8 ms·

The Semantic Future of the Web

88 points by kjhughes 6y ago

stolenmerch 6y ago
I was extremely excited by the Semantic Web back in 2003-2005 when working on a master's in Information Science. I was sure it was 5 years away, tops. I was eagerly building profile pages using FOAF and trying hard to implement other ontologies in my work. I got a job in an academic library and pushed hard for semantic technologies. Seemed like Linked Data was such a hot buzzword and topic that we all wanted to explore but could... just.. never.. get going. In 2015 I gave it all 5 more years and then would consider it essentially "vaporware". Maybe it'll catch on someday but it's 2020 and our data is siloed as much as ever. Feel like web scraping plus machine learning is the real winner in this space, but maybe that's an unfair comparison.
- pocketgrok 6y ago
  The incentives aren’t there. It takes effort to get right and what do you get? Bots scraping your data? I wish it was different that seems to be the thought process.
  - wrnr 6y ago
    As I've said elsewhere I fear that it's actually worse then a lack of economic incentives, even in a Communist utopia it won't work because knowledge can not be encoded through semantic predicates.
    - bawolff 6y ago
      Umm why not? I mean, its clear that all knowledge probably can't (probably can't encode all knowledge in english either), but it seems intuitively obvious to me that there exists a useful subset of knowledge that can be, given sufficient effort. I think ability to encode useful knowledge in principle in semantic triples is about the only problem the semantic web doesn't have.
      - wrnr 6y ago
        I've ranted about this before[1] and you can read it when searching for my nickname. It is ultimately a philosophic question about the meaning of semantics (sorry), but suggest to a modern linguist that knowledge can be grounded with predicates logic and they'll tell you "Dude we haven't been trying to do this for more then a 100 years, ever since Wittgenstein had a nervous breakdown". It is a shame the semantic web doesn't pay attention to other fields that have studied this questions, or maybe some did and left :) [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24583798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24583798
        bawolff 6y ago
        "Semantics" is a very overloaded term, but i'm not sure the goal of the semantic web matches the goals of "semantics" in other fields that you are thinking of.
    - Privacy846 6y ago
      > won't work because knowledge can not be encoded through semantic predicates. “Can not” means “has the possibility of not happening”. Did you mean: “cannot”?
- fudged71 6y ago
  I have been incredibly interested in ontologies and information science recently. So I’m wondering, what are the hob prospects like? What are you doing now? Your classmates?
- Vinnl 6y ago
  I had the same feeling back then, although I was in high school. By the time I'd graduated high school it was clear that it was indeed mostly a pipe dream and how, as another comment says, the incentives are all misaligned. I grew fairly sceptical of the semantic web. And what do you know... 15 years later and I'm working for TimBL himself, figuring out if we can make it work this time with personal data and changed (legislative) incentives. Who knows :)
mark_l_watson 6y ago
I have been interested in the semantic web since the beginning, with interesting work in the field. I view the SW as part of knowledge representation, thus part of AI.
cookiengineer 6y ago
I find it ironic that this blog post is made by stackoverflow. A company whose sole purpose is questions and answers, but whose website doesn't even have a print stylesheet. The semantic web was much more than bots. It meant transformability and adaptiveness of information. Braille displays are just as important as print, web, screen and other targets. Sadly modern day web browsers have such less support for it that they even dropped the media device targets from the CSS spec, which I think is morally wrong. Did you know that screenreaders, palm PDAs and others all had support for it...and that publishing to a new platform was as easy as linking a new stylesheet? None of that HTML5 crap was necessary. No modernizr, no JS, no pixelperfect designs necessary. It just worked. XHTML 1.1 strict ran everywhere. And by everywhere, I mean even the mobile audiobook players that used the DAISY format. Fully automatically transformed, and voiced over content. Imagine a web where you could train your personal assistant without any machine learning, and where information is automatically connected, researched, gathered and related. That kind of internet is the necessary step for our species to reach a superintelligence level. Without it, humans will stay as dumb as the internet is right now. Full of misinformation, deceit, and financial players "shaping" public opinion and manipulating the truth.
