8 ms·

I have some insight here because I did a postdoc working on anatomy ontologies in the UK. A big part of the problem with the semantic web is that lots of people

by xamuel 8y ago

I have some insight here because I did a postdoc working on anatomy ontologies in the UK. A big part of the problem with the semantic web is that lots of people in European academia use it as a collection of buzzwords for making grant proposals sexier, without understanding or caring what it actually means. Instead of saying, "Give us money to build a webpage", they say, "Give us money to expose metadata annotations using a RESTful API on the semantic web." I would prepare conference presentations where I was just filling slides up with BS to fill time. Devs from other universities (gotta check that international research box!) understood the technology even less than our team did. We provided them a tool for storing RDF triples for their webpage so they could store triples about anatomical relationships. They wanted to use said RDF store as their backend database for storing things like usernames and passwords. facepalm So you have all these academics publishing all this extremely important sounding literature about the semantic web, but as soon as you pry one nanometer deep, it's nothing but a giant ball of crap.

evrydayhustling 8y ago
Yeah, semantic web really hacked the brains of academic-facing bureaucrats. It fell into this giant gap between what administrators don't know about business and what they don't know about technology... a gap big enough to shove every utopian idea about "an effortlessly integrated, data driven society" into. There's no such thing as "right" way to represent any given data stream, just ways that are more or less suitable to specific tasks and interests. That's why HTML failed as descriptive language (and has become fine-grained-formatting language), and it's why symantic web was doa.
- ghaff 8y ago
  >hacked the brains of academic-facing bureaucrats In all fairness, it was also promoted by legitimate academics including Time Berners-Lee. I actually saw him give a talk about it a number of years back for his Draper Prize speech.
  - evrydayhustling 8y ago
    I remember his AAAI '07 talk where he laid into the audience for changing and reusing URLs. It made me really want to see this world he was imagining where millions of people using the web every which way agree to universally abide by a rule that makes their life a lot harder but makes it easier to reason about algorithms on the Web. Btw, I don't think this or failure of semantic web reflect badly on TBL. He is in a rare class of folks, along with Stallman, who can leave a bigger dent in the world while missing their ideals by a mile than most of is could if we got everything we wanted.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      Oh, I'm certainly not going to be very critical of Sir Tim! Along with the obvious reasons, I believe he coined the read/write web term and was a strong advocate of users being creators as well as consumers. And TBH, while it's fairly obvious today that classification and discovery has to happen largely organically if only because of the scale of the Web, thinking in terms of formal schemes is a pretty natural bias for someone of TBL's background to have. My main point was that this wasn't just some fantasy of out-to-lunch bureaucrats.
- jerf 8y ago
  'There's no such thing as "right" way to represent any given data stream, just ways that are more or less suitable to specific tasks and interests.' My core objection to "the Semantic Web" is the non-existence of "the Semantic". There is no way you can get everyone to agree upon a universal "semantic", and if you can, which you can't, you can't get people to accurately use it, and if you can, which you can't, you can't prevent people from gaming it into uselessness. But it all starts from the fact that the universal semantic doesn't even exist. Somewhere there's a great in-depth series of blog posts from someone who describes just trying to get libraries to agree upon and correctly use an author field or set of author fields for libraries. This is a near-ideal use case, because you have trained individuals, with no motivations to insert bad data into the system for aggrandizement or ad revenue. And even just for that one field, it's a staggeringly hard problem. Expecting "the web" to do any better was always a pipe dream. Can't dredge it up, though. (To the couple of other replies about how "it's happening, because it's happening in [medical] or [science]", well, no, that's not it. That's a smaller problem. The Semantic Web (TM) would at most use those as components, but nobody would consider that The Semantic Web (TM), at least in its original incarnation. Yes, smaller problems are easier to solve; that does not make the largest version of the problem feasible.)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - phlakaton 8y ago
    I don't think a "universal semantic" was ever a design goal of the semantic web. What's needed is not one semantic, but the ability to map between competing/complementary semantics. Which is still a hard problem, to be sure, but which admits varying degrees of partial progress.
    - zbentley 8y ago
      > still a hard problem, to be sure, but which admits varying degrees of partial progress. I think one of the big problems with the semantic web was that it turned "varying degrees of partial progress" into "multiple competing approaches", each of which wanted to detract from the others.
- deckard1 8y ago
