15 ms·

It puzzles me that the linked data future is still discussed, as if we didn't already try it, and didn't already discover that developers dislike arcane RDF sta

by tmcw 8y ago

It puzzles me that the linked data future is still discussed, as if we didn't already try it, and didn't already discover that developers dislike arcane RDF standards and the academic-rooted designers of the specifications have a terrible track record of solving real-world problems. And that now they're presenting linked data as some critical component of the decentralized web while skipping out on the debates that everyone else in the space is having - like whether decentralization can be fast, or how to ensure data authenticity, or whether a 'local server / pod' can be built that doesn't get hosed by hole-punching through a home Comcast connection. Instead, it's just 'what about old-fashioned websites, plus lots of xml schema and long spec documents'? It just tastes like a rehash of Berners-Lee's existing '5-star open data' schpiel ( https://5stardata.info/en/ https://5stardata.info/en/ ) but now with the billing that it'll fix the internet. 5-star open data has been around for years now, and, well, the linked data future isn't here. When's the last time you consumed RDF in an application?

Karrot_Kream 8y ago
There's been a lot of effort to improve RDF ergonomics with JSON-LD, and ActivityPub is a widely used standard based on JSON-LD (though my experience with implementing it has been quite challenging).
- hypothete 8y ago
  I feel you on implementation - every time I make an attempt to try out ActivityPub I get intimidated by the combo of JSON-LD and the verbosity of Activity Streams vocabulary: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/
  - Karrot_Kream 8y ago
    I've been working on an ActivityPub implementation and there are so many edge cases and SHOULD vs MAY recommendations, it's ridiculous. I'm planning a separate blog post on the intricacies of the standard.
    - ericflo 8y ago
      I banged my head against this issue quite a bit last year. Specifically the thing that tripped me up, is how many fields can either have single value or be a list of values, and figuring out what is meant semantically when it's a list or a single value.
      - Karrot_Kream 8y ago
        This is exactly what frustrates me the most and what most of my logic checks. I'm writing tests for each of these semantic cases, but it seems silly to me that a standard leaves something so ambiguous.
        cjslep 8y ago
        This is why the go-fed project uses code generation.
shriphani 8y ago
Agreed 100% schema.org and whatever fb's equivalent is only "succeeded" because of the incentive in their ranking models (thus centralization). Highly unlikely someone will bother with this (in addition to all the other quirks) while making their website.
rubenverborgh 8y ago
You'll be surprised to hear that developers like Linked Data. People starting with Linked Data development today are not burdened by the Semantic Web legacy and mistakes of the past. We've been working with front-end devs who have never seen RDF, and never will. They enjoy how Linked Data is able to cross borders and leads to more data than a centralized database could ever give you. The confusion in your comment is that one would need RDF to do Linked Data. I've written about that misconception here: https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2018/12/28/designing-a-linked-data-developer-experience/ https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2018/12/28/designing-a-linke... Don't get me wrong, the Semantic Web community has made mistakes and has not been developer-friendly. But we're not still stuck in the 90s. For instance, XML hasn't been a part of any of this for many years.
- anomie31 8y ago
  By RDF did you mean RDF/XML specifically? JSON-LD is still RDF, it's just serialized differently, which is fine, I like RDF, but OP may have more specific concerns than the syntax.
  - jauco 8y ago
    Well, it also contains usable ordered lists. Which is not a small addition to rdf (it defines interop with rdf’s version of ordered lists, but the one in json-ld is array based with random access patterns and a .length while the pure rdf version is purely linked list based without any guarantees about having only one link)
  - dmitriid 8y ago
    The specific concern is that it's a 100th attempt at creating metadata for everything in the world. You can't create a non-ambiguous comprehensive catalog of the world.
    - smarx007 8y ago
      This concern can't get less specific.
  - 8y ago
smarx007 8y ago
In my opinion, the linked data future is still discussed, because when Tim Berners-Lee first presented the idea of Semantic Web in 1994, he used what I would call an IoT scenario to describe it ([1], scroll to the end; I really hope he is not reading this comment). Now that the IoT is here, maybe more people are ready to listen. And just to make sure we are on the same page here: it's not academics' job to build usable products. We will continue working on things that are novel from the academic standpoint; if people like you dismiss LD/SemWeb, those novel things will have "a terrible track record of solving real-world problems". I hope this does not come across as too personal. [1]: https://www.w3.org/Talks/WWW94Tim/ https://www.w3.org/Talks/WWW94Tim/
- y4mi 8y ago
  No, your link doesn't talk about an iot scenario. Selling and purchasing houses has absolutely nothing to do with iot. And using semantic web for that is just as bad. A basic json API would be much more stable than parsing a document with navigation and similar just to get that data.
svachalek 8y ago
I really, really sympathize with the goals here but when I read through these proposals a few months ago I literally facepalmed. They seem about as realistic as praying for some kind of deus ex machina. Ultimately I think there are technical solutions to making the decentralized web more attractive than the walled gardens, but at this point they will need to be ridiculously polished and shiny to even get a look, and this stuff... is not. Going forward it gets even worse, they're going to be opposed at every step by corporations with more money than most nations. The internet was originally decentralized because the government wanted to make it that way, and I think the only way to get back there is going to require a gigantic, economically unattractive investment. There are at least a few governments that may have the capability but I can't name one that would have the motivation. Hopefully some billionaire's charity will decide saving the internet is a worthy legacy.
