7 ms·

Other than the oft-repeated 'machine readable', I'm having a hard time getting over the conceptual hump of what the Semantic Web is.

• trevelyan 19y ago
  I work with semantic analysis technology (no, it isn't profitable), and think this is a really good summary. The useful applications long-term are in areas like machine translation (contextual semantic knowledge is important), document categorization and indexing for search (ie. semantic data-scraping). Indexing for search is the simplest of the bunch and the most likely use of the tech that we'll see soon. RWW has it right that the major challenge this poses to Google is a proliferation of industry specific applications that monetize better information management by virtue of knowing exactly what their users want and figuring out creative ways to aggregate it. Google is particularly weak with multiple languages: their focus on language-agnostic translation tools makes them vulnerable in foreign markets. Then again, if Google provides the tools to let these vertical portals manage their own on-site advertising, who cares who is doing the actual document indexing/analysis?
  • leaf 19y ago
    It's been a really long time since I looked at this kind of stuff in any detail. The librarians I worked with at university would go on and on about semantic markup, and there were some very dedicated users that seemed to be willing to slog through the SGML nightmare. But, as soon as HTML came out it swamped the other technologies because it was so easy for people. Has anything changed since the SGML days? Rhetorically, it all still sounds like a bunch of librarians complaining woefully that they can't do search properly if no one marks up their data properly.
    • deleted 19y ago
      [deleted]
    • trevelyan 19y ago
      Nothing much has changed. Most of the talk about the semantic web is complete hot air. It isn't as if this stuff is counterintuitive or non-obvious -- it's just that no-one wants to go through the work of teaching machines to understand language/text without a way to profit from it.
• michaelneale 19y ago
  Semweb solution is to add annotations to everything (tags), so its obvious to a machine what the information means (ie, the content providers/authors do more work up front to provide more automation later). Versus the crawl the web and index approach with unstructured data (which google are very very good at, clearly). I see it a bit like the static/dynamic typing "disagreements" people have (heck I disagree with myself, frequently).
• xirium 19y ago
  It would great if client application had understanding of context rather than blindly performing layout or having fragile scripts which scrape content. Today, if you access an ecommerce website and retreive a page which describes one or more products then your browser only obtains HTML for layout. The number of products and the fields are not apparent to the software. If the content was explicit then you could do more. For example, you could have a client which could switch to product thumbnails. You could have clients or servers performing meaningful price comparisons on more products. For event listings, information could be added to calendar software more easily. For social networking, contacts could be added more easily. The central idea with semantic web is that layout isn't the final use of information.