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  Apart from it having been introduced by W3C as part of heir 1998-2004ish push for renovating the web, I can't see what XHTML and CSS media queries have to do with SemWeb, though. There's no reason to be bitter about the failure of XML/XHTML on the web as the good parts (SVG, MathML to some degree) have been incorporated into HTML5. To the contrary, one could say W3C's fixation on XML (and RDF/sparql) gave rise to WHATWG/Google, and their vision for the appification of the web.
  - Mikhail_Edoshin 6y ago
    XML was designed as a federation of interoperable notations. The notations could co-exist and independently and organically grow and enhance the web in all ways. This is a much broader vision than what HTML turned into.
bawolff 6y ago
Wow, this feels like something out of the mid-2000s. The problem with the semantic web is that the incentives are mostly wrong. People make websites to be viewed by people. Doing the semantic stuff is work that can be difficult to get right. If it doesn't bring you visitors, why would (most) people bother. Sure you can get fancy tools that use the data (lets ignore the scaling issues that many of them have), but fancy tools separates the data from the context, further reducing incentives (for many content creators). If they ever did take off, we would have massive spam/quality problems, because we have now separated the data from the website, with all the visual indicators of how spammy it is, which is perfect for dark SEO and other spammers/phisers. For that matter, just look at metadata on the web in general and what a mess that is. <meta name=description (or keywords) - spammers took over and nobody use them. <link rel="next" i think old opera is the only thing to ever do anything with that metadata. The only metadata systems that have ever worked is when the site author gets something out of it: e.g. technocrati tags, <link> to rss feeds, facebook opengraph, various google things, etc. Or on the other side, when that is their whole reason for being, like https://wikidata.org https://wikidata.org and maybe some glam stuff. Everyone making arbitrary metadata out of the goodness of their heart, and having it be of consistent quality and meaning is a pipe dream. Not to mention the negative incentive of obliterating the walled garden which as much as it sucks is something the corporate overlords like a lot.
- jka 6y ago
  To be honest, I think we already have the spam/quality issues[1], it's just that web spidering systems have to wade through and discard most of the presentation-layer cruft before they begin to determine the value of the content. Allowing users to access information more directly and reducing the cost + complexity of content extraction seem like worthwhile goals. [1] Edit: clarification: even in embedded semantic web data (microformats, etc)
- holri 6y ago
  > because we have now separated the data from the website That is why microformats exists. With it the visual representation is at the same time semantic and parseable. https://indieweb.org/microformats https://indieweb.org/microformats
tannhaeuser 6y ago
LOL. It's been the future of the Web for the last 20 years.
- bawolff 6y ago
  The history section of the wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_network#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_network#History goes all the way back to the 3rd century!
iddan 6y ago
I think that the future of the semantic web is not by adapting websites to use semantic tags (even though many of them do to some degree to work well with Google’s knowledge graph) rather APIs will start to use a semantic format (JSON-LD is a likely candidate). Unlike content, for data there is a big incentive to make it as easily understandable by machines. It can enable a whole new class of applications that use data according to well known ontologies instead of a rigid data structure (think API hyperlinks but with much less hard coding)
kstenerud 6y ago
With AI at last hitting its heyday, semantic data will finally be important enough to enter general use. It's not a replacement for the web, but rather a supplement to it, where intelligent machine agents can automatically and intelligently navigate relationship connections to find or even infer the information you're looking for using various APIs. Tim Berners Lee was way ahead of his time with this (and ahead of computers' ability to make something useful out of it), which is why it languished for so long (much like AI did). schema.org is a godsend, because it's finally a serious attempt at standardizing semantics (much like foaf did in a rather anemic attempt). I've added the relationship data type to the Concise Encoding spec [1] and look forward to exciting times! [1] https://concise-encoding.org/#relationships https://concise-encoding.org/#relationships
