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The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web

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Re: The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web

#51

Post by kortex »

lyxsus wrote: post #46
jerf wrote: post #42

The reason why the semantic web is even more fundamental: You can't get everyone to agree on one schema. Period. Even if everyone is motivated to, they can't agree, and if there is even a hint of a reason to try to distinguish oneself or strategically fail to label data or label it incorrectly, it becomes even more impossible. (I mean, the "semantic web" has foundered so completely and utterly on the problem of even…

There're a lot of wrong perspectives on the topic in this thread, but this one I like the most. When someone starts to talk about "agreeing on a single schema/ontology" it's a solid indicator that that someone needs to get back to rtfm (which I agree a bit too cryptic). The point here is that in semantic web there're supposed to be lots and lots of different ontologies/schemas by design, often describing the same dat…

> The point here is that in semantic web there're supposed to be lots and lots of different ontologies/schemas by design, often describing the same data.

This is incredibly problematic for many reasons. Not the least of which is the inevitable promulgation of bad data/schemas. I remember one ontology for scientific instruments and I, a former chemist, identified multiple catastrophically incorrect classifications (I forget the details, but something like classifying NMR as a kind of chromatography. Clear indicators the owl author didn't know the domain).

The only thing worse than a bad schema is multiple bad schemas of varying badness, and not knowing which to pick. Especially if there is disjoint aspects of each which are (in)correct.

There may have been advancements in the few years since I was in the space, but as of then, any kind of probabilistic/doxastic ontology was unviable.

Re: The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web

#52

Post by lyxsus »

kortex wrote: post #51
lyxsus wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There're a lot of wrong perspectives on the topic in this thread, but this one I like the most. When someone starts to talk about "agreeing on a single schema/ontology" it's a solid indicator that that someone needs to get back to rtfm (which I agree a bit too cryptic). The point here is that in semantic web there're supposed to be lots and lots of different ontologies/schemas by design, often describing the same dat…

> The point here is that in semantic web there're supposed to be lots and lots of different ontologies/schemas by design, often describing the same data. This is incredibly problematic for many reasons. Not the least of which is the inevitable promulgation of bad data/schemas. I remember one ontology for scientific instruments and I, a former chemist, identified multiple catastrophically incorrect classifications (I…

That's a valid point, but I'm not sure, the following problem has a technical solution:

> Clear indicators the owl author didn't know the domain

Re: The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web

#53

Post by mxmilkiib »

LV2 audio plugins use RDF/Turtle;

https://github.com/lv2/lv2

  curl -H "Accept: text/turtle,application/rdf+xml" http://lv2plug.in/ns/ext/lv2core
  curl -H "Accept: text/turtle,application/rdf+xml" http://lv2plug.in/ns/ext/atom
Some hosts also use it for saving audio graphs;

https://drobilla.net/software/ingen.html http://drobilla.net/ns/ingen.html

https://github.com/moddevices/mod-factory-user-data/tree/mas... https://pedalboards.moddevices.com/

Re: The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web

#54

Post by mxmilkiib »

lysergia wrote: post #10

Long live the dream of the semantic web. For visual learners there’s a great YouTube video explaining the semantic web here: https://youtu.be/6gmP4nk0EOE

For a longer in-depth video playlist, https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoOmvuyo5UAeihlKcWpzVzB51...

Re: The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web

#55

Post by lyxsus »

jerf wrote: post #48
lyxsus wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There're a lot of wrong perspectives on the topic in this thread, but this one I like the most. When someone starts to talk about "agreeing on a single schema/ontology" it's a solid indicator that that someone needs to get back to rtfm (which I agree a bit too cryptic). The point here is that in semantic web there're supposed to be lots and lots of different ontologies/schemas by design, often describing the same dat…

"The point here is that in semantic web there're supposed to be lots and lots of different ontologies/schemas by design, often describing the same data." Then that is just another reason it will fail. We already have islands of data. The problem with those islands of data is not that we don't have a unified expression of the data, the problem is the meaning is isolated. The lack of a single input format is little mor…

so if it tries to have a unified ontology that's why it's destined to fail, but if it's designed to working with many small ontologies… that's why it will fail! lol, but you can't have it both ways.

In SW, the "semantic" part is subjective to an interpreter. You can have different data sources, partially mapped using owl to the ontology that an interpreter (your program) understands. That allows you to integrate new data sources independently from the program if they use a known ontology seamlessly or create a mapping of a set of concepts into a known ontology (which you would have do anyway in other approach). So in theory, data consumption capabilities (and reasoning) grows as your data sources evolve.

> If what you describe is the semantic web, the Semantic Web is "JSON", and solved.

