Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

lespetitescases.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 70 posts

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

#41

Post by JimmyRuska »

Semantic web tech solves a common problem. You have a database where you want to have some shared schema among many groups, and you want a way to infer facts based on first order logic. You want to be able to query multiple sources and reason about facts when taking into account multiple sources.

Whether you use semantic web tech or not that's still a common problem that doesn't always have a good plug and play solution. There's still a lot of places using jsonld format for metadata and cataloging information. You can google cooking recipes and get ratings, cook time; search for movies and see how high rated the movie is and who made it with a synopsis of the plot, all of these are product metadata powered by rdfs or jsonld metadata, a relic of the semantic web. It would be incorrect to say semantic web is dead. Any AI that can effectively use wikidata as a fact table would be jeopardy grade. There's still new tools coming out like RDFox that apply first order logic at multicore speed across huge datasets for reasoning. There is work being done to make it horizontally scalable. I think people will just go on an endless loop of getting the same pain points and creating new tools using the trending tech of the day, but even in this day and age, sometimes something like prolog or picat is what you need.

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

#42

Post by killface »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #36
abathur wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They don't even care about that. They care about their advertising revenue.

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

#43

Post by goto11 »

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…

The reason HTML pages doesn't validate is pretty simple: It does not provide any benefit for the publisher. Consider if the images didn't show up - you better believe the publisher would have it fixed immediately.

Same for the semantic web. Show the benefit for the publisher.

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

#44

Post by markhollis »

zcw100 wrote: post #12

I could write a book on what's wrong with the semantic web. One of the worst isn't even technical, it's the community. There are some great people in the community but there are also a large number of extremely toxic people that drive people away. If the technology ever takes off it's going to be because some outside community cherry-picks the good parts and tells those people to f-off. That's already starting to hap…

I'm curious what those toxic attitudes are. Surely the "we already invented it and you're reinventing it" can't be the only case. I'm also curious if it's in an academia or in industry.

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

#45

Post by JimmyRuska »

ansible wrote: post #25

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…

Checkout datomic, you can query for facts given a certain point in time. This is common among customer preference storage too, like, "what's your favorite song or movie can change easily over time." Being able to query the state at a certain date can be helpful. Some predictive analytics can also be done like people with these preferences, how did they change once they had a family, or moved to another "life stage".

Though you probably don't need datomic, it would be not too complicated to model this in neo4j or some other RDF graph that supports arbitrary sized tuples. Datomic just supports this feature as a first class value offering.

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

#46

Post by wrnr »

markhollis wrote: post #44
zcw100 wrote: post #12

I could write a book on what's wrong with the semantic web. One of the worst isn't even technical, it's the community. There are some great people in the community but there are also a large number of extremely toxic people that drive people away. If the technology ever takes off it's going to be because some outside community cherry-picks the good parts and tells those people to f-off. That's already starting to hap…

I'm curious what those toxic attitudes are. Surely the "we already invented it and you're reinventing it" can't be the only case. I'm also curious if it's in an academia or in industry.

My take on the attitude in academia: Here we describe a set of algorithms that can solve a class of problems that previous algorithms can't. In the 60' someone published a solution to a problem we have improved upon with the novel innovation of called "hyperlinks". The technical, social and economical shortcomings of our solution are invalid because it is decentralised and therefor morally superior to the current offerings, used the world over, of industry practitioners who are only doing it for the money. More funding is needed for further research.

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

#47

Post by abathur »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #36
abathur wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe. Not sure what I think about that framing.

FWIW, I was picking "eyeballs" as something wider than just ad revenue. I think ads are the big share, but I'm sure there are people/orgs who want eyeballs for other reasons like ego/status, promote their company/brand/service/products, etc.

In some sense I think your framing is accurate, but I don't know about whether we'd be better off (have an informational ecosystem that is more net-positive?) without status chasers. Some share of them are inevitably gaming the system and diluting the ecosystem; others probably add net value in pursuit of eyeballs?

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

#48

Post by mdlincoln »

ansible wrote: post #25

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…

context-dependent, or "reified" assertions are a pain point for sure. I come from the perspective of cultural heritage data, where context is king. Which expert made this attribution for this painting? Who owned it _when_? According to which archival document? etc.

Almost all the engineering problems cited in the original post are still basically there, but graphical models are still the least painful way of doing this, particularly when trying to share data between institutions. Example: https://linked.art/model/assertion/

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

#49

Post by tasogare »

markhollis wrote: post #44
zcw100 wrote: post #12

I could write a book on what's wrong with the semantic web. One of the worst isn't even technical, it's the community. There are some great people in the community but there are also a large number of extremely toxic people that drive people away. If the technology ever takes off it's going to be because some outside community cherry-picks the good parts and tells those people to f-off. That's already starting to hap…

I'm curious what those toxic attitudes are. Surely the "we already invented it and you're reinventing it" can't be the only case. I'm also curious if it's in an academia or in industry.

I shared the experience described by the grand parent. In particular I remember I had some argument on HN with a few people and the sheer amount of bad faith and technical inaccuracy thrown at me was jaw dropping. At this point I consider SW more a cult than a technology.

On the research side there are two kinds of research papers: the one that proposes an ontology for a domain, and the one that describes the conversion of an existing resource to RDF. I've never seen a paper where SW was used for something new and interesting and that would have been impossible without SW.

That being said, they are also both technical and conceptual pain points that are plaguing RDF. Basically the tech is trying to address too many things: both metadata and data, and every kind of data. "IRIs that can be URLs than can be sometimes dereferenced and sometimes not, but it's better if they are and then it's Linked Data" kind of thing makes it hard to assume (and thus build) anything.

So, RDF have been success in a few domains (biology) but in most case it doesn't offer a real competitive advantage over simpler and more expressive technologies such as graph databases.

PS: @zcw100 if you where to really write a book about semantic web, drop me a line please.

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

#50

Post by tasogare »

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've read my share of SW papers: the fact that after a year more than half of links in such works are dead is more telling than the papers themselves.
Post reply on HN