5 ms·

> "What I get a lot is: 'Why are you against the Semantic Web?' I am not against the Semantic Web. But from Google's point of view, there are a few things you n

> "What I get a lot is: 'Why are you against the Semantic Web?' I am not against the Semantic Web. But from Google's point of view, there are a few things you need to overcome, incompetence being the first,. . . We deal with millions of Web masters who can't configure a server, can't write HTML. It's hard for them to go to the next step." Thankfully we have a bit more practice writing HTML today. Rdfa & microdata are both fine markup formats for html that are not hard to understand. Rdfa first got semi-started in 2004, & honestly, was not that challenging. More code-centric systems also have JSON-LD as an option, which is fairly simple to author. What concerns me most though is that Norvig seems to be arguing a strong case of worse-is-better, claiming that since some people will find semantic web difficult to publish, it's not worth doing at all. That we could be creating value, that we could be making information more rich is not of interest: the focus is on the downsides, is on creating an image of unsuccess, unpossibility. It's a dissapointing framing & difficult to try to move a conversation forward past this low bogland Norvig sets up. > "The second problem is competition. Some commercial providers say, 'I'm the leader. Why should I standardize?'" Today Google is a primary instigator/driver of schema.org, along with Microsoft Yahoo, and Yandex. I'd say Google is the best evidence this hard problem wasn't really so hard. Also, there are other perfectly good ontologies out there that also coexist. > "The third problem is one of deception. We deal every day with people who try to rank higher in the results" Again a problem specific to Google. Semantic web doesn't have to be the authoritative source of truth & 100% accurate to start to add value to the world, to make the information on the page meaningful & semantic. But again Norvig is applying his specific demands to the Semantic Web, & making an incredibly high bar. --- The page has been a glossy synthetic produced whole object-artifact for a long time now. I for one continue to hope we can do what the semantic web promised: start to break down the things on the page, to define the page in terms of a construction of a bunch of different, individual, meaningful objects. I don't think truly empowering information & augmenting people (in this semantic web style) is compatible with the mission statement of a company whose goal has been to "organize and make available the world's information," since such a company would be less needed if the information were better able to present & make available itself. Norvig was taking down a huge threat, and one that indeed is not particularly helpful to his cause.

bawolff 5y ago
> It's a dissapointing framing & difficult to try to move a conversation forward past this low bogland Norvig sets up. Wishing things were different than they are doesn't make it so. If there's an argument that's hard to move past, it probably means its a good argument. Its not even a unique argument - its something every open-membership distributed system has to answer. The spam issue itself has been the death of many such systems (usenet comes to mind)
- rektide 5y ago
  I'm not sure what you are trying to contribute to the discussion with this abstract, high minded generalization? I need to return to what I said the sentence before, for some context about what we're actually trying to debate, I think? > What concerns me most though is that Norvig seems to be arguing a strong case of worse-is-better, claiming that since some people will find semantic web difficult to publish, it's not worth doing at all. I continue to believe this & don't see how it's challenged. It doesn't matter at all if not everyone does the semantic web. I continue to think Norvig is making us wade out of a swamp of irrelevant disbelief that has no bearing on what use there is. It's insisting on an absolutist framing when we can have ongoing, continual gain & wins from some folk trying to do better. It's hard to move past because it's hard to debate irrelevant sticky points. Norvig's point was entirely a non-issue, and finding that meta-analysis to explain that is harder than having a point that actually means something that we can then discuss straightforwardly. This objection Norvig raised is irreelvant & nonsensical. It was actively harmful to suggest everyone has to be onboard and everyone has to do a thing 100% right for a thing to be ok.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    Ah ok, i thought you were generalizing that to all his points (incompetence and malice) not just the adoption one. I do think his adoption criticism is by far his weakest argument, but i am still convinced by it. That said, I think there's a lot of missing elaboration for the argument. My reading of it is: * users want web crawling tools that work for the majority of the web * most authors will find semantic web too complex to implent (Say > 95% don't implement) * as a result, if we want to serve our users, we would need to make two tools,one for semantic sites and one for not * The non-semantic tool is going to work for both semantic and non semantic sites, so why bother building two tools? To reiterate my previous comment - this is a bog standard product problem. Its so common it even has a name: chicken-or-the-egg. Tons of products require some sort of critical mass or network effects to be useful. Succesful products find a way to get there or make the product somewhat useful before that point so incentives are such that there is a path to get from 0 to a stable sustaining point. > It's hard to move past because it's hard to debate irrelevant sticky points. Norvig's point was entirely a non-issue, and finding that meta-analysis to explain that is harder than having a point that actually means something that we can then discuss straightforwardly. If you really believe lack of adoption is a non issue, then i'm not sure why you think you have to move past this. Success is the best come-back to criticism, and if the lack of adoption is a non-issue, why are we debating whether or not its an issue instead of just pointing to the successes? And to be fair, there have been successes in specific limited domains. Domain-specific successes just aren't the grand idealistic vision of a unified semantic web that people like to present. I suspect that its this grand ideal that Norvig is arguing against, not against niche specific publishing of structured data.

