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Tim Berners-Lee loves to wax poetic on the evolution of our mental model of what's important and what we consider to be the nodes in the computing graph: TCP/I

by joelg 10y ago

Tim Berners-Lee loves to wax poetic on the evolution of our mental model of what's important and what we consider to be the nodes in the computing graph: TCP/IP: "It's not the wires, it's the computers!" HTTP/HTML: "It's not the computers, it's the documents!" Semantic Web (/Fathom): "It's not the documents, it's the things that they are about!" https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Abstractions.html https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Abstractions.html I look forward to the day when the idea of discrete, atomic documents is finally abstracted away in the same manner that we abstracted away the physical machines that host them.

ZenoArrow 10y ago
I agree that our uses for the web will evolve again once we embrace the semantic web. To repurpose some marketing-speak, I see the semantic web as 'Web 3.0' (as it goes beyond the possibilities of the web apps of 'Web 2.0'). There does seem to be some overloading of the term 'semantic web' though. Sometimes the term is used to refer to semantic markup, such as using the <em> HTML tag instead of using the <i> HTML tag... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_HTML https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_HTML Other times, the term semantic web is used to refer to structured meaning transmitted through specialised metadata... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web Fathom seems to sit across the two, though I'd suggest it's closer to the first, unless it's used as a tool to analyse the design of existing web pages for the benefit of new website designs (combined with site usage data, e.g. bounce rates, etc...).
- janober 10y ago
  Totally agree! The semantic web (Web 3.0) will change a lot how we for example interact with websites and will finally make the information on the web usable. Currently every website lives in its own little world. As long as we stay on one page it kind of works and I can for example sort and filter by properties, however as soon as I want to combine the information of different pages this ends (example if I want to see the hotel I stay in with the best restaurants in the city from yelp). That is the reason why we currently work on http://link.fish http://link.fish which is a smart bookmark manager and allows people to work with the information behind the urls. We are currently in a closed beta but am happy about anybody who gives honest feedback. Here is a short 2 min (low quality) demo video which shows how it works: https://youtu.be/Chfy3le5gY0 https://youtu.be/Chfy3le5gY0
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    Link.fish looks promising, I can see it being a useful tool. Best of luck with it.
    - janober 10y ago
      Thanks & great to hear!
choosername 10y ago
they are still the same kind of machine
nl 10y ago
Note that the Fathom approach rejects TBL's vision of standardized markup for semantics, and instead favours a rule based approach similar to the many "content extraction" services/apis/browser add ins. I'd note that Google's Knowledge Vault paper[1] found that "semantic web"-type technologies (very widely interpreted as anything that used metadata) was pretty useless as a source of data: only 0.25M out of 140M total "facts" extracted using those annotations were classified as high confidence (ie 0.2%). This is in contrast to a DOM-rules based approach (which seems similar to Fathom) which extracted 94M out of 1200M total (ie 8%). The Semantic Web is dead, and the KV paper buried it. [1] https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~murphyk/Papers/kv-kdd14.pdf https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~murphyk/Papers/kv-kdd14.pdf

by joelg 10y ago

ZenoArrow 10y ago

I agree that our uses for the web will evolve again once we embrace the semantic web. To repurpose some marketing-speak, I see the semantic web as 'Web 3.0' (as it goes beyond the possibilities of the web apps of 'Web 2.0'). There does seem to be some overloading of the term 'semantic web' though. Sometimes the term is used to refer to semantic markup, such as using the <em> HTML tag instead of using the <i> HTML tag... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_HTML https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_HTML Other times, the term semantic web is used to refer to structured meaning transmitted through specialised metadata... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web Fathom seems to sit across the two, though I'd suggest it's closer to the first, unless it's used as a tool to analyse the design of existing web pages for the benefit of new website designs (combined with site usage data, e.g. bounce rates, etc...).

janober 10y ago
Totally agree! The semantic web (Web 3.0) will change a lot how we for example interact with websites and will finally make the information on the web usable. Currently every website lives in its own little world. As long as we stay on one page it kind of works and I can for example sort and filter by properties, however as soon as I want to combine the information of different pages this ends (example if I want to see the hotel I stay in with the best restaurants in the city from yelp). That is the reason why we currently work on http://link.fish http://link.fish which is a smart bookmark manager and allows people to work with the information behind the urls. We are currently in a closed beta but am happy about anybody who gives honest feedback. Here is a short 2 min (low quality) demo video which shows how it works: https://youtu.be/Chfy3le5gY0 https://youtu.be/Chfy3le5gY0
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  Link.fish looks promising, I can see it being a useful tool. Best of luck with it.
  - janober 10y ago
    Thanks & great to hear!

choosername 10y ago

they are still the same kind of machine

nl 10y ago

Note that the Fathom approach rejects TBL's vision of standardized markup for semantics, and instead favours a rule based approach similar to the many "content extraction" services/apis/browser add ins. I'd note that Google's Knowledge Vault paper[1] found that "semantic web"-type technologies (very widely interpreted as anything that used metadata) was pretty useless as a source of data: only 0.25M out of 140M total "facts" extracted using those annotations were classified as high confidence (ie 0.2%). This is in contrast to a DOM-rules based approach (which seems similar to Fathom) which extracted 94M out of 1200M total (ie 8%). The Semantic Web is dead, and the KV paper buried it. [1] https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~murphyk/Papers/kv-kdd14.pdf https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~murphyk/Papers/kv-kdd14.pdf