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  If anything, I’d have thought AI would lead to people being lazier about marking up semantic data, because if the machine learning is good enough there’s simply no call for it. So yeah, people may consume the semantic data, but the actual markup for such semantic data could become even less important than it is now. > schema.org is a godsend, because it's finally a serious attempt at standardizing semantics schema.org is nothing new. It’s been around since 2011 (and was a direct follow-up to earlier efforts like microformats from 2005–2010), and has been valuable to search engine listings and thus widely used ever since.
  - kstenerud 6y ago
    It's not about people marking up HTML to add semantic data; that's never going to happen (and never should). HTML is a presentation layer designed for comsumption by humans, and human presentation data is no place for semantic content because it's a view of the data meant for HUMANS, who will already understand the semantic meaning. "Semantic content" is about machines using common semantic identifiers in their public APIs so that their data sets can interoperate and be used as components for something bigger.
    - tannhaeuser 6y ago
_iyig 6y ago
I tend to agree with the selected Cory Doctorow quote. “Put a tag on it” is the semantic web version of IoT’s “put a chip in it” - technically feasible, yes, but to what end all that time and expense? The author here is fuzzy on applications. Feels like a solution looking for a problem. When it comes to augmenting digital assistants like Alexa or OK Google, standalone semantic knowledge bases like Wikidata [0] seem good enough. And as natural language understanding code gets better at interpreting user queries, so too does it get better at ingesting unstructured knowledge, such as raw Wikipedia articles, without need to resort to structured meta-tags. [0] https://wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page https://wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page
- iso8859-1 6y ago
  Wikidata is such a great companion to Wikipedia, now most structured data is moved over and shared by all languages.
gfxgirl 6y ago
this will never work. the problem is people will add whatever semantics get them more sales. If tagging a site about dogs as "cats" gets 5% more visitors, even if they're pissed off it will still translate into more sales. Further, getting everyone to agree on semantics is impossible. You can already see this in action on soundcloud. Search for any music category and you won't be 5 songs in until you find a song that doesn't fit the category. Whether that's because the creator legitimately thought the tag belonged or if they just thought it would get them more listens it doesn't really matter. What matters is the tags become useless I see this on many sites. Stack Overflow uses tags to add semantics. It only kind of works because of a vast army of volunteers fixing the tags.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Sounds like tag downvoting/upvoting on the search engine is the way to go ?
  - gfxgirl 6y ago
    The scammers will just either make bots to upvote or hire cheap labor. Same as all the fake reviews on Amazon.
yenwel 6y ago
In the more traditional domain of websites I don't think are adapted but in newer domains around iot, digital twins or smart cities there _is_ adoption specifically to avoid data silos and vendor lock in. https://fiware-datamodels.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ngsi-ld_howto/index.html https://fiware-datamodels.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ngsi-ld_h... https://github.com/Azure/opendigitaltwins-dtdl https://github.com/Azure/opendigitaltwins-dtdl https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-pnp/overview-iot-plug-and-play https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-pnp/overview-iot-...
daftponk 6y ago
I applied to YC a bunch of times with a prototype for a business to help create more of the semantic web. They were never interested in the slightest bit.
jgalt212 6y ago
The biggest impediment to the Semantic Web is Google. They'll do for structured data what they did for news data. https://searchengineland.com/wikipedia-confirms-they-are-steadily-losing-google-traffic-228237 https://searchengineland.com/wikipedia-confirms-they-are-ste... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23477201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23477201 https://hackernoon.com/how-wikipedia-lost-3-billion-organic-search-visits-to-google-in-2019-qz6630u6 https://hackernoon.com/how-wikipedia-lost-3-billion-organic-...
throwawaybutwhy 6y ago
These folks don't want to allow anonymous users to run searches on their website which is a shame, semantic web or not. The bolg post is also strangely devoid of meaning.

