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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

#81

Post by ternaryoperator »

strangattractor wrote: post #24

Having worked for an Academic Publisher that had intense interest in this I finally came to the following conclusions to why this is DOA. 1. Producers of content are unwilling to pay for it (and neither are consumers BTW) 2. It is impossible to predict how the ontology will change over time so going back and reclassifying documents to make them useful is expensive. 3. Most pieces of info have a shelf life so it is no…

Not sure I understand the comparison with Lisp. You list five reasons for the semantic web that mostly involve cost.

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

#82

Post by marviel »

fleddr wrote: post #71

You can debate syntax forever but the semantic web will never rise without the proper incentives. Not only is there no incentive for industry to participate in it, there's in fact an anti-incentive to do so. Say you've build a weather app/website. Being a good citizen, you publish "weatherevent" objects. Now anybody can consume this feed, remix it, aggregate, run some AI on it, new visualizations, whichever. A great…

As my Reinforcment Learning professor said: "It's all about incentives, people"

This is the kind of idea that begs me to reconsider crypto as a possible real-world-problem-solving-tool. But I've yet to see an example of crypto working in a way that feels like it'll take off for anything other than (1) another form of "stock" at best, or (2) a grift at worst. I suppose we're in the market for another solution.

To use a Machine Learning analogy, there's the "Credit Assignment Problem." which is basically the same thing: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ajcq9xWi2fmgn8RBJ/the-credit...

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

#83

Post by leoxv »

staplung wrote: post #75

Clay Shirky nailed in in 2003: https://deathray.us/no_crawl/others/semantic-web.html I'll just excerpt the conclusion: ``` The systems that have succeeded at scale have made simple implementation the core virtue, up the stack from Ethernet over Token Ring to the web over gopher and WAIS. The most widely adopted digital descriptor in history, the URL, regards semantics as a side conversation between consenting adults,…

"However, like many visions that project future benefits but ignore present costs, it requires too much coordination and too much energy to effect in the real world" ... Wikipedia, Wikidata, OpenStreetMaps, Archive.org, ORCID science-journal stores, and the thousands of other open linked-data platforms are proofing Clay wrong each day. He has not been relevant for a long time IMHO. Semweb > tag-taxonomies.

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

#84

Post by hosh »

This is a really fascinating analysis. I have wondered why the semantic web never took off, and I am finding myself interested in being able to create data sources in a federated way. The author’s mention of Data Mesh and his own project, TerminusDB looks like what I had been looking for, for a side project.

One adjacent project I did not see mentioned is XMPP. The extensibility of XMPP comes from being able to refer to schemas within stanzas of the payload. It’s also an interesting case study on an ecosystem built from a decentralized, extensible protocol. One of the burdens plaguing the XMPP ecosystem is spam, and I wonder to what extent we might see that if the semantic web revives again.

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

#85

Post by leoxv »

jll29 wrote: post #74
asplake wrote: post #17

Seems to miss the obvious double whammy: 1) Because it burdens producers to no obvious benefit, a problem forever 2) Because progress over time in language processing makes it less and less necessary

Natural language processing (NLP) may indeed understand the unstructured text, then according to (2), the "Semantic Web" is not needed, except for perhaps caching NLP outputs in machine-readable form. (1) is more fundamental: a lot of value-add annotation (in RDF or other forms) would be valuable, but because there is work involved those that have it don't give it away for free. This part was not sufficiently address…

"No Semantic Web until the Incentive Problem and the Trust Problem are solved."

No. The semweb is already functional as is (see my other comments here). Trust is orthogonal and can/is being solved in different ways (centralized/decentralized as in Wikidata/ORCIDs/org-ID-URIs).

