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I'd be interested to know what people thought of Semantic Web tech (which barely squeezes in, around 1999). When I went to university (2013-16ish) there were s

I'd be interested to know what people thought of Semantic Web tech (which barely squeezes in, around 1999). When I went to university (2013-16ish) there were still a couple of professors clinging to the idea that everyone would see the light and semantic web would be broadly implemented, but aside from that everyone else I've ever discussed it with has considered it a dead or vapourware technology. I am curious as to whether it was seen as viable or realistic back in the day, or just a pipe dream.

kstenerud 5y ago
I've always believed that semantic web (in the sense of semantic connection technologies) would become a critical technology; just not in the way they said. The idea of having semantic data alongside of your presentation data (embedding RDF statements in your web pages) is and always was stupid. They are separate concerns, and should live entirely separate from each other. You're not going to have content authors embedding machine-readable knowledge in with the human presentation; who the hell is going to bother with that kind of tedious, annoying work when their audience is humans? However, data warehouses that can be automatically mined by smart machines for meaning is huge. It's still going to be awhile before our systems are powerful enough and there's data enough to make this worthwhile, but at our rate of data generation I doubt it'll be much longer before we simply NEED these kinds of connecting and semantic technologies in order to handle the ever-growing mountain of data. I put the relationship type into my data format specifically as a bet on this: https://concise-encoding.org/#relationships https://concise-encoding.org/#relationships We still don't have any sizeable shared ontologies, but that's to be expected since only researchers are interested in it at this too-early stage. Once the shit hits the fan so-to-speak, we'll see some company or group build a serious reference ontology in record time.

kstenerud 5y ago

I've always believed that semantic web (in the sense of semantic connection technologies) would become a critical technology; just not in the way they said. The idea of having semantic data alongside of your presentation data (embedding RDF statements in your web pages) is and always was stupid. They are separate concerns, and should live entirely separate from each other. You're not going to have content authors embedding machine-readable knowledge in with the human presentation; who the hell is going to bother with that kind of tedious, annoying work when their audience is humans? However, data warehouses that can be automatically mined by smart machines for meaning is huge. It's still going to be awhile before our systems are powerful enough and there's data enough to make this worthwhile, but at our rate of data generation I doubt it'll be much longer before we simply NEED these kinds of connecting and semantic technologies in order to handle the ever-growing mountain of data. I put the relationship type into my data format specifically as a bet on this: https://concise-encoding.org/#relationships https://concise-encoding.org/#relationships We still don't have any sizeable shared ontologies, but that's to be expected since only researchers are interested in it at this too-early stage. Once the shit hits the fan so-to-speak, we'll see some company or group build a serious reference ontology in record time.