4 ms·

I've said it before, I'll say it again. The semantic web is a pipedream. It's never, ever going to happen. The whole idiotic scheme hinges on the notion that pe

by jamess 18y ago

I've said it before, I'll say it again. The semantic web is a pipedream. It's never, ever going to happen. The whole idiotic scheme hinges on the notion that people are going to spend a whole bunch of extra time adding intelligent metadata to their data. Never. Going. To. Happen. I find it far more likely that we'll have built a practical AI before the semantic web ever happens, at which point all semantic efforts will be obsolete. Of course, if there's anything more masturbatory than the semantic web, it's microformats. Hey! You there! Don't link to a vcard object, that's yesterday's deal. Instead, painstakingly reproduce your vcard in XML! Yeah, that's a good idea, isn't it. Lets take a widely supported data format that many people already have, and turn it in to a completely unsupported, poorly specified fantasy format. Then you can maintain two copies of the same data! Endless fun. It's just a symptom of the general web malaise. Am I crazy or was it once possible for real human beings to write web pages? You know, before you had to remember 90 pages of how CSS worked? The W3C these days seems to be where small minds go to die, and even TBL isn't helping.

piers 18y ago
So that's a no then?
justindz 18y ago
The average Joe seems to be moving towards a web presence based on a blogging platform or a social network or a CMS. If app providers build semantically and enterprises or large data set publishers build semantically, you could conceivably end up with a reasonably semantic web for content of value. I think the idealists are on to something, but as usual they are whacking off over the thought that one day everything will be semantic. That's the pipedream to which you rightly refer. What I said above will not take place for many home-spun sites or apps or businesses that can't justify the cost with added value or increased revenue.
- jamess 18y ago
  Only in the sense of "metadata you get for free." It's perfectly reasonable for, say, a CMS to semantically mark up when an article was posted. That's free. The server knows the date, so why not? It's not hurting anyone. Similarly, a camera with a GPS chip could easily add LAT/LONG EXIF metadata to every photo, except for the power, that's free too. You could use that to answer queries like "give me all photos taken in Laos in the past year", for example. Nothing wrong with that. Where it breaks down is that there isn't enough free metadata to make the semantic web worthwhile. It relies on people actually saying "This is an address I'm typing right now... this is the street component of the address... This is the City..." It's ridiculous. Certainly, there'll be special purpose applications making use of free metadata in the future, but the whole web being semantic will never happen.
  - justindz 18y ago
    Google Maps seems to do a pretty good job of parsing addresses. Given a database of say, US city names, state names and zip codes, could an API not be built that would recognize something like that and wrap it in a microformat either by a stupid simple API call or just as an auto-expanding template type feature? I agree with you that the average user (which includes business, etc.) will not do it significantly unless it's effortless so I wonder if app platforms or frameworks can make it more effortless in this way. That combined with some level of justified business value in some sectors could be our best stab at a practically, usefully, partially semantic web. Being pragmatic, I'm not one to say that unless the whole web is semantic then we give up. I'm also not one to believe the whole web will be semantic or that all of it really needs to be.
    - jamess 18y ago
      If you had a machine that could recognise addresses with reasonable accuracy and zero false positives, you wouldn't NEED microformats or the semantic web. That's the whole point, smart humans spending their time compensating for the stupidity of machines. It's a boil the ocean strategy that only makes any kind of economic sense of consider your users peons whose time has no value. Spending time making machines smarter is an investment in the future, the semantic web is an admission of defeat. Also, Google doesn't parse addresses at all, it uses its index data the same way it does spell checking.
