLT+js. This is content-presentation separation at best. Is JSON-LD just reinventation of this?

Back in the optimistic 2000s there was the brief idea of GRDDL – using XSLT stylesheets and XPath selectors for extracting stuff from HTML, e.g. microformats, HTML meta, FOAF, etc, and then transforming it into RDF or other things:

https://www.w3.org/TR/grddl/

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#205

Post by ttepasse » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 3:13 PM UTC

1f60c wrote: post #121

This has been invented a number of times. Facebook's version is called Open Graph. https://ogp.me/

Back then Facebook said their Open Graph Protocol was only an application of RDFa – and syntax wise it seemed so.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#206

Post by ttepasse » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 3:19 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #130

I wish there was a better alternative to JSON-LD. I want to avoid duplication by reusing the data that's already in the page by marking them up with appropriate tags and properties. Stuff like RDF exists but is extremely complex and verbose.

Originally you could use the schema.org vocabulary with RDFa or Microdata which embed the structured data right at the element. But than can be brittle: Markup structures change, get copy-and-pasted and editing attributes is not really great in CMS. I may not like it aesthetically but embedded JSON-LD makes some sense.

See also this comment above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41309555

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#207

Post by bawolff » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 3:21 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #189

bawolff wrote: post #184

If this counts as the "semantic web", then In which case we have all been on it since the mid 90s.

It's real RDF. You can process this with RDF tools. Certainly do SPARQL queries. Probably add a schema and have valid OWL DL and do OWL inference if the data is squeaky clean. Certainly use SPIN or Jena rules. It leans too hard on text and doesn't have enough concepts defined as resources but what do you expect, Python didn't have a good package manager for decades because 2 + 2 = 3.9 with good vibes beats 2 + 2 = 4…

My point is that even if technically its rdf, if all anyone does is use a few specific properties from a closed pre-agreed schema, we might as well just be using meta tags.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#208

Post by nottorp » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 3:41 PM UTC

dspillett wrote: post #180

nottorp wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem with blockchain is identical to the one with LLMs. When snake oil salesmen try to apply the same solution to every problem, you stop wasting your time with those salesmen. Both can be useful now and then, but the legit uses are lost in the noise. And for blockchain... it was launched with the promise of decentralized currency. But we've had decentralized currency before in the physical world. Until t…

> And for blockchain... it was launched with the promise of decentralized currency. Cryptocurrencies were launched with that promise. They are but one use¹ of block-chains / merkle-trees, which existed long before them². ---- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree#Uses [2] 1982 for blockchains/trees as part of a distributed protocol as people generally mean when they use the words now³, hash chains/trees thems…

But if you put it that way neural networks were defined in the 70s too :)

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#209

Post by PaulHoule » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 3:45 PM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #207

PaulHoule wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's real RDF. You can process this with RDF tools. Certainly do SPARQL queries. Probably add a schema and have valid OWL DL and do OWL inference if the data is squeaky clean. Certainly use SPIN or Jena rules. It leans too hard on text and doesn't have enough concepts defined as resources but what do you expect, Python didn't have a good package manager for decades because 2 + 2 = 3.9 with good vibes beats 2 + 2 = 4…

My point is that even if technically its rdf, if all anyone does is use a few specific properties from a closed pre-agreed schema, we might as well just be using meta tags.

But there's the question of who is responsible for it and who sets the standards. These days the consortium behind HTML 5 is fairly quick and responsive compared to the W3C's HTML activity in the day (e.g. fight with a standards process for a few months as opposed to "talk to the hand") but schema.org can evolve without any of that.

If there's anything that sucks today it is that people feel they have to add all kinds of markup for different vendors (such as Facebook's Open Graph) I remember the Semweb folks who didn't think it was a problem that my pages had about 20k of visible markup and 150k of repeated semantic markup. It's like the folks who don't mind that an article with 5k worth of text has 50M worth of Javascript, ads, trackers and other junk.

On the other hand I have no trouble turning

into

   @prefix meta:  .
    meta:description "A brief description of your webpage content." .

where meta: is some namespace I made up if I want to access it with RDF tools without making you do anything

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#210

Post by undefinedblog » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 3:51 PM UTC

druskacik wrote: post #61

There's a project [0] that parses Commoncrawl data for various schemas, it contains some interesting datasets. [0] http://webdatacommons.org/

That’s a really useful link, thanks for sharing. We’re building a scrapping service and only parsing rely on native html tags and open graph metadata, based on this link we should definitely take a step forward to parse JSON-LD as well.