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I appreciate the spirit of the semantic web, but I've never really been clear on how it would accomplish its stated goals. Let's imagine the web has lots of an

I appreciate the spirit of the semantic web, but I've never really been clear on how it would accomplish its stated goals. Let's imagine the web has lots of annotated, machine-readable data. You still need a client to explore that data, right? The browser is not going to know how to make sense of the relationships between your data points. How is the end user going to consume the information, a web app? As the dominance of companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter have shown, the average user doesn't care about de-centralization. They care about a good user experience. Let's take the recipe scenario presented in the article. What's to stop Google from ingesting all of this semantic data, and then using their army of software devs to integrate the results into Google's search results? Google has invested in natural language processing that can allow their web crawlers to make semantic sense of written text. I'm sure they would love it if a swath of volunteers did this for them instead. Sure, some small, indie shop could use the data too. But Google can integrate with their translation engine, their home speakers and Android. They'll make the experience nice enough that your aunt looking for a scone recipe won't want to leave their ecosystem, even if a more free, de-centralized alternative is available.

jcelerier 6y ago
> What's to stop Google from ingesting all of this semantic data, and then using their army of software devs to integrate the results into Google's search results? that's pretty much exactly what they were doing with freebase (https://developers.google.com/freebase/guide/basic_concepts https://developers.google.com/freebase/guide/basic_concepts)
elliottinvent 6y ago
Yes, I think the semantic web is suited to big companies with large teams and huge processing capabilities – they hoover the data up and add it to their own graph. As you've pointed out, the trend is for Google to pull it out of the website and display it on the results page, cutting the content creator out entirely. Building a tool or service on top of the semantic web is out of reach for most developers because of inconsistencies and complexities, unless they use the tools provided by the giants – and that goes directly against the principles of the semantic web. The exception here is niche use cases and academia working with huge datasets, where the semantic web seems to be incredibly useful.
Karrot_Kream 6y ago
> You still need a client to explore that data, right? http://client.linkeddatafragments.org/ http://client.linkeddatafragments.org/ > How is the end user going to consume the information, a web app? https://github.com/linkeddata/rdflib.js https://github.com/linkeddata/rdflib.js There's many more RDF libraries out there > What's to stop Google from ingesting all of this semantic data, and then using their army of software devs to integrate the results into Google's search results? Google has invested in natural language processing that can allow their web crawlers to make semantic sense of written text. I'm sure they would love it if a swath of volunteers did this for them instead. That's already what Google does with Schema.org https://www.searchenginejournal.com/technical-seo/schema/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/technical-seo/schema/ is a result I pulled up on DDG > Sure, some small, indie shop could use the data too. But Google can integrate with their translation engine, their home speakers and Android. They'll make the experience nice enough that your aunt looking for a scone recipe won't want to leave their ecosystem, even if a more free, de-centralized alternative is available. Sure but without some way for smaller players to get access to the same data that the giants have, there's no way to compete. There's a reason Google, FB, LI, et al have spent as much energy as they have siloing their data, cutting off interop, and consolidating their services. Technical or product or user experience superiority means nothing when you don't have the data; a polished, quick search engine means nothing if it has no results to search through.
usrusr 6y ago
I think that the even more powerful pitfall of that web scenario would be plain and simple lack of truthfulness. Machine readable lies. If you are old enough then you will remember a time when SEO wasn't given a name yet, and mostly consisted of spamming the head tag with untrue META tags. The entire idea of the semantic web is basically a hypothetical extrapolation of the assumption "what if META didn't fell victim to lies?" But that idea quickly evolved away from that web use case full of deliberate deception and evolved into technology for interoperable knowledge representation. The "web" use case quickly turned into the science funding equivalent of spamming META tags: systems (decision-makers) that were still falling for it where considered so far behind that influencing them with that method did not even feel like lying. Interoperable knowledge representation isn't valuable because you might want to plug together random knowledge bases (you wouldn't), but because it would be an enabling technology to build one knowledge base on top of another (or on top of multiple others). This would be particularly valuable when modeling is done in short-lived iterative steps with changing teams, organisations and goals, like the quick iterations of student generations that each push ahead their niche of science with some miniscule contribution to progress. With sem-web tech, one generation of knowledge modelers would be able to do their work on top of the work of those who came before them, without being restricted to the technology of those earlier generations. Think of the "web" in "semantic web" as a big spelling error of "stack". (source: did my diploma during peak semantic web, shoveling OWL from a Java DOM into a Lisp server to brute force maximal consistent subsets of an inconsistent superset in fantastically un-scalable ways)