  > That's why HTML failed as descriptive language I think HTML and the web failed in general. Modern HTML is really nothing more than div tags everywhere, with a handful of span tags. We went from abusing tables to abusing the entire document. We, in effect, eliminated all semantic meaning from a document by making everything generic tag soup. The DOM + JS has largely supplanted HTML as the source of a web page. Especially when using tools such as React or Angular. In terms of vision, the rise of native phone apps and the fact that every major site has a mobile version and a separate desktop version really highlights how the web failed. I do node/React dev for a living. I'll be the first to admit this pile of hacks is total garbage. Mobile web is almost unusable. I hate it. I hate the sites I work on. Their UX is horrid. Native apps are so far superior that they make the web look like an embarrassing relic. But web development pays the bills and keeps the lights on.
  - pmontra 8y ago
    I'm working on a project with a React frontend. I think I never tried it on my phone. It probably works but the site is really meant for the desktop and I don't know if it makes sense on a small display. However... I'm writing this on my phone so HN is part of the mobile web and it works well. I read the post on twobithistory.org on my phone and that also works well. I doubt that they have an app and even if they did, why should I install it and what would happen when I follow a link from HN to them? I'll get the mobile site or would the app catch the link and open itself? I don't even have the apps of the news sites I read most. Reading them on the phone with Firefox and uBlock is good enough. Their apps probably contain more spyware then the adblocked sites. So the mobile web did not conpletely fail. It's still what's on the screen of my phone for about 50% of the time: since last charge 3h 55m of screen time, 57m used by phone calls, 1h 54m Firefox, 15m WhatsApp, etc.
    - mycall 8y ago
      > 57m used by phone calls You are an unusual smartphone user. For most people, it is 0m.
      - chickenfries 8y ago
jesuslop 8y ago
It's not cynism, is how much things went. Meanwhile there is much genuine work in knowledge representation awaiting to be done and funded both in the foundations and the platform sides.
baxtr 8y ago
Thanks for sharing. I am worried that exactly the same will happen to AI in Europe :-/ https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/2165004/european-artificial-intelligence-experts-unite-bid-challenge-us https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/2165004/euro...
- tim333 8y ago
  I think AI is a different kind of thing. Re: >More than 2,000 European AI experts have come together to collaborate on research and call for large-scale funding from the European Union to counter China and America’s rapid progress in the field. you wouldn't get them worrying about the US / China's rapid progress in Semantic Web.
- __jal 8y ago
  Very different beast. The semantic web was an effort to improve the commons. AI/ML benefits are captured by their owners.
groovy2shoes 8y ago
I've never worked in any field that might be considered "semantic web", but at my last gig I spent some time researching deductive database technology. "Semantic web" was like a keyword that popped up in the abstract of virtually every paper published on the topic since the mid 90s or so. It seemed to me one of those phrases that virtually guaranteed grants of funding if you could work it into your paper. I think you're correct that people working in the field of semantic web oftentimes didn't understand (or lost sight of) the intended nature and utility of the concept. But I also think that its buzzword status lead to the label being applied to many things that were only loosely related. There was (is?) a lot of good work happening under the heading of "semantic web", but—partly because the term was not an apt one for the work, and partly because the dream of the semantic web never really actualized—that work has remained relatively obscure. Obversely, there was much work of questionable worth happening under the same banner, likely because it was a reliable way to get funding, at which point we return to that extremely important-sounding literature that's nothing but a giant ball of crap...
throwawaysemweb 8y ago
Wow, had such a similar story, except with a Master's degree. Most of my graduate program was consumed by a highly-cited and quite arrogant professor who focused on the Semantic Web. I took 2(!) separate Semantic Web courses and couldn't understand what the fuss was all about. By the end, I figured out the professor was full of crap. When AJAX became a big thing, I remember the professor asking, "Why don't you add AJAX to this project?" What does that have to do with the Semantic Web? In the end, I got a paper published in a fairly prestigious journal by just combining some flashy visuals with the Semantic Web and having the professor be a co-author. That was one of the big experiences that helped me figure out that academia wasn't for me. And I would be perfectly fine never hearing about triples, RDF, or that other nonsense again!
- xtracto 8y ago
  Yup, I was in academia in UK and Germany for a total of 7 years. Had similarly crappy experience and got out. I think 80% of research is crap done "just to get the grant" and not real research.
- enraged_camel 8y ago
  >>When AJAX became a big thing, I remember the professor asking, "Why don't you add AJAX to this project?" Sounds like something my manager at my previous job would say. He was a Pointy Haired Boss.
ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
Cool comment...but say you have a friend whose dumb and wanted to explain why its not ok to store usernames and passwords.... What would you say to them?
- Thiez 8y ago
