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Why isn’t semantic web more popular inside companies? This expandable graph seems like the purest representation of all data in a company. Instead we have sev

Why isn’t semantic web more popular inside companies? This expandable graph seems like the purest representation of all data in a company. Instead we have several different databases each with their own schemas. All with entities related to one another, but without these relations defined anywhere, and impossible to query. RDBMS are implementation details of this graph that involve a heap of manual work. Wouldn’t it be great if the rdbms was generated from this graph. There are so many interconnections between the data involved in the design and implementation of a product and the product database itself. Imagine hovering over a UI element and seeing who implemented it and when, what project it was part of, why the project was initiated, and what kpis and goals it contributes to.

dym_sh 4y ago
same reason wikis arent, it takes too much effort to maintain and keep it semantic instead of copypasted pile of text you'd need CMS, CRM, knowledge base, documentation, source control, chat/forum, inventory, point of sale, customer support channels, issues ticketing system, and every other thing interconnected to with each other do you know of anyone offering this as a complex turn-key integrated solution at a reasonable price?
- WJW 4y ago
  I know of several ERP vendors offering such products at a price that is reasonable for such complexity. "Reasonable" is not the same as "cheap" though.
  - dym_sh 4y ago
    well, i would like a couple of links if that's not too much to ask
- vaughan 4y ago
  Sounds like an opportunity. In every category you mentioned there are new products released and widely adopted all the time. Look at the rise of ClickUp for example in such a crowded space as project management. I don't think its too farfetched to one day see a new entrant offering as a key selling point that their api is just a big interoperable graph that you can easily plug your company into...and that's not just GraphQL.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tokinonagare 4y ago
> Why isn’t semantic web more popular inside companies? Because SemWeb doesn't solve any real problem while create a ton of new ones and uses a complex data model. Any company that would benefit from using graphs will be better served using a simpler and more general graph model and database. SemWeb is nothing more than stringly typed data with an URI fetish.
Lutger 4y ago
I have had this question for years myself, and I still think it has a lot of potential for companies. For new tech to take off, multiple things need to be true and often the social factors are the most important. The semantic web tech seems mostly driven by scientists and highly specialist companies. The barrier for developers is still quite high and a lot of concerns have been poorly addressed. Probably the most important merit of json-ld is improving the usability for developers a bit, making it less difficult to take advantage of the semantic web. Furthermore, most organizations subdivide the work in silos (teams) and have clear subdivision of goals. Anything you are doing that isn't directly contributing to the goals assigned to you or your team is potentially damaging your standing and rewards, whether those are promotional, monetary or simply recognition and praise. After all, this effort cannot be spend in your main focus. So this comes together with my previous point: it takes a lot of 'extra' time adapting the data in your silo to work with the semantic web of your company, and there are usually zero incentives for doing so. This is true even if it would be quite valuable to the company as a whole, because individuals and teams don't act from that perspective. Thus, it simply doesn't get done, since it only really works if (nearly) everybody is onboard. Its like the famous decree of Jeff Bezos demanding everything to be available via an api: it takes a single minded visionary (or dictator) to push everyone to do this 'extra' work and get to the point where the investment pays off.
- vaughan 4y ago
  I think the only hope comes from going graph-first and using a graph db as the source of truth. I think programming as a whole would be in a much better place if graph dbs beat out rdbms' and they attracted more R&D for perf optimization.
iSnow 4y ago
>Why isn’t semantic web more popular inside companies? Because it offers no protection against some team inside the company breaking the whole web by moving to a different URI or refactoring their domain model in incompatible ways. A department pays for some subgraph tailored to their needs and they are not interested in financing this for the whole org. Industrial companies use master data management systems, they are centralized and are considered the single source of truth, everyone else builds on them.
blowski 4y ago
At the point you create the data, you don't have link rot. At the point you create the link rot, you don't notice it. At the point you notice it, you don't have time to fix it. At the point you try to fix it, you don't have a full list of rotten links. And those who keep starting the cycle by creating links don't care that ends up this way because there's no immediate impact on their silo. Thus to fix it, you need an organisation-level project, but it's hard to identify what business value you get from it.
dathinab 4y ago
