modern NLP makes the semantic web completely obsolete. if anything, you need less markup because it's confusing and more often than not, just wrong.
As for semantic markup being confusing and usually wrong, I don't know where you get that.
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modern NLP makes the semantic web completely obsolete. if anything, you need less markup because it's confusing and more often than not, just wrong.
As for semantic markup being confusing and usually wrong, I don't know where you get that.
modern NLP makes the semantic web completely obsolete. if anything, you need less markup because it's confusing and more often than not, just wrong.
This is too extreme. If, like Google, you have a flock of Ph.D.s who you can put onto an NLP problem to extract semantics from text, then semantic markup becomes less valuable. Not all of us are in that situation. And I don't think parsing text is the only application of the semantic web. Having hugs databases full of knowledge is interesting in itself. As for semantic markup being confusing and usually wrong, I don'…
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…
Or maybe contact O'Reilly and write an intro book "Semantic Web: Just the Good Parts" for their series.
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…
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.
Maybe it's just the subset of the community that I choose to deal with, but the folks on the Jena mailing lists (pre and post Apache) have always been very gracious and helpful in my experience. And Ralph Hodgson, one of the co-founders of Top Quadrant came to a Triangle Java User's Group talk that I once gave on Semantic Web technologies, along with a bunch of other Top Quadrant people... and despite the fact that my company competes with them in certain areas, they were perfectly cordial and pleasant to interact with. Likewise for the other times that I've had Top Quadrant folks show up at events where I was speaking.
Maybe it's just dumb luck on my part, or whatever, but I have found no major issues with toxic people in the SemWeb community. shrug
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 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…
This is why much of the hubbub over property graphs puzzles me. If you need a relationship to have its own properties in an RDF graph, just turn it into a class. What's the big deal?
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…
It's interesting how perceptions vary. I've been working with SemWeb stuff for a decade or so, and I have never experienced what you describe here: 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. Maybe it's just the subset of the community that I choose to deal with, but the folk…
Databases, that are run on a shoe string, aren't stable so we're going to make everything federated with linked fragments? Fine, give it a go but you don't need to go on and on about how databases are inadequate because someone isn't willing to foot the AWS bill so they can host dbpedia for ya.
Lets have a go at JSON-LD. RDF/XML is finally recognized as a mistake. A somewhat reasonable mistake because everyone was XML crazy at the time. So what do we do? The exact same thing except this time it's JSON. But it's even worse. We choose a serialization that is prized for its simplicity and we foist the entire RDF stack onto it? Then they claim that JSON-LD isn't about the semantic web so we're good and Jedi mind trick it with, "This isn't the RDF you're looking for".
Because we aren't done overcomplicating simple things we take aim at CSV with CSVW. Granted CSV has some subtle complexities but it's easy and reasonably compact. So now we're going to add metadata to csv files with rdf and then serialize it into JSON as JSON-LD. Great. How do I find this metadata. Either a well known location or in a link header. Whoops I can't publish metadata and reference your csv file. Lets convert your csv fie to rdf. WTF. my 500Mb csv file just became 1.5B triples and it's taking 8hrs. to load it into my triple store!
Don't get me started on people who call themselves ontologists. They're really zombies but instead of eating brains they eat budgets. They should be dispatched the same way, with a shotgun blast to the face. They generally can't justify their decision even though there is a framework to do that, onto clean. I have yet to meet one who even knew what that was. They just convince management that what they're doing is intellectually unattainable by mere developers although they'd be lost without protege, top braid, or excel and what they produce is generally an incomputable pile of garbage. It's always OWL full. "Class or property? Class or Property? Well is is an "is a" relationship."
I'm done writing so I'll just include a list of the half baked ideas that sound good but are a day late and a dollar short. LDP, R2RML, ShEX, SHACL, DCAT, RDF Data Cube, WebID.....
My wife always says to say something nice so I'm going to say SKOS. SKOS is ok.
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…
> 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 creati…
You're mixing in some stuff, that aren't really Semantic Web related.
RSS vs. Atom was less about the Semantic Web than an squibble between different XML formats, one very loosely specified, the other more ... well-formed. The Semantic Web did had a small foot in the RSS wars - the very first RSS (RSS 0.9 from Netscape) was RDF based and for a short time RSS 1.0 wanted to rebuild RSS on an RDF basis for the expandability of the Semantic Web, but the later discussion were about the XML variants of RSS and then Atom, wether the spec was adequate, wether it was frozen or how and wether it should be fixed, etc.
The XHTML discussions were less about elements in my recollection but about parsing models. XHTML reformulated HTML als XML which meant an error model with no error correction but failure on the first error. And XHTML 2 tried to evolve structural elements by being not backward compatible but defining a somewhat different new dialect. The backslash against XHTML was against that, a group sponsored by the browser makers then formed which wanted to evolve backwards-compatible and to standardize the parsing of tag soup → HTML5.
(„Semantic elements“ were often a shorthand for „instead of a dumb div use the appropriate HTML element. That was more the quest of the web standards project than the Semantic Web.)
(Slight overlap: How to embed Semantic Web statements has a small relationship with XHTML - RDFa started imho in an XHTML 2 module.)
I somewhat miss that time. All these bloggers with an interest in web standards and how to do them best had their own idealism and the cross blog and W3C discussions were always interesting. Today web standards don't have that publicity and idealism anymore, they seem more like an engineering collaboration of the 2½ big browser makers which get to decide among themselves. Maybe it was always so, but it seemed different at that time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting how perceptions vary. I've been working with SemWeb stuff for a decade or so, and I have never experienced what you describe here: 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. Maybe it's just the subset of the community that I choose to deal with, but the folk…
Yes, there are some wonderful people in there. Andy Seaborne has always impressed me with his thoughtful responses. I won't call out any of the bad apples. Usually a question goes something like, "Uh, I'm new to the semantic web and I'd like to do X" and the response is, "this is how it works, you're a dummy and you need to understand how brilliant the semantic web is and you don't need to be doing what you're asking…
Finally? From what I've seen, most everybody in the SemWeb community moved on to N3 or Turtle over a decade ago, with a little bit of interest in the aforementioned JSON-LD.
I'm a fan of SKOS myself.
I may remain more of a fan of SemWeb tech because I say away from the edges. Out of LDP, R2RML, ShEX, SHACL, DCAT, RDF Data Cube, WebID....., I use none of those. Add GRDDL to the list of things I don't need as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 creati…
> I can hardly remember all of the RDF/RSS/Atom stuff from way … You're mixing in some stuff, that aren't really Semantic Web related. RSS vs. Atom was less about the Semantic Web than an squibble between different XML formats, one very loosely specified, the other more ... well-formed. The Semantic Web did had a small foot in the RSS wars - the very first RSS (RSS 0.9 from Netscape) was RDF based and for a short tim…
Atom/RSS was involved in the debate because they were also trying to solve the metadata issue. Things like "author", "publish date", etc. are just as relevant to aggregation/syndication formats as it is to the document itself. Again, I'm summoning my fallible memory here, but one argument was if the metadata is relevant to both documents then it ought to be stored separately and linked to the HTML/RSS docs using a URL.
XHTML was involved because as an XML format it was conceivable to store your metadata separately AND to use XSLT to transform it into your XHTML/RSS/Atom document on demand. So RDF, Atom, RSS and XHTML authors all wanted a say on a metadata format that would suit all of those use cases. That is a tall order.
My personal feeling about the death of XHTML was it wasn't one big thing that killed it. It was hundreds of smaller disputes like this one.