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Solid's goal is nice but its solution ia based on RDF and semantic web. Those technologies failed to take off for a web 3.0. I dont see this going to take off e

by TeeWEE 7y ago

Solid's goal is nice but its solution ia based on RDF and semantic web. Those technologies failed to take off for a web 3.0. I dont see this going to take off either. Turtle is just another syntax for RDF because XML is too verbose.... Anyway i do see a lot of value in IPFS, its solving a different problem, but it's related. It could allow for storing private data encrypted in a non centralized way, having the pinned copy owned by you. I dont think the data format is going to be Solid based.

mehh 7y ago
I'm not sure that because Semantic Web didn't work that implies the technologies don't work. The Semantic Web isn't the technologies it was an initiative. Having said that the technologies you mentioned do have developer experience problems. Some think devs just don't understand them, which is partially true, but having a fugly toolchain doesn't help!
- patrec 7y ago
  > It is not hard to imagine your Web-enabled microwave oven consulting the frozen-food manufacturer's Web site for optimal cooking parameters. This is Berners-Lee being visionary about the potential of a world-wide network of computers. The problem is not just the terrible technical implementation, it's also that the vision behind all this semantic web stuff was one of soulless dorks who saw the world's population spend their days semantically marking up All The Things to get the most of their web-enabled microwaves. Everything I have seen Berners-Lee prominently involved in sucks at every level from micro to macro. Take urls: url query strings separators conflict with html escaping, the port syntax conflicts with the IPv6 syntax (which came first) and finally urls are not even self delimiting, so Tim hatched the aesthetically compelling workaround to write them as <URL:http://example.com> http://example.com>.
  - mehh 7y ago
    >It is not hard to imagine your Web-enabled microwave oven consulting the frozen-food manufacturer's Web site for optimal cooking parameters. >This is Berners-Lee being visionary about the potential of a world-wide network of computers. That sounds very much like the sort of stuff that gets spouted by the IoT crowd too though isn't it? >The problem is not just the terrible technical implementation, it's also that the vision behind all this semantic web stuff was one of soulless dorks who saw the world's population spend their days semantically marking up All The Things to get the most of their web-enabled microwaves. Well, aren't there a huge mass of developers spending their lives writing custom code for every damn API, and then integrating with more custom code. And each time eventing new poor ways of describing the things and relationships?
- tannhaeuser 7y ago
  From what I understand, SemWeb is/was pretty much TBL's pet project at W3C, and the one thing he was interested tinkering with. SemWeb such as RDF, SPARQL, OWL, etc. isn't terrible to work with, and has found it's niches; for example I'm working right now on a project making heavy use of graph DBs and SPARQL for biochem, and the standardization has profoundly helped F/OSS and commercial software funding in that area, and has helped funding research (eg. identifying tractable fragments of first order logic with OWL/2). But OTOH the SemWeb stack feels very much a design-by-comittee, with lots of "reuse" of other unrelated W3C tech such as XML, and I don't think it will ever become mainstream apart from things such as Wikimedia's public data sets published as RDF where it seems a good fit. The more problematic side with TBL's SemWeb love affair is that it has resulted in web core standardization to become neglected at W3C. For example, W3C HTML was last published in 2017 as a recommendation (with plans to merely "bless" WHATWG snapshots going forward, which however hasn't happened so far). Likewise, the SVG2 effort (with little but still welcome additions/cleanup compared to SVG1.1) has stalled, etc.
ianopolous 7y ago
If you like the idea of an encrypted personal data store on ipfs, then check out Peergos. That's exactly what we're doing. https://book.peergos.org https://book.peergos.org https://github.com/peergos/peergos https://github.com/peergos/peergos
- thinkloop 7y ago
  I really like this. Is there any way to monetize it eventually?
  - ianopolous 7y ago
    Glad to hear you like it! The plan is to charge for a hosted version. (You could still have your own mirror if you want). We want to keep our incentives aligned with those of our users.
e12e 7y ago
> Turtle is just another syntax for RDF because XML is too verbose.... I'm not so sure that alone should be dismissed - html was "just" a simpler docbook. And json too, if you squint, is just a dumbed down xml - in the sense that both represent graph/documents. [ed: and xml was just a simpler sgml]. Both json and html dropped some important features from xml/sgml, but I think the resulting simplicity (both good and bad) had a hand in the success of first the web, and later the "json-rest" web 2.0. (I have a hard time calling it REST as it retains quite few of the benefits of rests, and modern SPAs aren't really REST at all, but rather "move able code" - more architecturally like office documents with rich macros than REST).
Vinnl 7y ago
I am inclined to be skeptical of semweb technologies as well, and certainly I think there are many in the Solid community that look at it as a sort-of second chance for it. However, I do think many of the reasons I think it failed the first time around might not apply in the case of Solid, where it's used for modeling just personal data stored in a place under the user's control - which comes with its own unique challenges for which it might actually be a good match. I'm on a phone with bad WiFi now, but happy to dive into that more later if anyone's interested. (Disclosure: I also work for Inrupt, but views are my own.)
- anderspitman 7y ago
  I'm interested in hearing more about this.
oever 7y ago
Turtle is a very nice format to read and write RDF in. There is no same XML serialization of RDF. RDF/XML is very annoying and unintuitive to write and parsing it into triples requires a lot of work so you need a special library anyway. You might as well start with Turtle then. That being said, it's easy to convert from one format to another: you'll get the same triples. So just use what you like.