It has nothing to do with JSON, JSON-LD, XML, Turtle, N3, rdfa, microdata and etc.. RDF is a data model, but those are serialisation formats. That's another interesting point, because half of the people talk only about formats and not the full stack. That's not a reasonable discussion.

> which certainly doesn't match what everyone else says it is

oh, I know it and it's upsetting.

Re: The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web

#56

Post by kortex »

lyxsus wrote: post #52
kortex wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point here is that in semantic web there're supposed to be lots and lots of different ontologies/schemas by design, often describing the same data. This is incredibly problematic for many reasons. Not the least of which is the inevitable promulgation of bad data/schemas. I remember one ontology for scientific instruments and I, a former chemist, identified multiple catastrophically incorrect classifications (I…

That's a valid point, but I'm not sure, the following problem has a technical solution: > Clear indicators the owl author didn't know the domain

It doesn't, which is exactly the problem. Ontologies inevitably have mistakes. When your reasoning is based on these "strong" graph links, even small mistakes can cascade into absolute garbage. Plus manual taxonomic classification is super time consuming (ergo expensive). Additionally, that assumes that there is very little in the way of nebulosity, which means you don't even have a solid grasp of correct/incorrect. Then you have perspectives - there is no monopoly on truth.

It's just not a good model of the world. Soft features and belief-based links are a far better way to describe observations.

Basically, every edge needs a weight, ideally a log-likelihood ratio. 0 means "I have no idea whether this relation is true or false", positive indicates truthiness and negative means the edge is more likely to be false than true.

Really, the whole graph needs to be learnable. It doesn't really matter if NMR is a chromatographic method. Why do you care what kind of instrument it is? Then apply attributes based on behaviors ("it analyses chemicals", "it generates n-dim frequency-domain data")

Re: The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web

#57

Post by convolvatron »

leoxv wrote: post #29
ggleason wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's discussed in the article though. The open world assumption is untenable. Having shareable interoperable schemata that can refer to each-other safely would be a god send however. And that's what is currently very hard but needn't be.

What is "unsafe, untenable or hard" about embedding some JSON-LD (which is just some JSON metadata, transformed using a small JS library), like I did here: https://twitter.com/conzept__/status/1552719001826074625 Whether you trust the URIs or the data that was placed there is not a problem for the semantic web. The fact that you _can_ state these things and relate to other resources and concepts on the web is already…

people should use something like json-schema to publish their structure. this doesn't solve the root denotation problem, but it would help a lot.

Re: The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web

#58

Post by wrnr »

lyxsus wrote: post #46
jerf wrote: post #42

The reason why the semantic web is even more fundamental: You can't get everyone to agree on one schema. Period. Even if everyone is motivated to, they can't agree, and if there is even a hint of a reason to try to distinguish oneself or strategically fail to label data or label it incorrectly, it becomes even more impossible. (I mean, the "semantic web" has foundered so completely and utterly on the problem of even…

There're a lot of wrong perspectives on the topic in this thread, but this one I like the most. When someone starts to talk about "agreeing on a single schema/ontology" it's a solid indicator that that someone needs to get back to rtfm (which I agree a bit too cryptic). The point here is that in semantic web there're supposed to be lots and lots of different ontologies/schemas by design, often describing the same dat…

I've been part of 4 commercial project that used the semantic web in one way or another. All these project or at least their semantic web part where a failure. I think that I have a good idea on where the misunderstanding about the semantic web originate. The author does seem to have a good understanding and is right about the semantic web forcing everything into a single schema. Academia sells the straight jacked of the semantic web as a life long free lunch at an all-you-can eat-buffet but instead you are convicted to a life sentence in prison. Adopting RDF is just too costly because it is never the way computers or humans structure data in order to work with it. Of course everything can be organised in a hyper graph, there is a reason why Steven Wolfram also uses this structure, they just so flexible. At the end of the day I don't agree with the author opinion of the semantic web having much of a future, I did my best but it didn't work out, time for other things.

Re: The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web

#60

Post by lyxsus »

kortex wrote: post #56
lyxsus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a valid point, but I'm not sure, the following problem has a technical solution: > Clear indicators the owl author didn't know the domain

It doesn't, which is exactly the problem. Ontologies inevitably have mistakes. When your reasoning is based on these "strong" graph links, even small mistakes can cascade into absolute garbage. Plus manual taxonomic classification is super time consuming (ergo expensive). Additionally, that assumes that there is very little in the way of nebulosity, which means you don't even have a solid grasp of correct/incorrect.…

Understood, thank you.

Yes, that's not solvable with just OWL (though it might help a little) or any other popular reasoners I know. There're papers, proposals and experimental implementations for generating probability-based inferences, but nothing one can just take and use, but there're tons of interesting ideas on how to represent that kind of data in RDF or reason about.

I think the correct solution in SW context would be to add a custom reasoner to the stack.

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