I wouldn't call semweb dead; it just has found its niche(s) and is even stabilizing and gaining in those areas. I actually landed a gig for graph DBs, SPARQL, etc. in lab informatics for bio/chem. Earlier this year I attended a keynote held by Wikimedia Deutschland's Franziska Heine pushing for large publicly available RDF data sets, etc.
I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me
51–60 of 70 posts
Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ecosyste…
In context of semantic web, pursuit of the eyeballs is a problem because it makes the people owning/creating the data also want to be delivering that data directly to the users, and be the only ones allowing to do so. Semantic web works for the opposite goal - to allow the data to be automatically transmitted, processed and understood by software, and only perhaps eventually delivered in some form to end user.
As for building more net-positive information ecosystems, going for the eyeballs instead of actually caring to deliver good information isn't necessarily bad per se, just suboptimal. It's better for an eyeball-chasing site to publish some information, if otherwise that information wouldn't be published at all. But it's the eyeballs being your primary revenue source that will make you work hard to make the data as useless as possible outside your own publication - which leads to a very unhealthy information ecosystem.
Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me
#53Semantic 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 solut…
> you want a way to infer facts based on first order logic
Isn't that computationally infeasible? Semantic web standards are based on description logics, i.e. multi-modal logics chosen specifically for computational expediency.
Also, I wouldn't describe JSON-LD as a "relic" of anything. It's a fairly recent standard in the grand scheme of things, and many interesting projects these days implicitly rely on it.
Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me
#54I 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 th…
The OP mentions property graphs as a way around this problem. They can be seen as natural extensions of "RDF quads" which in turn are based on common RDF triples (Subject / Property / Object)
Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me
#55I am still a fan of Googles OpenRefine tool. It's reconciliation feature that helps disambiguate Named Entities etc based on wikidata is really powerful - https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/wiki/Reconciliation You can hook in your own reconciliation end point which we do at work to expand internal knowledge graphs.
This is awesome, thanks so much for sharing. I'm really surprised I've never come across it because I've thought of building something like this before.
I really want to look into how this could ingest my own post-GDPR data exports, as well as data sanitization for ML projects.
Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me
#56I 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…
> a large number of extremely toxic people that drive people away
It's funny you say that because as soon as I saw semantic web I had a negative emotional nostalgia. I can hardly remember all of the RDF/RSS/Atom stuff from way, way back or what the trigger for that is but I just remember there being rancor swirling around the whole thing. I think there was some petty arguments about who deserved credit for the creation of the formats or something? Wasn't it between a bunch of bloggers? Then XHTML became a battleground since some groups were trying to keep semantic tags out of it while other people wanted them in. I remember just feeling exhausted every time the subject came up since it was like emacs vs. vim or space vs. tabs wars.
The funny thing is, I believe in the promise of the semantic web. I recall Tim Berners-Lee declaring the next frontier was not open source but open data and I agree. He even co-founded an institute around it: https://theodi.org/person/sir-tim-berners-lee/
Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me
#57Semantic 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 solut…
> you want a way to infer facts based on first order logic Isn't that computationally infeasible? Semantic web standards are based on description logics, i.e. multi-modal logics chosen specifically for computational expediency. Also, I wouldn't describe JSON-LD as a "relic" of anything. It's a fairly recent standard in the grand scheme of things, and many interesting projects these days implicitly rely on it.
So not an expert in this area, would love if someone corrects me. My understanding is generally FOL is infeasible. Propositional logic even can be computationaly difficult [1]. My understanding is that most of the semantic web stuff is done using a description logic of some flavor. These will be named based on the properties of the logic. The important thing is that they are generally decidable, and you can use something like MALET or some other solver to infer things from your database or ontology.(You give up some expressivity for decidability) Not sure how much stuff is going on with that these days. Played with a petrology ontology in protegé some back in college, but haven't followed the space. I remember OWL being important, but can't remember why at the moment.
[1] For example if you try to figure out if a formula is satisfiable. You can for sure do this using truth tables. The catch is that you're looking at 2^n complexity where n is the number of propositions in your formula.
Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 off…
In general the decentralised fetishism isn't something that is big in academia (as in the academia that publishes paper). There's lots of issues in academia and even more with the semantic web, but fetishism of decentralisation isn't it.
Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me
#59I am still a fan of Googles OpenRefine tool. It's reconciliation feature that helps disambiguate Named Entities etc based on wikidata is really powerful - https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/wiki/Reconciliation You can hook in your own reconciliation end point which we do at work to expand internal knowledge graphs.
Note that OpenRefine isn't really kept up to date.
The basic capabilities work ok, but lots of the additional capabilities have atrophied away.
Re: I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't imagine what semantic tags would pollute a blog's markup as most of the semantic tags were designed to structure simple text content like a blog post. Do you have any examples? > Is it for search engines? Yes. And Accessibility.
I think you might be confusing semantic HTML with the semantic web. (Which is understandable given the mention of semantic tags.) Using semantic HTML means using rather than yet another . What GP is referring to, however, is adding extra information to your HTML detailing what kind of data is in your tags, e.g.: Christopher Froome was sponsored by Sky in the Tour de France. Here, the vocab, typeof and property attrib…
You're right, I was conflating the two overlapping concepts.