No ... because the incentives to lie in metadata are too high
The semantic web is now widely adopted
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Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#32[deleted]
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#33As 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)
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#34Are there any tools that employ LLMs to fill out the Semantic Web data? I can see that being a high-impact use case: people don’t generally like manually filling out all the fields in a schema (it is indeed “a bother”), but an LLM could fill it out for you – and then you could tweak for correctness / editorializing. Voila, bother reduced! This would also address the two reasons why the author thinks AI is not suited…
Bringing an LLM into the picture is just silly. There's zero need.
The author (and much of HN?) seems to be unaware that it's not just thousands of websites using JSON-LD, it's millions.
For example: install WordPress, install an SEO plugin like Yoast, and boom you're done. Basic JSON-LD will be generated expressing semantic information about all your blog posts, videos etc. It only takes a few lines of code to extend what shows up by default, and other CMSes support this took.
SEOs know all about this topic because Google looks for JSON-LD in your document and it makes a significant difference to how your site is presented in search results as well as all those other fancy UI modules that show up on Google.
Anyone who wants to understand how this is working massively, at scale, across millions of websites today, implemented consciously by thousands of businesses, should start here:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu...
https://search.google.com/test/rich-results
Is this the "Semantic Web" that was dreamed of in yesteryear? Well it hasn't gone as far and as fast as the academics hoped, but does anything?
The rudimentary semantic expression is already out there on the Web, deployed at scale today. Someone creative with market pull could easily expand on this e.g. maybe someday a competitor to Google or another Big Tech expands the set of semantic information a bit if it's relevant to their business scenarios.
It's all happening, it's just happening in the way that commercial markets make things happen.
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#35I think that if you want your page to be well discoverable, to be well asvertised, positioned in search engines and social media you have to support standards. Like open graph protocol, or json ld.
Be nice to bots. This is advertisment after all.
Support standards even if Google does not. Other bots might not be as sofisticated.
For me, yes, it is worth the bother
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#36Did json-ld get a lot of traction for link previews? I haven't really encountered it much.
I actually implemented a simple link preview system a while ago. It uses opengraph and twitter cards meta data that is commonly added to web pages for SEO. That works pretty well.
Ironically, I did use chat gpt for helping me implement this stuff. It did a pretty good job too. It suggested some libraries I could use and then added some logic to extract titles, descriptions, icons, images, etc. with some fallbacks between various fields people use for those things. It did not suggest me to add logic for json-ld.
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#37I think the future holds a synthesis of LLM functions with semantic entities and logic from knowledge graphs (this is called "neuro-symbolic AI"), so each topic/object can have a clear context, upon which you can start prompting the AI for the preferred action/intention.
Already implemented in part on my Conzept Encyclopedia project (using OpenAI): https://conze.pt/explore/%22Neuro-symbolic%20AI%22?l=en&ds=r...
Something like this is much easier done using the semantic web (3D interactive occurence map for an organism): https://conze.pt/explore/Trogon?l=en&ds=reference&t=link&bat...
On Conzept one or more bookmarks you create, can be used in various LLM functions. One of the next steps is to integrate a local WebGPU-based frontend LLM, and see what 'free' prompting can unlock.
JSON-LD is also created dynamically for each topic, based on Wikidata data, to set the page metadata.
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#38The argument about LLMs is wrong, not because of reasons stated but because semantic meaning shouldn't solely be defined by the publisher. The real question is whether the average publisher is better than an LLM at accurately classifying their content. My guess is, when it comes to categorization and summarization, an LLM is going to handily win. An easy test is: are publishers experts on topics they talk about? The…
Yet LLMS fail to make these simple but sometimes meaningful differentiation. See for example this case in which a court reporter is described as being all the things he reported about by Copilot: a child molester, a psychatric escapee, a widow cheat. Presumably because his name was in a lot of articles about said things and LLMS simply associate his name with the crimes without making the connection that he could in fact be simply the messenger and not the criminal. If LLMS had the semantic understanding that the name on top/bottom of a news article is the author, it would not have made that mistake.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Copilot-turns-a-court-reporter-...
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#39The author gives two reasons why AI won't replace the need for metadata: 1: LLMs "routinely get stuff wrong" 2: "pricy GPU time" 1: I make a lot of tests on how well LLMs get categorization and data extraction right or wrong for my Product Chart ( https://www.productchart.com ) project. And they get pretty hard stuff right 99% of the time already. This will only improve. 2: Loading the frontpage of Reddit takes hundr…
LLMs have no soul, so I like content and curation from real people
Huh, it's not often you hear a religious argument in a technical discussion. Interesting viewpoint!
Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted
#40Here I was, thinking the machines would make our lives easier. Now we have to make our websites Reader-Mode friendly, ARIA[1]-labelled, rendered server-side and now semantic web on top, just so that bots and non-visitors can crawl around?
[1] This is also something the screen assist software should do, not the publisher.