5 ms·

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/com

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.
jerf 8y ago
"I don't think a "universal semantic" was ever a design goal of the semantic web." And I'm pretty sure it was the whole point. Nobody would ever have written as many reams of marketing material if the pitch was "Hey, someday, you'll be able to reach out to the web, and with specialized software for your particular domain you can access specialized web sites with specialized tags that give you access to specialized data sets that can be fed to your specialized artificial intelligence engines!" Because that pitch is basically a "yawn, yeah, duuuuuh", and dozens of examples could have been produced even ten years ago. The whole point was to have this interconnected web of everything linking to everything, and that's what's not possible.
- phlakaton 8y ago
  These two visions you present lie on extreme ends of a continuum. They're both complete strawmen. The folks behind semantic web were aware of both of them, and were careful not to let their work be pigeonholed into either one. Consider these passages, from "The Semantic Web," Tim Berners-Lee et al, Scientific American, May 2001: "Like the Internet, the Semantic Web will be as decentralized as possible. Such Web-like systems generate a lot of excitement at every level, from major corporation to individual user, and provide benefits that are hard or impossible to predict in advance. Decentralization requires compromises: the Web had to throw away the ideal of total consistency of all of its interconnections, ushering in the infamous message 'Error 404: Not Found' but allowing unchecked exponential growth." "Semantic Web researchers... accept that paradoxes and unanswerable questions are a price that must be paid to achieve versatility. We make the language for the rules as expressive as needed to allow the Web to reason as widely as desired. This philosophy is similar to that of the conventional Web: early in the Web's development, detractors pointed out that it could never be a well-organized library; without a central database and tree structure, one would never be sure of finding everything. They were right. But the expressive power of the system made vast amounts of information available, and search engines... now produce remarkably complete indices of a lot of the material out there. The challenge of the Semantic Web, therefore, is to provide a language that expresses both data and rules for reasoning about the data and that allows rules from any existing knowledge-representation system to be exported onto the Web."

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.

jerf 8y ago

"I don't think a "universal semantic" was ever a design goal of the semantic web." And I'm pretty sure it was the whole point. Nobody would ever have written as many reams of marketing material if the pitch was "Hey, someday, you'll be able to reach out to the web, and with specialized software for your particular domain you can access specialized web sites with specialized tags that give you access to specialized data sets that can be fed to your specialized artificial intelligence engines!" Because that pitch is basically a "yawn, yeah, duuuuuh", and dozens of examples could have been produced even ten years ago. The whole point was to have this interconnected web of everything linking to everything, and that's what's not possible.

phlakaton 8y ago
These two visions you present lie on extreme ends of a continuum. They're both complete strawmen. The folks behind semantic web were aware of both of them, and were careful not to let their work be pigeonholed into either one. Consider these passages, from "The Semantic Web," Tim Berners-Lee et al, Scientific American, May 2001: "Like the Internet, the Semantic Web will be as decentralized as possible. Such Web-like systems generate a lot of excitement at every level, from major corporation to individual user, and provide benefits that are hard or impossible to predict in advance. Decentralization requires compromises: the Web had to throw away the ideal of total consistency of all of its interconnections, ushering in the infamous message 'Error 404: Not Found' but allowing unchecked exponential growth." "Semantic Web researchers... accept that paradoxes and unanswerable questions are a price that must be paid to achieve versatility. We make the language for the rules as expressive as needed to allow the Web to reason as widely as desired. This philosophy is similar to that of the conventional Web: early in the Web's development, detractors pointed out that it could never be a well-organized library; without a central database and tree structure, one would never be sure of finding everything. They were right. But the expressive power of the system made vast amounts of information available, and search engines... now produce remarkably complete indices of a lot of the material out there. The challenge of the Semantic Web, therefore, is to provide a language that expresses both data and rules for reasoning about the data and that allows rules from any existing knowledge-representation system to be exported onto the Web."