- cookiecaper 8y ago
  The internet is already decentralized. Some billionaire can't do anything to fix the situation, at least not directly, because our draconian copyright and network access laws are the only reason that walled gardens are able to exist. The internet doesn't really tolerate serious technical barriers stopping someone from automatically multiplexing the content from various social networks into a single read-write stream, for example. The issue is that when someone attempts to do that kind of thing, they get sued and they end up owing BigTechCo millions of dollars. [0] An open internet is _not_ a technical issue. It's a legal one. [0] https://www.eff.org/cases/facebook-v-power-ventures https://www.eff.org/cases/facebook-v-power-ventures
  - cwyers 8y ago
    The walled gardens exist because the open Internet kind of sucks, really. E-mail is pretty much the last bastion of the old open Internet, and the amount of resources needed to just deal with malicious e-mails is huge. Mindbogglingly huge. And those costs cut out a lot of organizations from being able to operate their own e-mail servers (either the costs of doing it or the costs of verifying to the big players that the e-mail you're sending isn't garbage). And that's pretty much the story across the board. The old Internet was overwhelmed by bad actors who would ruin everything. Facebook and Twitter house a lot of awful stuff. But can you imagine how bad it would be if we were all still using USENET and IRC?
xipho 8y ago
You're right, there are a lot of academics that like the idea of a semantic web, it rings true to a lot of scientific principles. There are also a lot of ideas and far fewer day-to-day applications. Science ticks a long a lot slower than startup culture, however, so it's not suprising that a) understanding of the issues comes slower, but also b) some "experiments" that would utilize semantic data have not yet been fully tested. Read a list of points that address "why the semantic web is dead", many of those points are precisely what science seeks, i.e. principles that promote a slow, and deep understanding of a domain of knowledge. With open-science mandates coming from governments around the world researchers are looking for ways to share their data in meaningful ways. I can think of a significant amount of research that regularly consumes RDF, particularly in the fields of medical biology and genomics where it's used to annotate data. This is where I'd guess you'll see it take a foothold, for example medical diagnosis codes are notoriously disparate and there is a strong appreciation for what semantics could address. Unify, exchange, and consume medical diagnoses ... proffit. Links etc. off the top of my head- * GO - The gene ontology, used in hundreds of thousands of genomic anotations https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3944782/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3944782/ * UBERON - https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-2012-13-1-r5 https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-... * The second year of US2TS - http://us2ts.org/2019/posts/registration.html http://us2ts.org/2019/posts/registration.html * OBO foundry - https://github.com/OBOFoundry/OBOFoundry.github.io https://github.com/OBOFoundry/OBOFoundry.github.io
- degyves 8y ago
  Even more, we're already there: US ONC Health IT and HL7 are currently on the FHIR standard, which is slowly integrating linked data principles. E.g. currently uses JSON-LD: https://www.healthit.gov/buzz-blog/interoperability/heat-wave-the-u-s-is-poised-to-catch-fhir-in-2019 https://www.healthit.gov/buzz-blog/interoperability/heat-wav...
- mbrock 8y ago
  I’ve been learning about Barry Smith’s project for a scientific base ontology, Basic Formal Ontology, and it’s really fascinating stuff.
kgwxd 8y ago
Why does it matter the last time anyone consumed RDF? If it's a good fit for the problem at hand (I don't know if it is), then there is no reason to not use it. It doesn't matter how old an idea is, just how it gets used.
degyves 8y ago
Not only now Linked Data + RDF is even simpler and nicer to learn: There are currently more libraries to work with. Also it is more critical than ever for many industries. Current solution for several issues related with electronic health records concluded to create the new standard, to use RDF and linked data, which solved most of the issues on the previous standard. See FHIR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Healthcare_Interoperability_Resources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Healthcare_Interoperabili... In fact, current linked data discussions seem to me that become relevant again because it is more clear now that we have been misusing/overusing/ bad REST, microservices architectures and GraphQL for some already analyzed and solved problems. But, of course, for a single application which doesn't require interoperability, not requiring standardized data exchange formats, not requiring support for flexible data representation, Linked Data and RDF will be clearly unnecessary. But on time, the future of data interconnection plays on the side of Linked Data IMHO. Until now, current attempts to create some Linked Data + RDF alternate infraestructures are more likely to create ad-hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementations of Linked Data and RDF.
- geitir 8y ago
  Is this a bot?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
walterbell 8y ago
> skipping out on the debates that everyone else in the space is having - like whether decentralization can be fast, or how to ensure data authenticity, or whether a 'local server / pod' can be built that doesn't get hosed by hole-punching through a home Comcast connection Where is a good place to participate in those debates, especially data authenticity and local server pods? FreedomBox didn't go anywhere. FreeNAS with ZFS is reliable but not designed to be exposed to the public internet. Many local services are using a centralized rendezvous server for NAT hole punching. On the shiny commercial front, MyAmberLife has $13M in funding for a home server but it's mostly controlled by a central cloud service. Do Western Digital, Synology, QNAP, Drobo, etc care about decentralization?
- tmcw 8y ago
  Some relevant efforts are dat (and Beaker Browser, the user-friendly frontend), Secure Scuttlebutt (and Patchwork, the user-friendly frontend), and IPFS. Somewhat less legit (imho) is ZeroNet, and somewhat earlier-stage or more obscure is Upspin.