  1) users often use the same username and password on various websites, despite this being dumb (because it's so convenient) 2) if you ask such a stupid question you probably won't be able to properly secure the machine hosting this 3) your users will be totally screwed when you get hacked And this is why you should never store passwords but only a salted hash, and never trust any service that can email you your password when you click "I forgot my password".
- steerpike 8y ago
  Different data store types are used to solve different problems. An RDF store is designed to help solve the problem of ontological relationships. I wouldn't use an RDF store if I wanted to store information about who has the current high score on my video game or who has signed up to my site for a username and password. Unfortunately some developers think that once you've chosen one particular storage technology (RDF, relational DB, document storage) that's the bucket you hae to put everything into in order to do anything in your application. I suspect that was the mental model of the other devs in the story above.
- xamuel 8y ago
  Well for one thing, with triple-stores it's not uncommon to expose an unsanitized read-only query engine (usually SPARQL), usually harmless because none of the data is secret. That goes out the window if you're actually storing business-sensitive stuff in there. Aside from that, I guess there's theoretically nothing stopping you from using the triplestore for usernames/passwords (I hope you mean salted passwords) but sheesh, talk about killing a fly with a bazooka. To be fair to those colleagues, it might have been less about them being clueless, and more about them wanting to offload work to my team, lol.
gaius 8y ago
In my circle the semantic web types morphed seamlessly into data scientists and continued to extract funding without missing a beat
nradov 8y ago
What do you think of SNOMED as an anatomy ontology? Is it good enough or are there serious flaws?
- xamuel 8y ago
  Sorry, I only worked with FMA, with some tangentially related ontologies like CHEBI, and some custom in-house ontologies.
karolusrex 8y ago
Really interesting to hear that my experience is shared by any. I wrote my master thesis on rdf and linked data and the more I got into it the more I realize how it's just a collection of people praising each other's ideas without any outward potential. In theory the idea is brilliant but the execution is poor. In many cases the world of academia is way too detached from software development to be able to produce any real-world useful tooling beyond toy projects and proof-of-concepts.
subhobroto 8y ago
> So you have all these academics publishing all this extremely important sounding literature about the semantic web, but as soon as you pry one nanometer deep, it's nothing but a giant ball of crap. It's not just academia. I made an observation about how most BigCo and BigGovts use a lot of Semantic Web: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036041
themodelplumber 8y ago
This is really fascinating. It seems there's an interfacing problem at a level, with a sort of depth-expectation on one end of the problem (real-world / technology application), and a more exploratory breadth-expectation on the other (pure academia / science). It'd be cool to develop some standards to create a sort of bridge between the two. On the breadth end there may be a need for a sort of "contract of depth commitment" to provide insurance against the flighty hijinks of the ever-expanding mind, and at the real-world level you need a sort of "grant of exploration" which allows academia to bring its own type of surface-level one-night-stand concern or even ADHD to the game. Without the latter there's probably too much risk of repeating history while someone else is blazing the trails you won't try. Anyway thanks for that comment, it's really interesting.
- samuell 8y ago
  Somewhat related, I suggested how the Semantic Web (aka "Linked Data") and the more real-lifeish Data Science field could be merged, at a Linked Data event in Sweden earlier this year: TLDR; What semweb / linked data lacks the most, is a practical logic / reasoning layer, so that facts can more easily be inferred form existing plain data. I further suggest this is already available in a rock-solid proven technology; Prolog. Blog post: http://bionics.it/posts/linked-data-science http://bionics.it/posts/linked-data-science Slides and video: http://bionics.it/posts/semantic-web-data-science-my-talk-at-linked-data-sweden-2018 http://bionics.it/posts/semantic-web-data-science-my-talk-at...
  - mycall 8y ago
    Could you use something like Google Inference API to generate inferred form from existing plan data?
    - arunaugustine 8y ago
      Isn't Google's Inference API for time series data? Finding patterns? Prolog is more of deductive logic engine right?
ChuckMcM 8y ago
That is so sad. I proposed, and worked briefly on with a handful of really awesome engineers, a project that would use an LDA to try to ascertain the topic for a web page, then use NLP to pull apart the sentences for their contextual components, the next step was to slot the values into an ontology framework to store alongside the web page text. Its initial goal was web content scoring with respect to ontological coherence but later for building knowledge bases dynamically.
watersb 8y ago
Yes. I was trying to formalize an ontology for astronomical data sets, found that good people in Strasbourg had already done a good job there, but had no experience with unification over simple tuples. Tried to explain RDF with Prolog queries. I tried to steer away from typical databases, but in the end I was just getting in the way.