jcelerier 6y ago

> What's to stop Google from ingesting all of this semantic data, and then using their army of software devs to integrate the results into Google's search results? that's pretty much exactly what they were doing with freebase (https://developers.google.com/freebase/guide/basic_concepts https://developers.google.com/freebase/guide/basic_concepts)

elliottinvent 6y ago

Yes, I think the semantic web is suited to big companies with large teams and huge processing capabilities – they hoover the data up and add it to their own graph. As you've pointed out, the trend is for Google to pull it out of the website and display it on the results page, cutting the content creator out entirely. Building a tool or service on top of the semantic web is out of reach for most developers because of inconsistencies and complexities, unless they use the tools provided by the giants – and that goes directly against the principles of the semantic web. The exception here is niche use cases and academia working with huge datasets, where the semantic web seems to be incredibly useful.

Karrot_Kream 6y ago

> You still need a client to explore that data, right? http://client.linkeddatafragments.org/ http://client.linkeddatafragments.org/ > How is the end user going to consume the information, a web app? https://github.com/linkeddata/rdflib.js https://github.com/linkeddata/rdflib.js There's many more RDF libraries out there > What's to stop Google from ingesting all of this semantic data, and then using their army of software devs to integrate the results into Google's search results? Google has invested in natural language processing that can allow their web crawlers to make semantic sense of written text. I'm sure they would love it if a swath of volunteers did this for them instead. That's already what Google does with Schema.org https://www.searchenginejournal.com/technical-seo/schema/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/technical-seo/schema/ is a result I pulled up on DDG > Sure, some small, indie shop could use the data too. But Google can integrate with their translation engine, their home speakers and Android. They'll make the experience nice enough that your aunt looking for a scone recipe won't want to leave their ecosystem, even if a more free, de-centralized alternative is available. Sure but without some way for smaller players to get access to the same data that the giants have, there's no way to compete. There's a reason Google, FB, LI, et al have spent as much energy as they have siloing their data, cutting off interop, and consolidating their services. Technical or product or user experience superiority means nothing when you don't have the data; a polished, quick search engine means nothing if it has no results to search through.

usrusr 6y ago

I think that the even more powerful pitfall of that web scenario would be plain and simple lack of truthfulness. Machine readable lies. If you are old enough then you will remember a time when SEO wasn't given a name yet, and mostly consisted of spamming the head tag with untrue META tags. The entire idea of the semantic web is basically a hypothetical extrapolation of the assumption "what if META didn't fell victim to lies?" But that idea quickly evolved away from that web use case full of deliberate deception and evolved into technology for interoperable knowledge representation. The "web" use case quickly turned into the science funding equivalent of spamming META tags: systems (decision-makers) that were still falling for it where considered so far behind that influencing them with that method did not even feel like lying. Interoperable knowledge representation isn't valuable because you might want to plug together random knowledge bases (you wouldn't), but because it would be an enabling technology to build one knowledge base on top of another (or on top of multiple others). This would be particularly valuable when modeling is done in short-lived iterative steps with changing teams, organisations and goals, like the quick iterations of student generations that each push ahead their niche of science with some miniscule contribution to progress. With sem-web tech, one generation of knowledge modelers would be able to do their work on top of the work of those who came before them, without being restricted to the technology of those earlier generations. Think of the "web" in "semantic web" as a big spelling error of "stack". (source: did my diploma during peak semantic web, shoveling OWL from a Java DOM into a Lisp server to brute force maximal consistent subsets of an inconsistent superset in fantastically un-scalable ways)