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My lasting (but maybe wrong) impression of the semantic web was that it was basically about interconnecting things. I think when focus shifted to mobile, where

by uola 10y ago

My lasting (but maybe wrong) impression of the semantic web was that it was basically about interconnecting things. I think when focus shifted to mobile, where closed app store with isolated apps were the norm, that idea became less practical. But I can't say if it was because of mobile or just that the companies "grew up" and this was then reflected in not adopting the semantic web and how mobile was designed.

hosh 10y ago
There is a part of the semantic web being subsumed by AIs. Viv, Alexa, and Google's and Apple's offering will be interesting as people start creating apps for those. (And as you said, timing and how widespread things get is fuzzy). Another part of semantic web that had not taken off had to do with www itself. For example, in thinking about blockchain and ipfs, it's possible to create a fully decentralized data store. But to do it well, we'd need to incorporate the semantic web ... And possibly machine learning. I don't think anyone has yet figured out how to do a fully decentralized AI yet.
- bogomipz 10y ago
  Interesting, my probably incorrect assumptions are that the semantic web was largely 2000s era hype that didn't really take off. What are Vivs, Google and Apples semantic web offerings? I guess you are referring to the knowledge graph API from Google? Also what's an ipfs?
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > What are Vivs, Google and Apples semantic web offerings? Both Google Now and GMail/Inbox -- as well as Knowledge Graph in Google Search -- incorporate substantial functionality building on semantic web concepts. Some of them are built on Schema.org markup, which is essentially a modern, multiparty defined vocabulary semantic web markup vocabulary.
  - hosh 10y ago
    I don't think Viv is offering a semantic web offering. They are using it. Viv is a generation ahead of the current chat bot AIs, and able to deconstruct a query or a request and then construct actions. Those actions span across multiple APIs and ontologies. I'm not entirely sure how, but the Viv ontologies grows and change as Viv gets used. What would be interesting is to see how the third-party developer interfaces for Viv will look like, and whether incorporating semantic markup in data sources would make it easier to get your offering on the Viv platform. Assuming AI/MLs takes off as the next big thing (which as was asserted, it's not a certainty, but seems likely), I can see the technologies behind semantic web getting resuscitated as people try to get their offerings onto these AI platforms. IPFS is a completely decentralized store that combines a lot of older ideas in a way that hasn't been tried before. All content is content-addressable (like git), decentralized (like bittorrent), with nodes automatically discovering each other (dht), and a networking strategy that works with NATs. You can use it to publish content, and that content would be pinned or stored by the users who care about the content. One of the ways you can use IPFS is a kind of decentralized, immutable, unstructured datastore. So if you were writing an app on that, how do you make sure the data is sufficiently structured for your app? You might need to declare schemas, as well as describing a graph of how each piece of data are related to each other. Once you start trying to use IPFS as a kind of decentralized graph database, someone will probably reuse the ideas from semantic web or reinvent it.
    - bogomipz 10y ago
      +1 for mentioning Buckminster Fuller. I have a copy of Spaceship Earth on the bookshelf, a great thinker. Thanks for the detailed response, just in time for some weekend reading : )
      - udkl 10y ago
        What's a bookshelf ? ;)
        samstave 10y ago
        Its where you use old programming books to put your monitor on so its the right height for you.
  - hosh 10y ago
    One more: Buckminster Fuller had this concept of ephemeralization. He talked about how technologies get smaller and smaller until they are invisible. For example, water and sewage pipes are ephemeralized. They are ubiquitous (at least in first-world countries) _because_ they are invisible. I think that is what happened with semantic web. It didn't vaporize so much as ephemeralized. The AI/ML platform is interesting because I think a lot of it is shifting over to voice-based, rather then web-based (or mobile/tablet-based) interface. A voice-based interface is more invisible than a touch or mouse-based interface. Come to think of it, adding in the idea of ephemeralization might be a good way of getting a better estimate of timing for a technology. In such a case, voice-interface (and the AIs that power them) would probably be closer to being the next big thing than VR (based upon ephemeralization).
    - uola 10y ago
      William Gibson usually talk about how when things are new they are called with a prefix, like "electro", "cyber", "i" or "wireless". Then when it becomes commonplace it usually just sounds silly. We usually don't say "mobile phone" (unless talking about mobile vs. web/desktop) anymore, but we say things like smart-tv.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

