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The semantic web is now widely adopted

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Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#42
The question is: does this bring any of the purported benefits of the Semantic Web? Does it suddenly allow "agents" to understand the meaning of your web pages, or are we just complying with a set of pre-defined schemas that predefined software (or more specifically, Google, in practice) understands and knows how to render. In other words, was all the SemWeb rigmarole actually necessary, or could the same results have been achieved using any of the mentioned simpler alternatives (microdata, OpenGraph tags, or even just JSON schemas)?

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#43

So much jumping to defend llms as the future. I'd like to point that llms hallucinate, could be injected, and often lack context which well structured metadata can provide. At least, I don't want for an llm to hollucinate the author's picture and bio based on hints in the article, thank you very much. I don't think that one is necessarily better than the other, but imagining that llms are a silver bullet when another…

Sure but do hallucinations matter then much just for categorisation? Hardly the end of the world if they make up a published date occasionally. And prompt injection is irrelevant because the alternative we're considering is letting publishers directly choose the metadata.

Prompt injection is highly relevant because you end up achieving the same as the publisher choosing the metadata, but on a much higher price for the user. Price which needs to be paid by each user separately instead of using one already generated.

LLMs are much better when the user adapts the categories to their needs or crunches the text to pull only the info relevant to them. Communicating those categories and the cutoff criteria would be an issue in some contexts, but still better if communication is not the goal. Domain knowledge is also important, because nitch topics are not represented in the llm datasets and their abilities fail in such scenarios.

As I said above, one is not necessarily better than the other and it depends on the use cases.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#44

If even the semantic web people are declaring victory based on a post title and a picture for better integration with Facebook, then it's clear that Semantic Web as it was envisioned is fully 100% dead and buried. The concept of OWL and the other standards was to annotate the content of pages, that's where the real values lie. Each paragraph the author wrote should have had some metadata about its topic. At the very…

I had pretty much the same reacon while reading the article. "BlogPosting" isn't particularily informative. The rest of the metadata looked like it could/should be put in tags, done.

A very bad example if the intention was to demonstrate how cool and useful semweb is :-)

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#46
post #8

The 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…

Let's hope you never write articles about court cases then: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Copilot-turns-a-court-reporter-...

The alleged low error rate of 1% can ruin your day/life/company, if it hits the wrong person, regards the wrong problem, etc. And that risk is not adequately addressed by hand-waving and pointing people to low error rates. In fact, if anything such claims would make me less confident in your product.

1% error is still a lot if they are the wrong kind of error in the wrong kind of situation. Especially if in that 1% of cases the system is not just slightly wrong, but catastrophically mind-bogglingly wrong.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#48
I laughed at this bit:

"Googlers, if you're reading this, JSON-LD could have the same level of public awareness as RSS if only you could release, and then shut down, some kind of app or service in this area. Please, for the good of the web: consider it."

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#50
post #4

In all honesty, llms are probably going to make all this entirely redundant. As such semantic web was not a natural follower to what we had before, and not web 3.0.

The article addresses this point with the following: > It would of course be possible to sic Chatty-Jeeps on the raw markup and have it extract all of this stuff automatically. But there are some good reasons why not. > > The first is that large language models (LLMs) routinely get stuff wrong. If you want bots to get it right, provide the metadata to ensure that they do. > > The second is that requiring an LLM to re…

While both of these points a valid today they are likely going to be invalidated going forward - assume that what you can conceive is technically possible will become technically possible.

In 5 years resource price is likely negligible and accuracy is high enough that you just trust it.

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