  - wanorris 18y ago
    Not all websites are basically just documents with a management interface, however. Remember, there are an awful lot of sites with database back ends that store structured data. The technical difficulty of emitting that structured data out into a web page using a microformat (or RDFa, or whatever) is going to be pretty low, so if it's useful (for SEO or anything else), I expect it will start happening.
- phaedrus 18y ago
  What use is semantic metadata that is generated automatically? The whole point of "semantic" is that it's created by humans to describe the data; you can't get around the "extra work" requirement without defeating the uniqueness of the semantic tags. And if the extra work still stands, the average Joe will not bother with it. Hell, I wouldn't bother with it, in any form.
Readmore 18y ago
I hear what you're saying but I don't think it's as easy to dismiss as that. There are ways that microformats or semantic data could easily start showing up in websites. If a web framework, like say Rails, supported microformat creation based on your models then it wouldn't cost the developer or user any more time to markup that data. All of a sudden your movie app starts automatically inserting semantic movie info about the actors, director, etc which can link back to authoritative sources. I'm not saying that it WILL happen, but I think it is definitely doable. With a framework like Rails your schema is already available to the program. If we just had one more generator (or more likely a gem for each supported microformat) then you could get semantic data in your app for almost free.
- jamess 18y ago
  Well, imagine you're right. What then? Once you have all the magical, microformatted metadata what is it exactly you do with it? The canonical semantic web idea is that you build ontologies and search them. Now you have a new problem. How do you know which metadata is trustworthy? You'd be a fool to think people aren't going to attempt to game the system. If I search for "all articles about Lucy Liu", how is it that your semantic web search engine filters articles that are really about Lucy Liu from those that are merely marked up to make them appear so? You've just substituted a problem that requires as much intelligence as adding the metadata in the first place. Hell, what am I saying? Trust is a far harder problem. Even Google haven't cracked that one yet.
  - Readmore 18y ago
    So now that I've answered the 'How do you do it question' I have to also explain what would be done with it? Alright that's fine. Yahoo is already parsing microformats out of it's search results, so if two sites are otherwise equal in content and my site has microformat information about the data I'm going to get a better relevancy ranking from Yahoo than you are, which translates to more hits and more money. More data beats better algorithms, I've seen that on this site about a dozen times in the last few weeks but when the 'more data' is overhyped like the Semantic Web everyone decides that it's totally pointless. Your other point, that 'people will game it' is an amazingly bad reason to not do something. Think if Google had looked at PageRank and said: "yeah that's cool but all people have to do is make a link farm and they can game the system, making a new search engine is pointless." With the level of intelligence and Hackertude that is available on this site I'm pretty astounded that there are so much vocal opposition to the Semantic Web. You're not going to beat Google in standard search but something like this could give a startup a leg-up in the market place. Maybe we should start looking at ways to answer the questions instead of just throwing our hands up in the air and saying that it won't work.
mattmaroon 18y ago
I like Norvig's quote. Semantics are the future of the web, and always will be.
- schtog 18y ago
  whats his quote?
  - mattmaroon 18y ago
    Semantics are the future of the web, and always will be.