Because it's not what you thing and doesn't solve the problems most companies have. Firstly jsonld is only a format for serializing semantic metadata, nothing more, so it only specifies how you can attach that metadata, but not what exctly can be attached in what way with what subtle meanings. Secondly it's one of this very generic tools which "can solve everything" but in practice often only make things more complicated as long as you don't have enough very complicated (and matrue!) tooling around it. And that's where the problem lies, the availability and maturity of this tooling is limited and awareness or experience about which tooling is good and mature and which isn't often is missing too. So it's easy to end up with adding a lot of complexity with very little gain, hence why most avoid it. Through some companies had success with it, but their are often on the size of SAP or similar. > This expandable graph seems like the purest representation of all data in a company. Yes, but requires you to have all the data in the right format correctly annotated, correctly maintained and changed and available often non of this is true. > Imagine hovering over a UI element and seeing who implemented it and when This would need a proper integration of json-ld in the version manager and development flow, project manager, and probably more. There is a good chance that whatever tooling you use has not integration for any of this points, not even considering that you then still need to bind the data together (query) in a usable performant way which might having a non graph db for caching common queries etc. Each of this points being likely a non trivial sub project, one which most companies wouldn't want to afford for some minor benefit like having such a tooltip in a UI builder. Now if everyone would always support the semantic web, and would agree on common annotations for all kind of metadata (far beyond the scope of the jsonld spec) and would add accessible apis based on this to their product etc. _then yes it would be grate_.
- vaughan 4y ago
  > would need a proper integration Yeh I think it's way too complex to shoe-horn in later with minimal benefit. But new databases are being built at new companies every day. A lot of new companies I see, build out their first MVPs, CRMs, etc. adhoc in Airtable. Then some mockups in Figma. Then they bring in the devs to build a RDBMS. Now if all these low-code tools worked on manipulating a single graph instead of building a bunch of disparate relational databases...that would be cool. And then you just need a good graph database to build web apps with. I think a bunch of tools need to be re-invented with this in mind. > would agree on common annotations for all kind of metadata Thinking about a project/task manager for example. They all pretty much have similar schemas at this point. There is also a huge industry in connecting tools together. Zapier/IFTTT/Unito/etc. Everything is adhoc though or proprietary. Standardization is slow and boring. I think the best thing would be if someone made a schema for this that gained wide adoption, and then the transformers from these existing applications fed into this graph. Basically using a graph db instead of relational or key-value.
hobofan 4y ago
DISCLAIMER: Contains some self-promotion > Imagine hovering over a UI element and seeing who implemented it and when, what project it was part of, why the project was initiated, and what kpis and goals it contributes to. That's exactly what we are building at Field 33[0] with a package manager for ontologies (Plow[1]) as an underpinning to get a good level of flexibility/reusability/colaboration on all the concepts that go into your graph. ------ > Why isn’t semantic web more popular inside companies? As part of building Field 33 we obviously also asked ourselves that question. My rough hypothesis would be that ~10 years ago semantic tech didn't provide tangible enough benefits, and since then got left behind in the dust by non-semantic tech. That caused a tech chasm that widened and widened, where the non-semantic side became a lot more accessible with quasi-standards (REST) and new methods of querying data for frontend usage (GraphQL), while the status quo of the semantic web space is still SPARQL (a query language full of footguns). Same thing goes for triple stores (the prevalent databases in the space) that roughly go through the same advancements as RDBMs, just at a much slower pace. It also doesn't help that most work being done in the space comes from academia rather than companies that utilize it in production scenarios. There is quite a nice curated list of problems/papercuts about the semantic web/RDF space[2]. Overall, despite the current status quo, I'm quite optimistic that the space can have a revival. [0]: https://field33.com https://field33.com [1]: https://plow.pm https://plow.pm [2]: https://github.com/w3c/EasierRDF https://github.com/w3c/EasierRDF
- vaughan 4y ago
  Interesting work you guys are doing. I think a big reason for lack of popularity is familiarity of graphs in general. Most people wouldn't know of a good graph editor I would guess. Everyone knows documents and spreadsheets/tables/lists/folders, but it's rare to see a graph anywhere. Online and offline. If I have to think about an example of a graph in real-life what comes to mind is: a corkboard with strings going between them to track a criminal in a tv show, or a subway network map. In VSCode/IntelliJ, there is not one graph I look at frequently, even though pretty much all code is a data flow and dependency graph. I think part of this is that graphs always appear like a complicated mess, and we prefer hierarchies and categories. I would really like a tool like Airtable for graphs. You start with spreadsheets with columns relating to other columns, and then you view the graph next to it as you go. I don't know of a popular tool that does this. It's funny because behind-the-scenes of spreadsheets there is always big dependency graph that updates cells as changes come through. All the specs feel overly-complex too. Like a relic from the XML/SOAP days. For such a simple base concept (subject-predicate-object / entity-attribute-value) it feels like overkill. It's interesting though thinking about how JSON won, while being extremely inferior to XML. Although I think this ability to move fast has left us with a ton of untyped data lying around, and plenty of ad-hoc data transformations. I'm interested to read into the EasierRDF doc you sent - looks very interesting.