88 points by kjhughes 6y ago

I was extremely excited by the Semantic Web back in 2003-2005 when working on a master's in Information Science. I was sure it was 5 years away, tops. I was eagerly building profile pages using FOAF and trying hard to implement other ontologies in my work. I got a job in an academic library and pushed hard for semantic technologies. Seemed like Linked Data was such a hot buzzword and topic that we all wanted to explore but could... just.. never.. get going. In 2015 I gave it all 5 more years and then would consider it essentially "vaporware". Maybe it'll catch on someday but it's 2020 and our data is siloed as much as ever. Feel like web scraping plus machine learning is the real winner in this space, but maybe that's an unfair comparison.

pocketgrok 6y ago
The incentives aren’t there. It takes effort to get right and what do you get? Bots scraping your data? I wish it was different that seems to be the thought process.
- wrnr 6y ago
  As I've said elsewhere I fear that it's actually worse then a lack of economic incentives, even in a Communist utopia it won't work because knowledge can not be encoded through semantic predicates.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    Umm why not? I mean, its clear that all knowledge probably can't (probably can't encode all knowledge in english either), but it seems intuitively obvious to me that there exists a useful subset of knowledge that can be, given sufficient effort. I think ability to encode useful knowledge in principle in semantic triples is about the only problem the semantic web doesn't have.
    - wrnr 6y ago
      I've ranted about this before[1] and you can read it when searching for my nickname. It is ultimately a philosophic question about the meaning of semantics (sorry), but suggest to a modern linguist that knowledge can be grounded with predicates logic and they'll tell you "Dude we haven't been trying to do this for more then a 100 years, ever since Wittgenstein had a nervous breakdown". It is a shame the semantic web doesn't pay attention to other fields that have studied this questions, or maybe some did and left :) [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24583798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24583798
      - bawolff 6y ago
        "Semantics" is a very overloaded term, but i'm not sure the goal of the semantic web matches the goals of "semantics" in other fields that you are thinking of.
  - Privacy846 6y ago
    > won't work because knowledge can not be encoded through semantic predicates. “Can not” means “has the possibility of not happening”. Did you mean: “cannot”?
fudged71 6y ago
I have been incredibly interested in ontologies and information science recently. So I’m wondering, what are the hob prospects like? What are you doing now? Your classmates?
Vinnl 6y ago
I had the same feeling back then, although I was in high school. By the time I'd graduated high school it was clear that it was indeed mostly a pipe dream and how, as another comment says, the incentives are all misaligned. I grew fairly sceptical of the semantic web. And what do you know... 15 years later and I'm working for TimBL himself, figuring out if we can make it work this time with personal data and changed (legislative) incentives. Who knows :)

mark_l_watson 6y ago

I have been interested in the semantic web since the beginning, with interesting work in the field. I view the SW as part of knowledge representation, thus part of AI.

cookiengineer 6y ago

I find it ironic that this blog post is made by stackoverflow. A company whose sole purpose is questions and answers, but whose website doesn't even have a print stylesheet. The semantic web was much more than bots. It meant transformability and adaptiveness of information. Braille displays are just as important as print, web, screen and other targets. Sadly modern day web browsers have such less support for it that they even dropped the media device targets from the CSS spec, which I think is morally wrong. Did you know that screenreaders, palm PDAs and others all had support for it...and that publishing to a new platform was as easy as linking a new stylesheet? None of that HTML5 crap was necessary. No modernizr, no JS, no pixelperfect designs necessary. It just worked. XHTML 1.1 strict ran everywhere. And by everywhere, I mean even the mobile audiobook players that used the DAISY format. Fully automatically transformed, and voiced over content. Imagine a web where you could train your personal assistant without any machine learning, and where information is automatically connected, researched, gathered and related. That kind of internet is the necessary step for our species to reach a superintelligence level. Without it, humans will stay as dumb as the internet is right now. Full of misinformation, deceit, and financial players "shaping" public opinion and manipulating the truth.