by jamess 18y ago

piers 18y ago

So that's a no then?

justindz 18y ago

The average Joe seems to be moving towards a web presence based on a blogging platform or a social network or a CMS. If app providers build semantically and enterprises or large data set publishers build semantically, you could conceivably end up with a reasonably semantic web for content of value. I think the idealists are on to something, but as usual they are whacking off over the thought that one day everything will be semantic. That's the pipedream to which you rightly refer. What I said above will not take place for many home-spun sites or apps or businesses that can't justify the cost with added value or increased revenue.

jamess 18y ago
Only in the sense of "metadata you get for free." It's perfectly reasonable for, say, a CMS to semantically mark up when an article was posted. That's free. The server knows the date, so why not? It's not hurting anyone. Similarly, a camera with a GPS chip could easily add LAT/LONG EXIF metadata to every photo, except for the power, that's free too. You could use that to answer queries like "give me all photos taken in Laos in the past year", for example. Nothing wrong with that. Where it breaks down is that there isn't enough free metadata to make the semantic web worthwhile. It relies on people actually saying "This is an address I'm typing right now... this is the street component of the address... This is the City..." It's ridiculous. Certainly, there'll be special purpose applications making use of free metadata in the future, but the whole web being semantic will never happen.
- justindz 18y ago
  Google Maps seems to do a pretty good job of parsing addresses. Given a database of say, US city names, state names and zip codes, could an API not be built that would recognize something like that and wrap it in a microformat either by a stupid simple API call or just as an auto-expanding template type feature? I agree with you that the average user (which includes business, etc.) will not do it significantly unless it's effortless so I wonder if app platforms or frameworks can make it more effortless in this way. That combined with some level of justified business value in some sectors could be our best stab at a practically, usefully, partially semantic web. Being pragmatic, I'm not one to say that unless the whole web is semantic then we give up. I'm also not one to believe the whole web will be semantic or that all of it really needs to be.
  - jamess 18y ago
    If you had a machine that could recognise addresses with reasonable accuracy and zero false positives, you wouldn't NEED microformats or the semantic web. That's the whole point, smart humans spending their time compensating for the stupidity of machines. It's a boil the ocean strategy that only makes any kind of economic sense of consider your users peons whose time has no value. Spending time making machines smarter is an investment in the future, the semantic web is an admission of defeat. Also, Google doesn't parse addresses at all, it uses its index data the same way it does spell checking.
- wanorris 18y ago
  Not all websites are basically just documents with a management interface, however. Remember, there are an awful lot of sites with database back ends that store structured data. The technical difficulty of emitting that structured data out into a web page using a microformat (or RDFa, or whatever) is going to be pretty low, so if it's useful (for SEO or anything else), I expect it will start happening.
phaedrus 18y ago
What use is semantic metadata that is generated automatically? The whole point of "semantic" is that it's created by humans to describe the data; you can't get around the "extra work" requirement without defeating the uniqueness of the semantic tags. And if the extra work still stands, the average Joe will not bother with it. Hell, I wouldn't bother with it, in any form.

Readmore 18y ago

I hear what you're saying but I don't think it's as easy to dismiss as that. There are ways that microformats or semantic data could easily start showing up in websites. If a web framework, like say Rails, supported microformat creation based on your models then it wouldn't cost the developer or user any more time to markup that data. All of a sudden your movie app starts automatically inserting semantic movie info about the actors, director, etc which can link back to authoritative sources. I'm not saying that it WILL happen, but I think it is definitely doable. With a framework like Rails your schema is already available to the program. If we just had one more generator (or more likely a gem for each supported microformat) then you could get semantic data in your app for almost free.

jamess 18y ago
Well, imagine you're right. What then? Once you have all the magical, microformatted metadata what is it exactly you do with it? The canonical semantic web idea is that you build ontologies and search them. Now you have a new problem. How do you know which metadata is trustworthy? You'd be a fool to think people aren't going to attempt to game the system. If I search for "all articles about Lucy Liu", how is it that your semantic web search engine filters articles that are really about Lucy Liu from those that are merely marked up to make them appear so? You've just substituted a problem that requires as much intelligence as adding the metadata in the first place. Hell, what am I saying? Trust is a far harder problem. Even Google haven't cracked that one yet.
- Readmore 18y ago
  So now that I've answered the 'How do you do it question' I have to also explain what would be done with it? Alright that's fine. Yahoo is already parsing microformats out of it's search results, so if two sites are otherwise equal in content and my site has microformat information about the data I'm going to get a better relevancy ranking from Yahoo than you are, which translates to more hits and more money. More data beats better algorithms, I've seen that on this site about a dozen times in the last few weeks but when the 'more data' is overhyped like the Semantic Web everyone decides that it's totally pointless. Your other point, that 'people will game it' is an amazingly bad reason to not do something. Think if Google had looked at PageRank and said: "yeah that's cool but all people have to do is make a link farm and they can game the system, making a new search engine is pointless." With the level of intelligence and Hackertude that is available on this site I'm pretty astounded that there are so much vocal opposition to the Semantic Web. You're not going to beat Google in standard search but something like this could give a startup a leg-up in the market place. Maybe we should start looking at ways to answer the questions instead of just throwing our hands up in the air and saying that it won't work.

mattmaroon 18y ago

I like Norvig's quote. Semantics are the future of the web, and always will be.

schtog 18y ago
whats his quote?
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  Semantics are the future of the web, and always will be.