by xamuel 8y ago

evrydayhustling 8y ago

Yeah, semantic web really hacked the brains of academic-facing bureaucrats. It fell into this giant gap between what administrators don't know about business and what they don't know about technology... a gap big enough to shove every utopian idea about "an effortlessly integrated, data driven society" into. There's no such thing as "right" way to represent any given data stream, just ways that are more or less suitable to specific tasks and interests. That's why HTML failed as descriptive language (and has become fine-grained-formatting language), and it's why symantic web was doa.

ghaff 8y ago
>hacked the brains of academic-facing bureaucrats In all fairness, it was also promoted by legitimate academics including Time Berners-Lee. I actually saw him give a talk about it a number of years back for his Draper Prize speech.
- evrydayhustling 8y ago
  I remember his AAAI '07 talk where he laid into the audience for changing and reusing URLs. It made me really want to see this world he was imagining where millions of people using the web every which way agree to universally abide by a rule that makes their life a lot harder but makes it easier to reason about algorithms on the Web. Btw, I don't think this or failure of semantic web reflect badly on TBL. He is in a rare class of folks, along with Stallman, who can leave a bigger dent in the world while missing their ideals by a mile than most of is could if we got everything we wanted.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    Oh, I'm certainly not going to be very critical of Sir Tim! Along with the obvious reasons, I believe he coined the read/write web term and was a strong advocate of users being creators as well as consumers. And TBH, while it's fairly obvious today that classification and discovery has to happen largely organically if only because of the scale of the Web, thinking in terms of formal schemes is a pretty natural bias for someone of TBL's background to have. My main point was that this wasn't just some fantasy of out-to-lunch bureaucrats.
jerf 8y ago
'There's no such thing as "right" way to represent any given data stream, just ways that are more or less suitable to specific tasks and interests.' My core objection to "the Semantic Web" is the non-existence of "the Semantic". There is no way you can get everyone to agree upon a universal "semantic", and if you can, which you can't, you can't get people to accurately use it, and if you can, which you can't, you can't prevent people from gaming it into uselessness. But it all starts from the fact that the universal semantic doesn't even exist. Somewhere there's a great in-depth series of blog posts from someone who describes just trying to get libraries to agree upon and correctly use an author field or set of author fields for libraries. This is a near-ideal use case, because you have trained individuals, with no motivations to insert bad data into the system for aggrandizement or ad revenue. And even just for that one field, it's a staggeringly hard problem. Expecting "the web" to do any better was always a pipe dream. Can't dredge it up, though. (To the couple of other replies about how "it's happening, because it's happening in [medical] or [science]", well, no, that's not it. That's a smaller problem. The Semantic Web (TM) would at most use those as components, but nobody would consider that The Semantic Web (TM), at least in its original incarnation. Yes, smaller problems are easier to solve; that does not make the largest version of the problem feasible.)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- phlakaton 8y ago
  I don't think a "universal semantic" was ever a design goal of the semantic web. What's needed is not one semantic, but the ability to map between competing/complementary semantics. Which is still a hard problem, to be sure, but which admits varying degrees of partial progress.
  - zbentley 8y ago
    > still a hard problem, to be sure, but which admits varying degrees of partial progress. I think one of the big problems with the semantic web was that it turned "varying degrees of partial progress" into "multiple competing approaches", each of which wanted to detract from the others.
deckard1 8y ago
> That's why HTML failed as descriptive language I think HTML and the web failed in general. Modern HTML is really nothing more than div tags everywhere, with a handful of span tags. We went from abusing tables to abusing the entire document. We, in effect, eliminated all semantic meaning from a document by making everything generic tag soup. The DOM + JS has largely supplanted HTML as the source of a web page. Especially when using tools such as React or Angular. In terms of vision, the rise of native phone apps and the fact that every major site has a mobile version and a separate desktop version really highlights how the web failed. I do node/React dev for a living. I'll be the first to admit this pile of hacks is total garbage. Mobile web is almost unusable. I hate it. I hate the sites I work on. Their UX is horrid. Native apps are so far superior that they make the web look like an embarrassing relic. But web development pays the bills and keeps the lights on.
- pmontra 8y ago
  I'm working on a project with a React frontend. I think I never tried it on my phone. It probably works but the site is really meant for the desktop and I don't know if it makes sense on a small display. However... I'm writing this on my phone so HN is part of the mobile web and it works well. I read the post on twobithistory.org on my phone and that also works well. I doubt that they have an app and even if they did, why should I install it and what would happen when I follow a link from HN to them? I'll get the mobile site or would the app catch the link and open itself? I don't even have the apps of the news sites I read most. Reading them on the phone with Firefox and uBlock is good enough. Their apps probably contain more spyware then the adblocked sites. So the mobile web did not conpletely fail. It's still what's on the screen of my phone for about 50% of the time: since last charge 3h 55m of screen time, 57m used by phone calls, 1h 54m Firefox, 15m WhatsApp, etc.
  - mycall 8y ago
    > 57m used by phone calls You are an unusual smartphone user. For most people, it is 0m.
    - chickenfries 8y ago

