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The semantic web is not a technical problem, it's an incentive problem. RSS can be considered a primitive separation of data and UI, yet was killed everywhere.

by fleddr 5y ago

The semantic web is not a technical problem, it's an incentive problem. RSS can be considered a primitive separation of data and UI, yet was killed everywhere. When you hand over your data to the world, you lose all control of it. Monetization becomes impossible and you leave the door wide open for any competitor to destroy you. That pretty much limits the idea to the "common goods" like Wikipedia and perhaps the academic world. Even something silly as a semantic recipe for cooking is controversial. Somebody built a recipe scraping app and got a massive backlash from food bloggers. Their ad-infested 7000 word lectures intermixed with a recipe is their business model. Unfortunately, we have very little common good data, that is free from personal or commercial interests. You can think of a million formats and databases but it won't take off without the right incentives.

onion2k 5y ago
Even something silly as a semantic recipe for cooking is controversial. Somebody built a recipe scraping app and got a massive backlash from food bloggers. Their ad-infested 7000 word lectures intermixed with a recipe is their business model. Taking someone else's content and republishing it without permission isn't cool, even if you wrap it in a nice machine readable format.
- fleddr 5y ago
  I fully agree, and that's one of the problems I was describing. There's very little content free of commercial interests. If this is true, it blocks a lot of potential use cases of a semantic web.
Micoloth 5y ago
I'm more and more seeing that this is true. Still, it is sad. The question isn't even, what can one do, because obviously nobody can change how incentives works in a given society. The question is: is there a timeline in which the right incentives (to share data) start being enforced? How would that play out?
OliverJones 5y ago
> The semantic web is not a technical problem, it's an incentive problem. True. Demonstrable in the health-care IT world. Think of electronic health records. My personal portable electronic health record would either be a bunch of images of scrawled notes and maybe some nice medical images ( = nonsemantic web) Or it would be in a highly wrought format, i dunno, XML or something, with carefully worked out schemata for everything from flu shot records to heart transplants (= semantic web). Back in 2007-2010, "electronic health records" EHR were spottily and sloppily implemented by some providers. But, in the US, a federal law pushed more widespread implemetation. Now my online EHR, and yours, is decidedly app-mediated and non-semantic, on a web site portal. Export to JSON? Hah. No. The hospitals and health care systems only did it because of incentives. I happened to work at a B2B SaaS company focused on making connections between hospitals and rehab/skilled nursing providers. A rehab outfit can't decide to accept a patient without seeing her medical records and doctors' orders. So our customers had a real incentive to be able to share records. It worked. But the data we had access to (go read about HL7) was not even close to semantic. And our SQL database schemas were, umm, quinquiremes of Nineveh, really intricate, somewhat brittle. Let's leave privacy issues out of the conversation for a moment. Publishing the schema and accepting random queries would help NOBODY except some partner outfit willing to develop and test useful stuff. Hey, I got an idea! Let's give them an API! Oh, wait, nobody wants to bother with an API? OK, how about a nice web site! And we're back where we started. With a universal semantic web, the same problems would crop up everywhere.

by fleddr 5y ago

onion2k 5y ago

Even something silly as a semantic recipe for cooking is controversial. Somebody built a recipe scraping app and got a massive backlash from food bloggers. Their ad-infested 7000 word lectures intermixed with a recipe is their business model. Taking someone else's content and republishing it without permission isn't cool, even if you wrap it in a nice machine readable format.

fleddr 5y ago
I fully agree, and that's one of the problems I was describing. There's very little content free of commercial interests. If this is true, it blocks a lot of potential use cases of a semantic web.

Micoloth 5y ago

I'm more and more seeing that this is true. Still, it is sad. The question isn't even, what can one do, because obviously nobody can change how incentives works in a given society. The question is: is there a timeline in which the right incentives (to share data) start being enforced? How would that play out?

OliverJones 5y ago

> The semantic web is not a technical problem, it's an incentive problem. True. Demonstrable in the health-care IT world. Think of electronic health records. My personal portable electronic health record would either be a bunch of images of scrawled notes and maybe some nice medical images ( = nonsemantic web) Or it would be in a highly wrought format, i dunno, XML or something, with carefully worked out schemata for everything from flu shot records to heart transplants (= semantic web). Back in 2007-2010, "electronic health records" EHR were spottily and sloppily implemented by some providers. But, in the US, a federal law pushed more widespread implemetation. Now my online EHR, and yours, is decidedly app-mediated and non-semantic, on a web site portal. Export to JSON? Hah. No. The hospitals and health care systems only did it because of incentives. I happened to work at a B2B SaaS company focused on making connections between hospitals and rehab/skilled nursing providers. A rehab outfit can't decide to accept a patient without seeing her medical records and doctors' orders. So our customers had a real incentive to be able to share records. It worked. But the data we had access to (go read about HL7) was not even close to semantic. And our SQL database schemas were, umm, quinquiremes of Nineveh, really intricate, somewhat brittle. Let's leave privacy issues out of the conversation for a moment. Publishing the schema and accepting random queries would help NOBODY except some partner outfit willing to develop and test useful stuff. Hey, I got an idea! Let's give them an API! Oh, wait, nobody wants to bother with an API? OK, how about a nice web site! And we're back where we started. With a universal semantic web, the same problems would crop up everywhere.