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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 a

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

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