by tmcw 8y ago

Karrot_Kream 8y ago

There's been a lot of effort to improve RDF ergonomics with JSON-LD, and ActivityPub is a widely used standard based on JSON-LD (though my experience with implementing it has been quite challenging).

hypothete 8y ago
I feel you on implementation - every time I make an attempt to try out ActivityPub I get intimidated by the combo of JSON-LD and the verbosity of Activity Streams vocabulary: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/
- Karrot_Kream 8y ago
  I've been working on an ActivityPub implementation and there are so many edge cases and SHOULD vs MAY recommendations, it's ridiculous. I'm planning a separate blog post on the intricacies of the standard.
  - ericflo 8y ago
    I banged my head against this issue quite a bit last year. Specifically the thing that tripped me up, is how many fields can either have single value or be a list of values, and figuring out what is meant semantically when it's a list or a single value.
    - Karrot_Kream 8y ago
      This is exactly what frustrates me the most and what most of my logic checks. I'm writing tests for each of these semantic cases, but it seems silly to me that a standard leaves something so ambiguous.
      - cjslep 8y ago
        This is why the go-fed project uses code generation.

shriphani 8y ago

Agreed 100% schema.org and whatever fb's equivalent is only "succeeded" because of the incentive in their ranking models (thus centralization). Highly unlikely someone will bother with this (in addition to all the other quirks) while making their website.

