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I was "stuck" working with a bunch of leading academics and researchers on a SemWeb project using OWL/RDF, in collaboration with DARPA and the US Department of
by JPKab 6y ago
I was "stuck" working with a bunch of leading academics and researchers on a SemWeb project using OWL/RDF, in collaboration with DARPA and the US Department of Defense, around 2008-2009.
You are absolutely correct that they are hostile to anything outside of their "ideology".
The awful, horrific performance of the RDF/OWL databases compared to the impure, heretical evil Neo4j that they despised for its practicality..... that was always funny.
Another interesting thing I encountered in the field was the side-effect of an academic field that sounds really good to people who have never built anything EVER is that it can often get a ton of funding and grant money from central government organizations, thereby creating legions of rather shitty companies (especially in the EU, where the grants were everywhere) that have the word "semantic" in the name even though they do nothing with actual semantic technology. These shitty companies are often just there to employ the academics.
The craziest thing was these projects where they would employ a dozen or so "library scientists" who were all just masters and phd students who had, for some reason, decided to study to be librarians in the digital era to create the OWL ontologies. None of them knew anything about computer science or programming, and they would just sit there and read thousands of policy documents and use an Eclipse based GUI to create and edit giant graphs of knowledge and rules. All were being paid six figures, and didn't produce a single goddammed thing of value. So much taxpayer money in those rooms going to complete waste. Glad it wasn't just me that thought the community was a joke.
The semantic web will arrive one day, but OWL and SPARQL won't be anywhere in it. And it won't be any of these academics delivering it.
- ta988 6y agoAre you referring to the BFO crowd? I would be interested in your thoughts about BFO itself if thats the case.
- JPKab 6y agoIf by BFO you are referring to "Basic Formal Ontologies", then yes, I'm referring to that "crowd". My thoughts on ontologies in general are that they can certainly be powerful, and I've seen them used in the past in rules engines that powered fraud detection applications. In the SemWeb community, in the late 2000s, they successfully convinced a bunch of CIOs of massive organizations, especially in the US Federal Government, that a key to being able to centralize and federate all of their data, and save money on duplicative systems, they could simply have semantic mappings on top of every IT system's databases, and query this semantic layer. Ideally, they could eliminate duplicated data, so that all systems would get data from the "Authoritative Data Source" system instead of duplicating it locally in the application's database. I'm sure you can immediately see why this is wildly stupid and unrealistic. Imagine what it would look like if every single piece of data that I can technically obtain from another source has to remain in that source, and that storing that data locally with my application specific data is forbidden..... Suddenly, there is a massive increase in I/O, drop in performance, etc. The whole project taught me a lesson about the politics of academia, and how there is a segment of the population that is highly educated, and has learned how to manufacture work for themselves outside of academia by pushing for high-level government officials to implement programs based on their theories..... MITRE was a big part of this particular project.