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

#86

Post by [deleted] »

efitz wrote: post #63

The answer to almost any question beginning with "why don't they" (or why didn't they), is almost always "money". Producing, aggregating, storing, or otherwise adding value to information costs money. Operating the internet costs money. Providing access to data costs money. People are lazy. Businesses on the internet have learned that they can extract more money from this vast pool of lazy people by presenting inform…

[deleted]

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

#87

Post by [deleted] »

fleddr wrote: post #71

You can debate syntax forever but the semantic web will never rise without the proper incentives. Not only is there no incentive for industry to participate in it, there's in fact an anti-incentive to do so. Say you've build a weather app/website. Being a good citizen, you publish "weatherevent" objects. Now anybody can consume this feed, remix it, aggregate, run some AI on it, new visualizations, whichever. A great…

[deleted]

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

#88

Post by fleddr »

marviel wrote: post #82
fleddr wrote: post #71

You can debate syntax forever but the semantic web will never rise without the proper incentives. Not only is there no incentive for industry to participate in it, there's in fact an anti-incentive to do so. Say you've build a weather app/website. Being a good citizen, you publish "weatherevent" objects. Now anybody can consume this feed, remix it, aggregate, run some AI on it, new visualizations, whichever. A great…

As my Reinforcment Learning professor said: "It's all about incentives, people" This is the kind of idea that begs me to reconsider crypto as a possible real-world-problem-solving-tool. But I've yet to see an example of crypto working in a way that feels like it'll take off for anything other than (1) another form of "stock" at best, or (2) a grift at worst. I suppose we're in the market for another solution. To use…

I think the fundamental issue in the digital world is that you compete with the entire damn world.

When I open a bakery, competition is limited to just a few miles of space. Provided I provide a decent product, I can exist. This idea allows for millions of independent bakeries to exist around the world, which is awesome. It provides great diversity in products, genuine creativity, cultural differentiation, meaningful local employment.

When you need to compete with the entire world, it's a different game altogether. Everything you do digitally can fairly easily be replicated at low cost. This creates an unstoppable force of centralization fueled by capital but also consumer preference: they rather have one service that has it all.

So even if you found a way to pay for data use (via crypto or not) all power will continue to flow to a dominant party.

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

#89

Post by lyxsus »

wrnr wrote: post #58
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…

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…

> semantic web forcing everything into a single schema

I don't think "forcing" is the right word here, I think the right one would be "expects it to converge under practical incentives". That's a more gentle statement that reflects the fact, that it doesn't have to for SW tech to work.

Also, the term "schema" is a bit off, bc there's really no such thing in there. You can have the same graph described differently using different ontologies at the same moment without changing underlying data model, accessible via the same interface. It's a very different approach.

> never the way computers or humans structure data in order to work with it

If you haven't mentioned that you had an experience, I would say you confuse different layers of technology, because graph data model is a natural representation of many complex problems. But because you have, can I ask you to clarify what you mean here?

> Academia sells the straight jacked of the semantic web as a life long free lunch at an all-you-can eat-buffet

I disagree, bc I in fact think that academia doesn't sell shit, and that's the problem. There's no clear marketing proposal and I don't think they really bother or equipped to make it. There's a lack of human-readable specs and docs, it's insane how much time you need to invest in this topic even just to be able estimate whenever it's a reasonable to consider using SW in a first place. Also, lack of conceptual framework, "walkthroughs", tools, outdated information, incorrect information drops survival chance of a SW-based project by at least x100. But it can really shine in some use-cases, that unfortunately have little to do with the "web" itself.

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

#90

Post by TylerE »

kukkeliskuu wrote: post #80

There are deeper issues with semantic web. Look at the EDIFACT. Huge standardization effort, but it was still not possible to automate system to system communication, because ultimately you need to rely on some words, and words are flexible. I was working with multiple companies that understood "through-invoicing" in EDIFACT differently, but the differences were so subtle they needed a third party to clarify those di…

Sort of reminds me of the original idea behind REST. IMO automated system-to-system is a dead end... you're always going to need humans in the loop for any useful non-trivial data.
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