tannhaeuser 6y ago
Apart from it having been introduced by W3C as part of heir 1998-2004ish push for renovating the web, I can't see what XHTML and CSS media queries have to do with SemWeb, though. There's no reason to be bitter about the failure of XML/XHTML on the web as the good parts (SVG, MathML to some degree) have been incorporated into HTML5. To the contrary, one could say W3C's fixation on XML (and RDF/sparql) gave rise to WHATWG/Google, and their vision for the appification of the web.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 6y ago
  XML was designed as a federation of interoperable notations. The notations could co-exist and independently and organically grow and enhance the web in all ways. This is a much broader vision than what HTML turned into.

bawolff 6y ago

Wow, this feels like something out of the mid-2000s. The problem with the semantic web is that the incentives are mostly wrong. People make websites to be viewed by people. Doing the semantic stuff is work that can be difficult to get right. If it doesn't bring you visitors, why would (most) people bother. Sure you can get fancy tools that use the data (lets ignore the scaling issues that many of them have), but fancy tools separates the data from the context, further reducing incentives (for many content creators). If they ever did take off, we would have massive spam/quality problems, because we have now separated the data from the website, with all the visual indicators of how spammy it is, which is perfect for dark SEO and other spammers/phisers. For that matter, just look at metadata on the web in general and what a mess that is. <meta name=description (or keywords) - spammers took over and nobody use them. <link rel="next" i think old opera is the only thing to ever do anything with that metadata. The only metadata systems that have ever worked is when the site author gets something out of it: e.g. technocrati tags, <link> to rss feeds, facebook opengraph, various google things, etc. Or on the other side, when that is their whole reason for being, like https://wikidata.org https://wikidata.org and maybe some glam stuff. Everyone making arbitrary metadata out of the goodness of their heart, and having it be of consistent quality and meaning is a pipe dream. Not to mention the negative incentive of obliterating the walled garden which as much as it sucks is something the corporate overlords like a lot.

jka 6y ago
To be honest, I think we already have the spam/quality issues[1], it's just that web spidering systems have to wade through and discard most of the presentation-layer cruft before they begin to determine the value of the content. Allowing users to access information more directly and reducing the cost + complexity of content extraction seem like worthwhile goals. [1] Edit: clarification: even in embedded semantic web data (microformats, etc)
holri 6y ago
> because we have now separated the data from the website That is why microformats exists. With it the visual representation is at the same time semantic and parseable. https://indieweb.org/microformats https://indieweb.org/microformats

tannhaeuser 6y ago

LOL. It's been the future of the Web for the last 20 years.

bawolff 6y ago
The history section of the wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_network#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_network#History goes all the way back to the 3rd century!

iddan 6y ago

I think that the future of the semantic web is not by adapting websites to use semantic tags (even though many of them do to some degree to work well with Google’s knowledge graph) rather APIs will start to use a semantic format (JSON-LD is a likely candidate). Unlike content, for data there is a big incentive to make it as easily understandable by machines. It can enable a whole new class of applications that use data according to well known ontologies instead of a rigid data structure (think API hyperlinks but with much less hard coding)

kstenerud 6y ago

With AI at last hitting its heyday, semantic data will finally be important enough to enter general use. It's not a replacement for the web, but rather a supplement to it, where intelligent machine agents can automatically and intelligently navigate relationship connections to find or even infer the information you're looking for using various APIs. Tim Berners Lee was way ahead of his time with this (and ahead of computers' ability to make something useful out of it), which is why it languished for so long (much like AI did). schema.org is a godsend, because it's finally a serious attempt at standardizing semantics (much like foaf did in a rather anemic attempt). I've added the relationship data type to the Concise Encoding spec [1] and look forward to exciting times! [1] https://concise-encoding.org/#relationships https://concise-encoding.org/#relationships