rubenverborgh 8y ago

You'll be surprised to hear that developers like Linked Data. People starting with Linked Data development today are not burdened by the Semantic Web legacy and mistakes of the past. We've been working with front-end devs who have never seen RDF, and never will. They enjoy how Linked Data is able to cross borders and leads to more data than a centralized database could ever give you. The confusion in your comment is that one would need RDF to do Linked Data. I've written about that misconception here: https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2018/12/28/designing-a-linked-data-developer-experience/ https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2018/12/28/designing-a-linke... Don't get me wrong, the Semantic Web community has made mistakes and has not been developer-friendly. But we're not still stuck in the 90s. For instance, XML hasn't been a part of any of this for many years.

anomie31 8y ago
By RDF did you mean RDF/XML specifically? JSON-LD is still RDF, it's just serialized differently, which is fine, I like RDF, but OP may have more specific concerns than the syntax.
- jauco 8y ago
  Well, it also contains usable ordered lists. Which is not a small addition to rdf (it defines interop with rdf’s version of ordered lists, but the one in json-ld is array based with random access patterns and a .length while the pure rdf version is purely linked list based without any guarantees about having only one link)
- dmitriid 8y ago
  The specific concern is that it's a 100th attempt at creating metadata for everything in the world. You can't create a non-ambiguous comprehensive catalog of the world.
  - smarx007 8y ago
    This concern can't get less specific.
- 8y ago

smarx007 8y ago

In my opinion, the linked data future is still discussed, because when Tim Berners-Lee first presented the idea of Semantic Web in 1994, he used what I would call an IoT scenario to describe it ([1], scroll to the end; I really hope he is not reading this comment). Now that the IoT is here, maybe more people are ready to listen. And just to make sure we are on the same page here: it's not academics' job to build usable products. We will continue working on things that are novel from the academic standpoint; if people like you dismiss LD/SemWeb, those novel things will have "a terrible track record of solving real-world problems". I hope this does not come across as too personal. [1]: https://www.w3.org/Talks/WWW94Tim/ https://www.w3.org/Talks/WWW94Tim/

y4mi 8y ago
No, your link doesn't talk about an iot scenario. Selling and purchasing houses has absolutely nothing to do with iot. And using semantic web for that is just as bad. A basic json API would be much more stable than parsing a document with navigation and similar just to get that data.

svachalek 8y ago

I really, really sympathize with the goals here but when I read through these proposals a few months ago I literally facepalmed. They seem about as realistic as praying for some kind of deus ex machina. Ultimately I think there are technical solutions to making the decentralized web more attractive than the walled gardens, but at this point they will need to be ridiculously polished and shiny to even get a look, and this stuff... is not. Going forward it gets even worse, they're going to be opposed at every step by corporations with more money than most nations. The internet was originally decentralized because the government wanted to make it that way, and I think the only way to get back there is going to require a gigantic, economically unattractive investment. There are at least a few governments that may have the capability but I can't name one that would have the motivation. Hopefully some billionaire's charity will decide saving the internet is a worthy legacy.

cookiecaper 8y ago
The internet is already decentralized. Some billionaire can't do anything to fix the situation, at least not directly, because our draconian copyright and network access laws are the only reason that walled gardens are able to exist. The internet doesn't really tolerate serious technical barriers stopping someone from automatically multiplexing the content from various social networks into a single read-write stream, for example. The issue is that when someone attempts to do that kind of thing, they get sued and they end up owing BigTechCo millions of dollars. [0] An open internet is _not_ a technical issue. It's a legal one. [0] https://www.eff.org/cases/facebook-v-power-ventures https://www.eff.org/cases/facebook-v-power-ventures
- cwyers 8y ago
  The walled gardens exist because the open Internet kind of sucks, really. E-mail is pretty much the last bastion of the old open Internet, and the amount of resources needed to just deal with malicious e-mails is huge. Mindbogglingly huge. And those costs cut out a lot of organizations from being able to operate their own e-mail servers (either the costs of doing it or the costs of verifying to the big players that the e-mail you're sending isn't garbage). And that's pretty much the story across the board. The old Internet was overwhelmed by bad actors who would ruin everything. Facebook and Twitter house a lot of awful stuff. But can you imagine how bad it would be if we were all still using USENET and IRC?

