4 ms·

Former semantic web researcher here. The problem with semantic web is that it's way too complicated for the average user (unlike html), with no clear payoff/ I

Former semantic web researcher here. The problem with semantic web is that it's way too complicated for the average user (unlike html), with no clear payoff/ I see the need for Machine learning to automate several of these tasks. It is a laudable effort, but I'm not sure if it'd be anything more than some marginal improvements in data interop on a web-scale.

echelon 6y ago
You're right. It's hard to publish data with semantic markup and understand the schemas (or even the benefit of using them). Nobody is writing FOAF or any other RDF/OWL by hand. In order to bootstrap the process, authorship tools need to produce semantic markup automatically on the behalf of users. Unfortunately the content silos do not want to do that. They're happy to keep the data to themselves and run Snowflake / big data queries on them all day long. They just don't want you doing the same. It's no benefit to them if your friend or interest graph escapes their hold. This is a difficult chicken and egg problem. A good angle of attack might be for the distributed web folks to take an interest. ActivityPub, Mastodon, and Matrix/Riot/(whatever they rebranded to) would be beneficiaries of schema ingestion. The more they can mark up the data they produce, the more useful it becomes. A tooling ecosystem can grow around semantic data. Technically open standard APIs in a distributed web are already semantic, it may just be that their schemas don't map well to queryable triple stores. But that's just a transformation away. RDF is just a format for expressing your ontology in an open and compatible way others can reference and build upon.
- Karrot_Kream 6y ago
  The ActivityPub standard is built atop JSON-LD, which is a Semantic Web standard. I don't think anyone has really tried to parse the data exposed by the Fediverse for much though.
dumb1224 6y ago
I was working in RDF/ontology space. IMO the additional domain knowledge required to model data correctly and publish them in a way an average user can comprehend and navigate properly is disproportional to the benefit of such data model. By the time everything is properly modelled the knowledge itself might be a bit obsolete (speaking from bio-tech related fields).

echelon 6y ago

You're right. It's hard to publish data with semantic markup and understand the schemas (or even the benefit of using them). Nobody is writing FOAF or any other RDF/OWL by hand. In order to bootstrap the process, authorship tools need to produce semantic markup automatically on the behalf of users. Unfortunately the content silos do not want to do that. They're happy to keep the data to themselves and run Snowflake / big data queries on them all day long. They just don't want you doing the same. It's no benefit to them if your friend or interest graph escapes their hold. This is a difficult chicken and egg problem. A good angle of attack might be for the distributed web folks to take an interest. ActivityPub, Mastodon, and Matrix/Riot/(whatever they rebranded to) would be beneficiaries of schema ingestion. The more they can mark up the data they produce, the more useful it becomes. A tooling ecosystem can grow around semantic data. Technically open standard APIs in a distributed web are already semantic, it may just be that their schemas don't map well to queryable triple stores. But that's just a transformation away. RDF is just a format for expressing your ontology in an open and compatible way others can reference and build upon.

Karrot_Kream 6y ago
The ActivityPub standard is built atop JSON-LD, which is a Semantic Web standard. I don't think anyone has really tried to parse the data exposed by the Fediverse for much though.

dumb1224 6y ago

I was working in RDF/ontology space. IMO the additional domain knowledge required to model data correctly and publish them in a way an average user can comprehend and navigate properly is disproportional to the benefit of such data model. By the time everything is properly modelled the knowledge itself might be a bit obsolete (speaking from bio-tech related fields).