bawolff 5y ago

> It's a dissapointing framing & difficult to try to move a conversation forward past this low bogland Norvig sets up. Wishing things were different than they are doesn't make it so. If there's an argument that's hard to move past, it probably means its a good argument. Its not even a unique argument - its something every open-membership distributed system has to answer. The spam issue itself has been the death of many such systems (usenet comes to mind)

rektide 5y ago
I'm not sure what you are trying to contribute to the discussion with this abstract, high minded generalization? I need to return to what I said the sentence before, for some context about what we're actually trying to debate, I think? > What concerns me most though is that Norvig seems to be arguing a strong case of worse-is-better, claiming that since some people will find semantic web difficult to publish, it's not worth doing at all. I continue to believe this & don't see how it's challenged. It doesn't matter at all if not everyone does the semantic web. I continue to think Norvig is making us wade out of a swamp of irrelevant disbelief that has no bearing on what use there is. It's insisting on an absolutist framing when we can have ongoing, continual gain & wins from some folk trying to do better. It's hard to move past because it's hard to debate irrelevant sticky points. Norvig's point was entirely a non-issue, and finding that meta-analysis to explain that is harder than having a point that actually means something that we can then discuss straightforwardly. This objection Norvig raised is irreelvant & nonsensical. It was actively harmful to suggest everyone has to be onboard and everyone has to do a thing 100% right for a thing to be ok.
- bawolff 5y ago
  Ah ok, i thought you were generalizing that to all his points (incompetence and malice) not just the adoption one. I do think his adoption criticism is by far his weakest argument, but i am still convinced by it. That said, I think there's a lot of missing elaboration for the argument. My reading of it is: * users want web crawling tools that work for the majority of the web * most authors will find semantic web too complex to implent (Say > 95% don't implement) * as a result, if we want to serve our users, we would need to make two tools,one for semantic sites and one for not * The non-semantic tool is going to work for both semantic and non semantic sites, so why bother building two tools? To reiterate my previous comment - this is a bog standard product problem. Its so common it even has a name: chicken-or-the-egg. Tons of products require some sort of critical mass or network effects to be useful. Succesful products find a way to get there or make the product somewhat useful before that point so incentives are such that there is a path to get from 0 to a stable sustaining point. > It's hard to move past because it's hard to debate irrelevant sticky points. Norvig's point was entirely a non-issue, and finding that meta-analysis to explain that is harder than having a point that actually means something that we can then discuss straightforwardly. If you really believe lack of adoption is a non issue, then i'm not sure why you think you have to move past this. Success is the best come-back to criticism, and if the lack of adoption is a non-issue, why are we debating whether or not its an issue instead of just pointing to the successes? And to be fair, there have been successes in specific limited domains. Domain-specific successes just aren't the grand idealistic vision of a unified semantic web that people like to present. I suspect that its this grand ideal that Norvig is arguing against, not against niche specific publishing of structured data.