3 ms·
It may not be immediately obvious, but this is basically another cri de coeur to the effect of "Why can't we make the Semantic Web work?" That's a good questio
by jerf 3y ago
It may not be immediately obvious, but this is basically another cri de coeur to the effect of "Why can't we make the Semantic Web work?"
That's a good question. But you need to start from the fact that people have actually tried really, really hard, rather than nobody having tried at all, and it in fact hasn't worked despite rather substantial investment. When you start from there, you may obtain some useful understanding. Perhaps even useful understanding that will lead to solving some of the problem. I've got no problem with people jousting with windmills, I just think that anyone who wants to take such a task on really ought to research previous jousting attempts first if they want to succeed (as opposed to just doing it for fun).
But if you start from the blatently false presumption that you're the first person to ever dream of data that can just flow between systems, well, yeah looking out into the world you're going to be confused at what you see.
We have in fact tried the "correct" way, and it turned out not to be correct. Whereas what we're doing now, however annoying it definitely is, does in fact at least partially work.
- zitterbewegung 3y agoThe semantic web did work. Google was able to enrich their own searches and bought a large semantic web called Freebase and incrementally enriched their web searches . When they can’t show you a relative ad they want to capture your search regardless and show you relevant info so you don’t switch providers.
- jerf 3y agoIf the "semantic web" worked, they wouldn't have had to buy a startup. You don't need a startup to read kindly-provided, accurate, well-categorized RDF tuples out of a web page. One of my favorite ironies of the "semantic web" is almost every story cited as a success story by its advocates is in fact a failure story, in that it involves somebody having to do something that wouldn't have been necessary if the semantic web actually existed. By the way, LLMs completely finish killing off the semantic web. The semantic web will never take the form of the entire world providing nice public RDF snippets. You "just" feed the real-world goo into an LLM (or its sequels) and extract what you need. It turns out that it was literally easier to solve the language comprehension problem than to implement the semantic web. (Even if you don't consider the language comprehension problem solved yet, we are well on track to having it solved before the semantic web is implemented.)
- zitterbewegung 3y agoNot claiming they even invested in RDF tuples it clearly was that the ability to understand the internet meaning of sites and so forth required freebase and enriching their web results . It took a large engineering force to actually make it work.
- mprast 3y agoHey, thanks for your feedback. You're right; this is basically what the Semantic Web was trying to do. In earlier attempts to explain the idea I had mentioned Web 3.0 (that is to say, the 'original' Web 3.0), but wasn't sure enough people remembered it to be pertinent (I could certainly be wrong on this point). I think the Semantic Web had a lot of promise, but it simply got too academic, with layers and layers of committees dedicated to ontologizing the entire world in a way that became progressively more detached from the needs of users and developers. As far as I could tell from my research, this was a stark reversal of the earliest ideas behind Web 3.0, which were more about establishing the 'meaning' of a piece of data in a decentralized way. Had the Semantic Web stayed the course on decentralization I think we may have seen a dramatically different outcome. If you feel that this post didn't pay enough homage to the work that came before, that's a fair critique and I apologize. The concept of a Schema Network is definitely inspired by a lot of ideas that were in vogue in the Web 3.0 days.