chrismorgan 6y ago
If anything, I’d have thought AI would lead to people being lazier about marking up semantic data, because if the machine learning is good enough there’s simply no call for it. So yeah, people may consume the semantic data, but the actual markup for such semantic data could become even less important than it is now. > schema.org is a godsend, because it's finally a serious attempt at standardizing semantics schema.org is nothing new. It’s been around since 2011 (and was a direct follow-up to earlier efforts like microformats from 2005–2010), and has been valuable to search engine listings and thus widely used ever since.
- kstenerud 6y ago
  It's not about people marking up HTML to add semantic data; that's never going to happen (and never should). HTML is a presentation layer designed for comsumption by humans, and human presentation data is no place for semantic content because it's a view of the data meant for HUMANS, who will already understand the semantic meaning. "Semantic content" is about machines using common semantic identifiers in their public APIs so that their data sets can interoperate and be used as components for something bigger.
  - tannhaeuser 6y ago

_iyig 6y ago

I tend to agree with the selected Cory Doctorow quote. “Put a tag on it” is the semantic web version of IoT’s “put a chip in it” - technically feasible, yes, but to what end all that time and expense? The author here is fuzzy on applications. Feels like a solution looking for a problem. When it comes to augmenting digital assistants like Alexa or OK Google, standalone semantic knowledge bases like Wikidata [0] seem good enough. And as natural language understanding code gets better at interpreting user queries, so too does it get better at ingesting unstructured knowledge, such as raw Wikipedia articles, without need to resort to structured meta-tags. [0] https://wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page https://wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page

iso8859-1 6y ago
Wikidata is such a great companion to Wikipedia, now most structured data is moved over and shared by all languages.

gfxgirl 6y ago

this will never work. the problem is people will add whatever semantics get them more sales. If tagging a site about dogs as "cats" gets 5% more visitors, even if they're pissed off it will still translate into more sales. Further, getting everyone to agree on semantics is impossible. You can already see this in action on soundcloud. Search for any music category and you won't be 5 songs in until you find a song that doesn't fit the category. Whether that's because the creator legitimately thought the tag belonged or if they just thought it would get them more listens it doesn't really matter. What matters is the tags become useless I see this on many sites. Stack Overflow uses tags to add semantics. It only kind of works because of a vast army of volunteers fixing the tags.

BlueTemplar 6y ago
Sounds like tag downvoting/upvoting on the search engine is the way to go ?
- gfxgirl 6y ago
  The scammers will just either make bots to upvote or hire cheap labor. Same as all the fake reviews on Amazon.

yenwel 6y ago

In the more traditional domain of websites I don't think are adapted but in newer domains around iot, digital twins or smart cities there _is_ adoption specifically to avoid data silos and vendor lock in. https://fiware-datamodels.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ngsi-ld_howto/index.html https://fiware-datamodels.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ngsi-ld_h... https://github.com/Azure/opendigitaltwins-dtdl https://github.com/Azure/opendigitaltwins-dtdl https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-pnp/overview-iot-plug-and-play https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-pnp/overview-iot-...

daftponk 6y ago

I applied to YC a bunch of times with a prototype for a business to help create more of the semantic web. They were never interested in the slightest bit.

jgalt212 6y ago

The biggest impediment to the Semantic Web is Google. They'll do for structured data what they did for news data. https://searchengineland.com/wikipedia-confirms-they-are-steadily-losing-google-traffic-228237 https://searchengineland.com/wikipedia-confirms-they-are-ste... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23477201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23477201 https://hackernoon.com/how-wikipedia-lost-3-billion-organic-search-visits-to-google-in-2019-qz6630u6 https://hackernoon.com/how-wikipedia-lost-3-billion-organic-...

throwawaybutwhy 6y ago

These folks don't want to allow anonymous users to run searches on their website which is a shame, semantic web or not. The bolg post is also strangely devoid of meaning.