by TeeWEE 7y ago

mehh 7y ago

I'm not sure that because Semantic Web didn't work that implies the technologies don't work. The Semantic Web isn't the technologies it was an initiative. Having said that the technologies you mentioned do have developer experience problems. Some think devs just don't understand them, which is partially true, but having a fugly toolchain doesn't help!

patrec 7y ago
> It is not hard to imagine your Web-enabled microwave oven consulting the frozen-food manufacturer's Web site for optimal cooking parameters. This is Berners-Lee being visionary about the potential of a world-wide network of computers. The problem is not just the terrible technical implementation, it's also that the vision behind all this semantic web stuff was one of soulless dorks who saw the world's population spend their days semantically marking up All The Things to get the most of their web-enabled microwaves. Everything I have seen Berners-Lee prominently involved in sucks at every level from micro to macro. Take urls: url query strings separators conflict with html escaping, the port syntax conflicts with the IPv6 syntax (which came first) and finally urls are not even self delimiting, so Tim hatched the aesthetically compelling workaround to write them as <URL:http://example.com> http://example.com>.
- mehh 7y ago
  >It is not hard to imagine your Web-enabled microwave oven consulting the frozen-food manufacturer's Web site for optimal cooking parameters. >This is Berners-Lee being visionary about the potential of a world-wide network of computers. That sounds very much like the sort of stuff that gets spouted by the IoT crowd too though isn't it? >The problem is not just the terrible technical implementation, it's also that the vision behind all this semantic web stuff was one of soulless dorks who saw the world's population spend their days semantically marking up All The Things to get the most of their web-enabled microwaves. Well, aren't there a huge mass of developers spending their lives writing custom code for every damn API, and then integrating with more custom code. And each time eventing new poor ways of describing the things and relationships?
tannhaeuser 7y ago
From what I understand, SemWeb is/was pretty much TBL's pet project at W3C, and the one thing he was interested tinkering with. SemWeb such as RDF, SPARQL, OWL, etc. isn't terrible to work with, and has found it's niches; for example I'm working right now on a project making heavy use of graph DBs and SPARQL for biochem, and the standardization has profoundly helped F/OSS and commercial software funding in that area, and has helped funding research (eg. identifying tractable fragments of first order logic with OWL/2). But OTOH the SemWeb stack feels very much a design-by-comittee, with lots of "reuse" of other unrelated W3C tech such as XML, and I don't think it will ever become mainstream apart from things such as Wikimedia's public data sets published as RDF where it seems a good fit. The more problematic side with TBL's SemWeb love affair is that it has resulted in web core standardization to become neglected at W3C. For example, W3C HTML was last published in 2017 as a recommendation (with plans to merely "bless" WHATWG snapshots going forward, which however hasn't happened so far). Likewise, the SVG2 effort (with little but still welcome additions/cleanup compared to SVG1.1) has stalled, etc.

ianopolous 7y ago

If you like the idea of an encrypted personal data store on ipfs, then check out Peergos. That's exactly what we're doing. https://book.peergos.org https://book.peergos.org https://github.com/peergos/peergos https://github.com/peergos/peergos

thinkloop 7y ago
I really like this. Is there any way to monetize it eventually?
- ianopolous 7y ago
  Glad to hear you like it! The plan is to charge for a hosted version. (You could still have your own mirror if you want). We want to keep our incentives aligned with those of our users.

e12e 7y ago

> Turtle is just another syntax for RDF because XML is too verbose.... I'm not so sure that alone should be dismissed - html was "just" a simpler docbook. And json too, if you squint, is just a dumbed down xml - in the sense that both represent graph/documents. [ed: and xml was just a simpler sgml]. Both json and html dropped some important features from xml/sgml, but I think the resulting simplicity (both good and bad) had a hand in the success of first the web, and later the "json-rest" web 2.0. (I have a hard time calling it REST as it retains quite few of the benefits of rests, and modern SPAs aren't really REST at all, but rather "move able code" - more architecturally like office documents with rich macros than REST).

Vinnl 7y ago

I am inclined to be skeptical of semweb technologies as well, and certainly I think there are many in the Solid community that look at it as a sort-of second chance for it. However, I do think many of the reasons I think it failed the first time around might not apply in the case of Solid, where it's used for modeling just personal data stored in a place under the user's control - which comes with its own unique challenges for which it might actually be a good match. I'm on a phone with bad WiFi now, but happy to dive into that more later if anyone's interested. (Disclosure: I also work for Inrupt, but views are my own.)

anderspitman 7y ago
I'm interested in hearing more about this.

oever 7y ago

Turtle is a very nice format to read and write RDF in. There is no same XML serialization of RDF. RDF/XML is very annoying and unintuitive to write and parsing it into triples requires a lot of work so you need a special library anyway. You might as well start with Turtle then. That being said, it's easy to convert from one format to another: you'll get the same triples. So just use what you like.