jesuslop 8y ago

It's not cynism, is how much things went. Meanwhile there is much genuine work in knowledge representation awaiting to be done and funded both in the foundations and the platform sides.

baxtr 8y ago

Thanks for sharing. I am worried that exactly the same will happen to AI in Europe :-/ https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/2165004/european-artificial-intelligence-experts-unite-bid-challenge-us https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/2165004/euro...

tim333 8y ago
I think AI is a different kind of thing. Re: >More than 2,000 European AI experts have come together to collaborate on research and call for large-scale funding from the European Union to counter China and America’s rapid progress in the field. you wouldn't get them worrying about the US / China's rapid progress in Semantic Web.
__jal 8y ago
Very different beast. The semantic web was an effort to improve the commons. AI/ML benefits are captured by their owners.

groovy2shoes 8y ago

I've never worked in any field that might be considered "semantic web", but at my last gig I spent some time researching deductive database technology. "Semantic web" was like a keyword that popped up in the abstract of virtually every paper published on the topic since the mid 90s or so. It seemed to me one of those phrases that virtually guaranteed grants of funding if you could work it into your paper. I think you're correct that people working in the field of semantic web oftentimes didn't understand (or lost sight of) the intended nature and utility of the concept. But I also think that its buzzword status lead to the label being applied to many things that were only loosely related. There was (is?) a lot of good work happening under the heading of "semantic web", but—partly because the term was not an apt one for the work, and partly because the dream of the semantic web never really actualized—that work has remained relatively obscure. Obversely, there was much work of questionable worth happening under the same banner, likely because it was a reliable way to get funding, at which point we return to that extremely important-sounding literature that's nothing but a giant ball of crap...

throwawaysemweb 8y ago

Wow, had such a similar story, except with a Master's degree. Most of my graduate program was consumed by a highly-cited and quite arrogant professor who focused on the Semantic Web. I took 2(!) separate Semantic Web courses and couldn't understand what the fuss was all about. By the end, I figured out the professor was full of crap. When AJAX became a big thing, I remember the professor asking, "Why don't you add AJAX to this project?" What does that have to do with the Semantic Web? In the end, I got a paper published in a fairly prestigious journal by just combining some flashy visuals with the Semantic Web and having the professor be a co-author. That was one of the big experiences that helped me figure out that academia wasn't for me. And I would be perfectly fine never hearing about triples, RDF, or that other nonsense again!

xtracto 8y ago
Yup, I was in academia in UK and Germany for a total of 7 years. Had similarly crappy experience and got out. I think 80% of research is crap done "just to get the grant" and not real research.
enraged_camel 8y ago
>>When AJAX became a big thing, I remember the professor asking, "Why don't you add AJAX to this project?" Sounds like something my manager at my previous job would say. He was a Pointy Haired Boss.

ghostbrainalpha 8y ago

Cool comment...but say you have a friend whose dumb and wanted to explain why its not ok to store usernames and passwords.... What would you say to them?