dym_sh 4y ago

same reason wikis arent, it takes too much effort to maintain and keep it semantic instead of copypasted pile of text you'd need CMS, CRM, knowledge base, documentation, source control, chat/forum, inventory, point of sale, customer support channels, issues ticketing system, and every other thing interconnected to with each other do you know of anyone offering this as a complex turn-key integrated solution at a reasonable price?

WJW 4y ago
I know of several ERP vendors offering such products at a price that is reasonable for such complexity. "Reasonable" is not the same as "cheap" though.
- dym_sh 4y ago
  well, i would like a couple of links if that's not too much to ask
vaughan 4y ago
Sounds like an opportunity. In every category you mentioned there are new products released and widely adopted all the time. Look at the rise of ClickUp for example in such a crowded space as project management. I don't think its too farfetched to one day see a new entrant offering as a key selling point that their api is just a big interoperable graph that you can easily plug your company into...and that's not just GraphQL.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tokinonagare 4y ago

> Why isn’t semantic web more popular inside companies? Because SemWeb doesn't solve any real problem while create a ton of new ones and uses a complex data model. Any company that would benefit from using graphs will be better served using a simpler and more general graph model and database. SemWeb is nothing more than stringly typed data with an URI fetish.

Lutger 4y ago

I have had this question for years myself, and I still think it has a lot of potential for companies. For new tech to take off, multiple things need to be true and often the social factors are the most important. The semantic web tech seems mostly driven by scientists and highly specialist companies. The barrier for developers is still quite high and a lot of concerns have been poorly addressed. Probably the most important merit of json-ld is improving the usability for developers a bit, making it less difficult to take advantage of the semantic web. Furthermore, most organizations subdivide the work in silos (teams) and have clear subdivision of goals. Anything you are doing that isn't directly contributing to the goals assigned to you or your team is potentially damaging your standing and rewards, whether those are promotional, monetary or simply recognition and praise. After all, this effort cannot be spend in your main focus. So this comes together with my previous point: it takes a lot of 'extra' time adapting the data in your silo to work with the semantic web of your company, and there are usually zero incentives for doing so. This is true even if it would be quite valuable to the company as a whole, because individuals and teams don't act from that perspective. Thus, it simply doesn't get done, since it only really works if (nearly) everybody is onboard. Its like the famous decree of Jeff Bezos demanding everything to be available via an api: it takes a single minded visionary (or dictator) to push everyone to do this 'extra' work and get to the point where the investment pays off.

vaughan 4y ago
I think the only hope comes from going graph-first and using a graph db as the source of truth. I think programming as a whole would be in a much better place if graph dbs beat out rdbms' and they attracted more R&D for perf optimization.

iSnow 4y ago

>Why isn’t semantic web more popular inside companies? Because it offers no protection against some team inside the company breaking the whole web by moving to a different URI or refactoring their domain model in incompatible ways. A department pays for some subgraph tailored to their needs and they are not interested in financing this for the whole org. Industrial companies use master data management systems, they are centralized and are considered the single source of truth, everyone else builds on them.

blowski 4y ago

At the point you create the data, you don't have link rot. At the point you create the link rot, you don't notice it. At the point you notice it, you don't have time to fix it. At the point you try to fix it, you don't have a full list of rotten links. And those who keep starting the cycle by creating links don't care that ends up this way because there's no immediate impact on their silo. Thus to fix it, you need an organisation-level project, but it's hard to identify what business value you get from it.

