3 ms·

I agree. I wouldn't be surprised to see RDF creep into a niche of the web where hard-semantic data is already a requirement (and this would just be standardizi

by wheels 19y ago

I agree. I wouldn't be surprised to see RDF creep into a niche of the web where hard-semantic data is already a requirement (and this would just be standardizing it), but I feel like in both psychology and web structure, meaning is something that is an emergent property, not something that's hard-coded into the raw data. Determining meaning from chaos is the impressive feat of modern search and the human psyche.

bct 19y ago
> meaning is something that is an emergent property, not something that's hard-coded into the raw data. Unless you store everything in unstructured text, it is hard-coded into the data. When you stick an article in a database, you're saying "this is a title", "this is who wrote it", etc.
- wheels 19y ago
  Sure. A lot of stuff is structured and some standardization may happen there. But let's say that somebody posts a really good comment here that becomes an authoritative source on something or another. You're not going to get the sort of fine-grained meta data that the semantic web expects. Titles are boring. We can get that from HTML already. And web search got a lot better when that and a lot of other structural metadata started being almost wholesale ignored. Where I could see the semantic web catching on would be in things like Amazon shops or something, where it was advantageous to be able to provide a homogenous interface to a given set of structured data. On the other hand, it wouldn't be in Amazon's interest for that to be the case, because for them the world works better when they get to define the rules and the API and it doesn't easily transfer to another store.
  - bct 19y ago
    > You're not going to get the sort of fine-grained meta data that the semantic web expects. Like what? Articles was a bad choice of example for me to use, because it's a common misconception that the Semantic Web is about making it easier to find documents. That's part of it, but (IMO) data about things is a lot more interesting than data about documents.
riklomas 19y ago
You could say that this is what Microformats are trying to achieve. The problem that Microformats has at the moment is that there isn't enough developers implementing them to make anything particularly useful, which in turn puts off other developers from implementing them as they think "what's the point?". Hopefully in time, Microformats reach a tipping point whereby it's the next hip thing a la Ajax and Rails.
- jgrahamc 19y ago
  Actually, what I'd like to see is web-wide tagging and then let the tags evolve. For example, I'd like to be able to wrap anything in a web page with <tag name="?"></tag> <tag name="phone">212 555 1963</tag>
  - bct 19y ago
    The main difference between your idea and eRDF or RDFa is lack of namespaces. The "web-wide tagging" and "let the tagging evolve" bits are a huge part of RDF.

by wheels 19y ago

bct 19y ago

> meaning is something that is an emergent property, not something that's hard-coded into the raw data. Unless you store everything in unstructured text, it is hard-coded into the data. When you stick an article in a database, you're saying "this is a title", "this is who wrote it", etc.

wheels 19y ago
Sure. A lot of stuff is structured and some standardization may happen there. But let's say that somebody posts a really good comment here that becomes an authoritative source on something or another. You're not going to get the sort of fine-grained meta data that the semantic web expects. Titles are boring. We can get that from HTML already. And web search got a lot better when that and a lot of other structural metadata started being almost wholesale ignored. Where I could see the semantic web catching on would be in things like Amazon shops or something, where it was advantageous to be able to provide a homogenous interface to a given set of structured data. On the other hand, it wouldn't be in Amazon's interest for that to be the case, because for them the world works better when they get to define the rules and the API and it doesn't easily transfer to another store.
- bct 19y ago
  > You're not going to get the sort of fine-grained meta data that the semantic web expects. Like what? Articles was a bad choice of example for me to use, because it's a common misconception that the Semantic Web is about making it easier to find documents. That's part of it, but (IMO) data about things is a lot more interesting than data about documents.

riklomas 19y ago

You could say that this is what Microformats are trying to achieve. The problem that Microformats has at the moment is that there isn't enough developers implementing them to make anything particularly useful, which in turn puts off other developers from implementing them as they think "what's the point?". Hopefully in time, Microformats reach a tipping point whereby it's the next hip thing a la Ajax and Rails.

jgrahamc 19y ago
Actually, what I'd like to see is web-wide tagging and then let the tags evolve. For example, I'd like to be able to wrap anything in a web page with <tag name="?"></tag> <tag name="phone">212 555 1963</tag>
- bct 19y ago
  The main difference between your idea and eRDF or RDFa is lack of namespaces. The "web-wide tagging" and "let the tagging evolve" bits are a huge part of RDF.