5 ms·

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. Hav

by 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.

by mehh 7y ago

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.