When writing data structures that are not for describing or defining services I still can't help but think in triples. I also can't help but think of each data facet as though it were something described with meta-data would provide sufficient context that it would make sense if it were read out loud to a stranger.
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
#32I really want to like semantic web technologies, but every time I try to get into them I'm stymied: * A zillion standards that all reference each other * Two zillion incomplete and incompatible implementations of those specifications * No sense of direction within it all (what's the easy path?) * Multiple rebrandings of the same ideas (Semantic Web, Linked Data, Solid...)
"Solid" is just SOcial LInked Data anyway. I like LD as it seems clearer in intent than the "semantic web" label.
Yeah, in that sense Solid is a subset of Linked Data: linking personal data.
Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me
#33At 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.
“better” is too strong: in many cases, structured data is not a problem (and if it is, people will scrape it anyway), but there's simply no business case for spending time on it. Most of the semweb stack had a horrible developer experience — bad documentation, tools, validators, etc. — and rarely had tangible benefit from spending time slogging through it.
The semantic data which has actually been implemented on a wide scale happened because someone could go to their boss and say “Spending time on x will mean better Google ranking” or “Facebook will use their new sharing display for our pages”, and it was orders of magnitude simpler to implement so the time and risk were far more palatable.
Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me
#34At 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'm working on the Semantic Web stack in a more limited setting of biomedical data. Performance is definitely a problem but the project is currently exiting pilot due to what were seen as satisfactory results in indexing and summarizing biomedical information, and bridging connections between domains of results (with human assistance).
This is a different outcome than in the commercial setting where the W3C is still imagining people as users of their computer rather than consumers of the services their computers connect to. But it also means that in certain technical domains where e.g. publication results are scaled out to oblivion but the ontologies are regular or made easily negotiable, there can be benefits for researchers.
Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me
#35How to describe semantics? Seems nobody is intensely aware of that at all. WTF? the language, of course. U must know how many forms of languages in semantics domain. XML will die, JSON after. huh? json5, jsn, ...... shows that, and proves that none is the best. BTW it is just like the papermaking technology, albeit Earth rotates without paper.
Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 respon…
So the root problem is actually that people care about the eyeballs. Nothing good comes from such incentive.
Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me
#37modern NLP makes the semantic web completely obsolete. if anything, you need less markup because it's confusing and more often than not, just wrong.
Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me
#38At 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!
Just want to pile on more kudos. Nicely written.
Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me
#39At 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.
That’s a proximal cause. The root cause is that the Internet is not free, despite appearances. If hosting and bandwidth were free, we wouldn’t need businesses to do what we want. Wikipedia wouldn’t need donations. Everything would be great.
Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me
#40If you want Semantic web all you need to do is add rel=Data to the link tag. The browser would use that to fetch the json data for the page just as it uses link to fetch styling.
Now that I've solved this for you, anything else?