xipho 8y ago

You're right, there are a lot of academics that like the idea of a semantic web, it rings true to a lot of scientific principles. There are also a lot of ideas and far fewer day-to-day applications. Science ticks a long a lot slower than startup culture, however, so it's not suprising that a) understanding of the issues comes slower, but also b) some "experiments" that would utilize semantic data have not yet been fully tested. Read a list of points that address "why the semantic web is dead", many of those points are precisely what science seeks, i.e. principles that promote a slow, and deep understanding of a domain of knowledge. With open-science mandates coming from governments around the world researchers are looking for ways to share their data in meaningful ways. I can think of a significant amount of research that regularly consumes RDF, particularly in the fields of medical biology and genomics where it's used to annotate data. This is where I'd guess you'll see it take a foothold, for example medical diagnosis codes are notoriously disparate and there is a strong appreciation for what semantics could address. Unify, exchange, and consume medical diagnoses ... proffit. Links etc. off the top of my head- * GO - The gene ontology, used in hundreds of thousands of genomic anotations https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3944782/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3944782/ * UBERON - https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-2012-13-1-r5 https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-... * The second year of US2TS - http://us2ts.org/2019/posts/registration.html http://us2ts.org/2019/posts/registration.html * OBO foundry - https://github.com/OBOFoundry/OBOFoundry.github.io https://github.com/OBOFoundry/OBOFoundry.github.io

degyves 8y ago
Even more, we're already there: US ONC Health IT and HL7 are currently on the FHIR standard, which is slowly integrating linked data principles. E.g. currently uses JSON-LD: https://www.healthit.gov/buzz-blog/interoperability/heat-wave-the-u-s-is-poised-to-catch-fhir-in-2019 https://www.healthit.gov/buzz-blog/interoperability/heat-wav...
mbrock 8y ago
I’ve been learning about Barry Smith’s project for a scientific base ontology, Basic Formal Ontology, and it’s really fascinating stuff.

kgwxd 8y ago

Why does it matter the last time anyone consumed RDF? If it's a good fit for the problem at hand (I don't know if it is), then there is no reason to not use it. It doesn't matter how old an idea is, just how it gets used.

degyves 8y ago

Not only now Linked Data + RDF is even simpler and nicer to learn: There are currently more libraries to work with. Also it is more critical than ever for many industries. Current solution for several issues related with electronic health records concluded to create the new standard, to use RDF and linked data, which solved most of the issues on the previous standard. See FHIR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Healthcare_Interoperability_Resources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Healthcare_Interoperabili... In fact, current linked data discussions seem to me that become relevant again because it is more clear now that we have been misusing/overusing/ bad REST, microservices architectures and GraphQL for some already analyzed and solved problems. But, of course, for a single application which doesn't require interoperability, not requiring standardized data exchange formats, not requiring support for flexible data representation, Linked Data and RDF will be clearly unnecessary. But on time, the future of data interconnection plays on the side of Linked Data IMHO. Until now, current attempts to create some Linked Data + RDF alternate infraestructures are more likely to create ad-hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementations of Linked Data and RDF.

geitir 8y ago
Is this a bot?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

walterbell 8y ago

> skipping out on the debates that everyone else in the space is having - like whether decentralization can be fast, or how to ensure data authenticity, or whether a 'local server / pod' can be built that doesn't get hosed by hole-punching through a home Comcast connection Where is a good place to participate in those debates, especially data authenticity and local server pods? FreedomBox didn't go anywhere. FreeNAS with ZFS is reliable but not designed to be exposed to the public internet. Many local services are using a centralized rendezvous server for NAT hole punching. On the shiny commercial front, MyAmberLife has $13M in funding for a home server but it's mostly controlled by a central cloud service. Do Western Digital, Synology, QNAP, Drobo, etc care about decentralization?

tmcw 8y ago
Some relevant efforts are dat (and Beaker Browser, the user-friendly frontend), Secure Scuttlebutt (and Patchwork, the user-friendly frontend), and IPFS. Somewhat less legit (imho) is ZeroNet, and somewhat earlier-stage or more obscure is Upspin.