by uola 10y ago

hosh 10y ago

There is a part of the semantic web being subsumed by AIs. Viv, Alexa, and Google's and Apple's offering will be interesting as people start creating apps for those. (And as you said, timing and how widespread things get is fuzzy). Another part of semantic web that had not taken off had to do with www itself. For example, in thinking about blockchain and ipfs, it's possible to create a fully decentralized data store. But to do it well, we'd need to incorporate the semantic web ... And possibly machine learning. I don't think anyone has yet figured out how to do a fully decentralized AI yet.

bogomipz 10y ago
Interesting, my probably incorrect assumptions are that the semantic web was largely 2000s era hype that didn't really take off. What are Vivs, Google and Apples semantic web offerings? I guess you are referring to the knowledge graph API from Google? Also what's an ipfs?
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > What are Vivs, Google and Apples semantic web offerings? Both Google Now and GMail/Inbox -- as well as Knowledge Graph in Google Search -- incorporate substantial functionality building on semantic web concepts. Some of them are built on Schema.org markup, which is essentially a modern, multiparty defined vocabulary semantic web markup vocabulary.
- hosh 10y ago
  I don't think Viv is offering a semantic web offering. They are using it. Viv is a generation ahead of the current chat bot AIs, and able to deconstruct a query or a request and then construct actions. Those actions span across multiple APIs and ontologies. I'm not entirely sure how, but the Viv ontologies grows and change as Viv gets used. What would be interesting is to see how the third-party developer interfaces for Viv will look like, and whether incorporating semantic markup in data sources would make it easier to get your offering on the Viv platform. Assuming AI/MLs takes off as the next big thing (which as was asserted, it's not a certainty, but seems likely), I can see the technologies behind semantic web getting resuscitated as people try to get their offerings onto these AI platforms. IPFS is a completely decentralized store that combines a lot of older ideas in a way that hasn't been tried before. All content is content-addressable (like git), decentralized (like bittorrent), with nodes automatically discovering each other (dht), and a networking strategy that works with NATs. You can use it to publish content, and that content would be pinned or stored by the users who care about the content. One of the ways you can use IPFS is a kind of decentralized, immutable, unstructured datastore. So if you were writing an app on that, how do you make sure the data is sufficiently structured for your app? You might need to declare schemas, as well as describing a graph of how each piece of data are related to each other. Once you start trying to use IPFS as a kind of decentralized graph database, someone will probably reuse the ideas from semantic web or reinvent it.
  - bogomipz 10y ago
    +1 for mentioning Buckminster Fuller. I have a copy of Spaceship Earth on the bookshelf, a great thinker. Thanks for the detailed response, just in time for some weekend reading : )
    - udkl 10y ago
      What's a bookshelf ? ;)
      - samstave 10y ago
        Its where you use old programming books to put your monitor on so its the right height for you.
- hosh 10y ago
  One more: Buckminster Fuller had this concept of ephemeralization. He talked about how technologies get smaller and smaller until they are invisible. For example, water and sewage pipes are ephemeralized. They are ubiquitous (at least in first-world countries) _because_ they are invisible. I think that is what happened with semantic web. It didn't vaporize so much as ephemeralized. The AI/ML platform is interesting because I think a lot of it is shifting over to voice-based, rather then web-based (or mobile/tablet-based) interface. A voice-based interface is more invisible than a touch or mouse-based interface. Come to think of it, adding in the idea of ephemeralization might be a good way of getting a better estimate of timing for a technology. In such a case, voice-interface (and the AIs that power them) would probably be closer to being the next big thing than VR (based upon ephemeralization).
  - uola 10y ago
    William Gibson usually talk about how when things are new they are called with a prefix, like "electro", "cyber", "i" or "wireless". Then when it becomes commonplace it usually just sounds silly. We usually don't say "mobile phone" (unless talking about mobile vs. web/desktop) anymore, but we say things like smart-tv.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]