dathinab 4y ago

Because it's not what you thing and doesn't solve the problems most companies have. Firstly jsonld is only a format for serializing semantic metadata, nothing more, so it only specifies how you can attach that metadata, but not what exctly can be attached in what way with what subtle meanings. Secondly it's one of this very generic tools which "can solve everything" but in practice often only make things more complicated as long as you don't have enough very complicated (and matrue!) tooling around it. And that's where the problem lies, the availability and maturity of this tooling is limited and awareness or experience about which tooling is good and mature and which isn't often is missing too. So it's easy to end up with adding a lot of complexity with very little gain, hence why most avoid it. Through some companies had success with it, but their are often on the size of SAP or similar. > This expandable graph seems like the purest representation of all data in a company. Yes, but requires you to have all the data in the right format correctly annotated, correctly maintained and changed and available often non of this is true. > Imagine hovering over a UI element and seeing who implemented it and when This would need a proper integration of json-ld in the version manager and development flow, project manager, and probably more. There is a good chance that whatever tooling you use has not integration for any of this points, not even considering that you then still need to bind the data together (query) in a usable performant way which might having a non graph db for caching common queries etc. Each of this points being likely a non trivial sub project, one which most companies wouldn't want to afford for some minor benefit like having such a tooltip in a UI builder. Now if everyone would always support the semantic web, and would agree on common annotations for all kind of metadata (far beyond the scope of the jsonld spec) and would add accessible apis based on this to their product etc. _then yes it would be grate_.

vaughan 4y ago
> would need a proper integration Yeh I think it's way too complex to shoe-horn in later with minimal benefit. But new databases are being built at new companies every day. A lot of new companies I see, build out their first MVPs, CRMs, etc. adhoc in Airtable. Then some mockups in Figma. Then they bring in the devs to build a RDBMS. Now if all these low-code tools worked on manipulating a single graph instead of building a bunch of disparate relational databases...that would be cool. And then you just need a good graph database to build web apps with. I think a bunch of tools need to be re-invented with this in mind. > would agree on common annotations for all kind of metadata Thinking about a project/task manager for example. They all pretty much have similar schemas at this point. There is also a huge industry in connecting tools together. Zapier/IFTTT/Unito/etc. Everything is adhoc though or proprietary. Standardization is slow and boring. I think the best thing would be if someone made a schema for this that gained wide adoption, and then the transformers from these existing applications fed into this graph. Basically using a graph db instead of relational or key-value.

hobofan 4y ago

DISCLAIMER: Contains some self-promotion > Imagine hovering over a UI element and seeing who implemented it and when, what project it was part of, why the project was initiated, and what kpis and goals it contributes to. That's exactly what we are building at Field 33[0] with a package manager for ontologies (Plow[1]) as an underpinning to get a good level of flexibility/reusability/colaboration on all the concepts that go into your graph. ------ > Why isn’t semantic web more popular inside companies? As part of building Field 33 we obviously also asked ourselves that question. My rough hypothesis would be that ~10 years ago semantic tech didn't provide tangible enough benefits, and since then got left behind in the dust by non-semantic tech. That caused a tech chasm that widened and widened, where the non-semantic side became a lot more accessible with quasi-standards (REST) and new methods of querying data for frontend usage (GraphQL), while the status quo of the semantic web space is still SPARQL (a query language full of footguns). Same thing goes for triple stores (the prevalent databases in the space) that roughly go through the same advancements as RDBMs, just at a much slower pace. It also doesn't help that most work being done in the space comes from academia rather than companies that utilize it in production scenarios. There is quite a nice curated list of problems/papercuts about the semantic web/RDF space[2]. Overall, despite the current status quo, I'm quite optimistic that the space can have a revival. [0]: https://field33.com https://field33.com [1]: https://plow.pm https://plow.pm [2]: https://github.com/w3c/EasierRDF https://github.com/w3c/EasierRDF

vaughan 4y ago
Interesting work you guys are doing. I think a big reason for lack of popularity is familiarity of graphs in general. Most people wouldn't know of a good graph editor I would guess. Everyone knows documents and spreadsheets/tables/lists/folders, but it's rare to see a graph anywhere. Online and offline. If I have to think about an example of a graph in real-life what comes to mind is: a corkboard with strings going between them to track a criminal in a tv show, or a subway network map. In VSCode/IntelliJ, there is not one graph I look at frequently, even though pretty much all code is a data flow and dependency graph. I think part of this is that graphs always appear like a complicated mess, and we prefer hierarchies and categories. I would really like a tool like Airtable for graphs. You start with spreadsheets with columns relating to other columns, and then you view the graph next to it as you go. I don't know of a popular tool that does this. It's funny because behind-the-scenes of spreadsheets there is always big dependency graph that updates cells as changes come through. All the specs feel overly-complex too. Like a relic from the XML/SOAP days. For such a simple base concept (subject-predicate-object / entity-attribute-value) it feels like overkill. It's interesting though thinking about how JSON won, while being extremely inferior to XML. Although I think this ability to move fast has left us with a ton of untyped data lying around, and plenty of ad-hoc data transformations. I'm interested to read into the EasierRDF doc you sent - looks very interesting.