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Well, it looks like Norvig won that fight. Now I guess the question is was Norvig prescient or did his reluctance to get involved in the semantic web given his

Well, it looks like Norvig won that fight. Now I guess the question is was Norvig prescient or did his reluctance to get involved in the semantic web given his position of power set the mood for google and the other big players?

warkdarrior 5y ago
What's really going to bake your noodle is, did Norvig launch massive multi-year campaigns of spamming and misinformation on the Internet to prove his point and win over Berners-Lee?
wmf 5y ago
The Semantic Web didn't need any help dying; very few people were ever interested in it.
Arnavion 5y ago
"Won" in that the average website's not using RDF, yes. "Won" in that Google's doing a better job than RDF could, no. https://i.imgur.com/UkcR945.png https://i.imgur.com/UkcR945.png ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27622613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27622613 )
- cowmoo728 5y ago
  There are some really funny ones. https://i.imgur.com/K7GdKKY.png https://i.imgur.com/K7GdKKY.png https://i.redd.it/tucvzslvh3151.png https://i.redd.it/tucvzslvh3151.png ^ the grass one is because lawns became a popular fashion statement in the 17th century, but still. https://i.redd.it/yjclt3q9nh111.jpg https://i.redd.it/yjclt3q9nh111.jpg
  - amscanne 5y ago
    The second is actually a decent example of where the semantic web would probably fail because of the imprecision, but Google has succeeded to some degree. “When was grass invented” has no good answer because it’s a stupid question. You could interpret this as “when was grass discovered” but I suspect this is not the question being asked. Google has interpreted this as “when was the grass lawn invented”, which is probably what the user was actually asking. In both cases, the results are actually great (my first link was to the Wikipedia Lawn article).
    - Cybiote 5y ago
      I don't think it's a stupid question, just oddly phrased (more on that later). I think there are two stable interpretations. "When did grass evolve" or "when were grass lawns invented". Later: Why isn't it an obviously stupid question? Because I think the accompanying "who (or what) invented grass" is validly answered as "by evolution". I feel the act of invention requires no intentionality and is simply the output of learning processes where generated artifacts have material and dynamic properties embodying deep knowledge of physical laws and help achieve some goal relative to an environment. Evolution learns in the sense that the mathematics of natural selection mirror that of bayesian filters.
- google234123 5y ago
  "nvidia 2080 number of cuda core" works
lemmsjid 5y ago
I wouldn't think Norvig won the fight. In fact, Google has been part of the charge to make it typical for federated content sites to provide structured data. For example, Google "recipe for pumpkin pie". You will see a bunch of recipes from a variety of sites. Go to one of them, and you'll see markup for schema.org's Recipe class (https://schema.org/Recipe https://schema.org/Recipe). A ton of Google's structured search results are powered by this. Norvig's concerns were valid, and over the years they have largely been overcome by a combination of tooling (CMS systems automatically emitting structured data alongside HTML) and incentivization (emitting structured data allowing one's site to be included in Google's structured search results).

warkdarrior 5y ago

What's really going to bake your noodle is, did Norvig launch massive multi-year campaigns of spamming and misinformation on the Internet to prove his point and win over Berners-Lee?

wmf 5y ago

The Semantic Web didn't need any help dying; very few people were ever interested in it.

Arnavion 5y ago

"Won" in that the average website's not using RDF, yes. "Won" in that Google's doing a better job than RDF could, no. https://i.imgur.com/UkcR945.png https://i.imgur.com/UkcR945.png ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27622613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27622613 )

cowmoo728 5y ago
There are some really funny ones. https://i.imgur.com/K7GdKKY.png https://i.imgur.com/K7GdKKY.png https://i.redd.it/tucvzslvh3151.png https://i.redd.it/tucvzslvh3151.png ^ the grass one is because lawns became a popular fashion statement in the 17th century, but still. https://i.redd.it/yjclt3q9nh111.jpg https://i.redd.it/yjclt3q9nh111.jpg
- amscanne 5y ago
  The second is actually a decent example of where the semantic web would probably fail because of the imprecision, but Google has succeeded to some degree. “When was grass invented” has no good answer because it’s a stupid question. You could interpret this as “when was grass discovered” but I suspect this is not the question being asked. Google has interpreted this as “when was the grass lawn invented”, which is probably what the user was actually asking. In both cases, the results are actually great (my first link was to the Wikipedia Lawn article).
  - Cybiote 5y ago
    I don't think it's a stupid question, just oddly phrased (more on that later). I think there are two stable interpretations. "When did grass evolve" or "when were grass lawns invented". Later: Why isn't it an obviously stupid question? Because I think the accompanying "who (or what) invented grass" is validly answered as "by evolution". I feel the act of invention requires no intentionality and is simply the output of learning processes where generated artifacts have material and dynamic properties embodying deep knowledge of physical laws and help achieve some goal relative to an environment. Evolution learns in the sense that the mathematics of natural selection mirror that of bayesian filters.
google234123 5y ago
"nvidia 2080 number of cuda core" works

lemmsjid 5y ago

I wouldn't think Norvig won the fight. In fact, Google has been part of the charge to make it typical for federated content sites to provide structured data. For example, Google "recipe for pumpkin pie". You will see a bunch of recipes from a variety of sites. Go to one of them, and you'll see markup for schema.org's Recipe class (https://schema.org/Recipe https://schema.org/Recipe). A ton of Google's structured search results are powered by this. Norvig's concerns were valid, and over the years they have largely been overcome by a combination of tooling (CMS systems automatically emitting structured data alongside HTML) and incentivization (emitting structured data allowing one's site to be included in Google's structured search results).