Thiez 8y ago
1) users often use the same username and password on various websites, despite this being dumb (because it's so convenient) 2) if you ask such a stupid question you probably won't be able to properly secure the machine hosting this 3) your users will be totally screwed when you get hacked And this is why you should never store passwords but only a salted hash, and never trust any service that can email you your password when you click "I forgot my password".
steerpike 8y ago
Different data store types are used to solve different problems. An RDF store is designed to help solve the problem of ontological relationships. I wouldn't use an RDF store if I wanted to store information about who has the current high score on my video game or who has signed up to my site for a username and password. Unfortunately some developers think that once you've chosen one particular storage technology (RDF, relational DB, document storage) that's the bucket you hae to put everything into in order to do anything in your application. I suspect that was the mental model of the other devs in the story above.
xamuel 8y ago
Well for one thing, with triple-stores it's not uncommon to expose an unsanitized read-only query engine (usually SPARQL), usually harmless because none of the data is secret. That goes out the window if you're actually storing business-sensitive stuff in there. Aside from that, I guess there's theoretically nothing stopping you from using the triplestore for usernames/passwords (I hope you mean salted passwords) but sheesh, talk about killing a fly with a bazooka. To be fair to those colleagues, it might have been less about them being clueless, and more about them wanting to offload work to my team, lol.

gaius 8y ago

In my circle the semantic web types morphed seamlessly into data scientists and continued to extract funding without missing a beat

nradov 8y ago

What do you think of SNOMED as an anatomy ontology? Is it good enough or are there serious flaws?

xamuel 8y ago
Sorry, I only worked with FMA, with some tangentially related ontologies like CHEBI, and some custom in-house ontologies.

karolusrex 8y ago

Really interesting to hear that my experience is shared by any. I wrote my master thesis on rdf and linked data and the more I got into it the more I realize how it's just a collection of people praising each other's ideas without any outward potential. In theory the idea is brilliant but the execution is poor. In many cases the world of academia is way too detached from software development to be able to produce any real-world useful tooling beyond toy projects and proof-of-concepts.

subhobroto 8y ago

> So you have all these academics publishing all this extremely important sounding literature about the semantic web, but as soon as you pry one nanometer deep, it's nothing but a giant ball of crap. It's not just academia. I made an observation about how most BigCo and BigGovts use a lot of Semantic Web: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036041

themodelplumber 8y ago

This is really fascinating. It seems there's an interfacing problem at a level, with a sort of depth-expectation on one end of the problem (real-world / technology application), and a more exploratory breadth-expectation on the other (pure academia / science). It'd be cool to develop some standards to create a sort of bridge between the two. On the breadth end there may be a need for a sort of "contract of depth commitment" to provide insurance against the flighty hijinks of the ever-expanding mind, and at the real-world level you need a sort of "grant of exploration" which allows academia to bring its own type of surface-level one-night-stand concern or even ADHD to the game. Without the latter there's probably too much risk of repeating history while someone else is blazing the trails you won't try. Anyway thanks for that comment, it's really interesting.

samuell 8y ago
Somewhat related, I suggested how the Semantic Web (aka "Linked Data") and the more real-lifeish Data Science field could be merged, at a Linked Data event in Sweden earlier this year: TLDR; What semweb / linked data lacks the most, is a practical logic / reasoning layer, so that facts can more easily be inferred form existing plain data. I further suggest this is already available in a rock-solid proven technology; Prolog. Blog post: http://bionics.it/posts/linked-data-science http://bionics.it/posts/linked-data-science Slides and video: http://bionics.it/posts/semantic-web-data-science-my-talk-at-linked-data-sweden-2018 http://bionics.it/posts/semantic-web-data-science-my-talk-at...
- mycall 8y ago
  Could you use something like Google Inference API to generate inferred form from existing plan data?
  - arunaugustine 8y ago
    Isn't Google's Inference API for time series data? Finding patterns? Prolog is more of deductive logic engine right?

ChuckMcM 8y ago

That is so sad. I proposed, and worked briefly on with a handful of really awesome engineers, a project that would use an LDA to try to ascertain the topic for a web page, then use NLP to pull apart the sentences for their contextual components, the next step was to slot the values into an ontology framework to store alongside the web page text. Its initial goal was web content scoring with respect to ontological coherence but later for building knowledge bases dynamically.

watersb 8y ago

Yes. I was trying to formalize an ontology for astronomical data sets, found that good people in Strasbourg had already done a good job there, but had no experience with unification over simple tuples. Tried to explain RDF with Prolog queries. I tried to steer away from typical databases, but in the end I was just getting in the way.