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Over on lobste.rs, someone cited another article retracing the history of the Semantic Web: https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html https://twobi

by rakoo 2y ago

Over on lobste.rs, someone cited another article retracing the history of the Semantic Web: https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html An interesting read in itself, and also points to Cory Doctorow giving seven reasons why the Semantic Web will never work: https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm. They are all good reasons and are unfortunately still valid (although one of his observations towards the end of the text has turned out to be comically wrong, I'll let you read what it is) Your comment and the two above links point to the same conclusion: again and again, Worse is Better (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better)

domh 2y ago
Thanks for sharing that Doctorow post, I had not seen that before. While the specific examples are of course dated (hello altavista and Napster), it still rings mostly true.
openrisk 2y ago
> An interesting read in itself... Indeed a good read, thanks for the link! > [Cory Doctorow's] seven insurmountable obstacles I think his context is the narrower "Web of individuals" where many of his seven challenges are real (and ongoing). The elephant in the digital room is the "Web of organizations", whether that is companies, the public sector, civil society etc. If you revisit his objections in that light they are less true or even relevant. E.g., > People lie Yes. But public companies are increasingly reporting online their audited financials via standards like iXBRL and prescribed taxonomies. Increasingly they need to report environmental impact etc. I mentioned in another comment common EU public procurement ontologies. Think also the millions of education and medical institutions and their online content. In institutional context lies do happen, but at a slightly deeper level :-) > People are lazy This only raises the stakes. As somebody mentioned already, the cost of navigating random API's is high. The reason we still talk about the semantic web despite decades of no-show is precisely the persistent need to overcome this friction. > People are stupid We are who we are individually, but again this ignores the collective intelligence of groups. Besides the hordes of helpless individuals and a handful of "big techs"(=the random entities that figured out digital technology ahead of others) there is a vast universe of interests. They are not stupid but there is a learning curve. For the vast part of society the so-called digital transformation is only at its beginning.
- rakoo 2y ago
  You have a very charitable view of this whole thing and I want to believe like you. Perhaps there is a virtuous cycle to be built where infrastructure that relies on people being more honest helps change the culture to actually be more honest which makes the infrastructure better. You don't wait for people to be nice before you create the gpl, the gpl changes mindsets towards opening up which fosters a better culture for creating more. It's also very important to think in macro systems and societies, as you point out, rather than at the individual level
kayo_20211030 2y ago
Every time I read a post like this I'm inclined to post Doctorow's Metacrap piece in response. You got there ahead of me. His reasoning is still valid and continues to make sense to me. Where do you think he's "comically wrong"?
- unconed 2y ago
  The implicit metrics of quality and pedigree he believed were superior to human judgement have since been gamified into obsolescence by bots.
  - kayo_20211030 2y ago
    I think that the jury is still out on that one. Human judgement is too often colored by human incentives. I still think there's an opportunity for mechanical assessments of quality and pedigree to excel, and exceed what humans can do; at least, at scale. But, it'll always be an arms race and I'm not convinced that bots are in it except in the sense of lying through metadata, which brings us back to the assessment of quality and pedigree - right/wrong, good/bad, relevant/garbage.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  Link counting being reliable for search. After going through people's not-so-noble qualities and how they make the semantic web impossible, he declares counting links as an exception. It was to a comical degree not an exception.
  - kayo_20211030 2y ago
    Yes. There is that. Ignobility wins out again.
- monknomo 2y ago
  item 2.6 kneecapped item 3
PaulHoule 2y ago
One major problem RDF has is that people hate anything with namespaces. It's a "freedom is slavery" kind of thing. People will accept it grudgingly if Google says it will help their search rankings or if you absolutely have to deal with them to code Java but 80% of people will automatically avoid anything if it has namespaces. (See namespaces in XML) Another problem is that it's always ignored the basic requirements of most applications like: 1. Getting the list of authors in a publication as refernces to authority records in the right order (Dublin Core makes the 1970 MARC standard look like something from the Starship Enterprise) 2. Updating a data record reliably and transactionally 3. Efficiently unioning graphs for inference so you can combine a domain database with a few database records relevant to a problem + a schema easily 4. Inference involving arithemtic (Godel warned you about first-order logic plus arithmetic but for boring fields like finance, business, logistics that is the lingua franca, OWL comes across as too heavyweight but completely deficient at the same time and nobody wants to talk about it) things like that. Try to build an application and you have to invent a lot of that stuff. You have the tools to do it and it's not that hard if you understand the math inside and out but if you don't oh boy. If RDF got a few more features it would catch up with where JSON-based tools like https://www.couchbase.com/products/n1ql/ https://www.couchbase.com/products/n1ql/ were 10 years ago.

by rakoo 2y ago

domh 2y ago

Thanks for sharing that Doctorow post, I had not seen that before. While the specific examples are of course dated (hello altavista and Napster), it still rings mostly true.

openrisk 2y ago

> An interesting read in itself... Indeed a good read, thanks for the link! > [Cory Doctorow's] seven insurmountable obstacles I think his context is the narrower "Web of individuals" where many of his seven challenges are real (and ongoing). The elephant in the digital room is the "Web of organizations", whether that is companies, the public sector, civil society etc. If you revisit his objections in that light they are less true or even relevant. E.g., > People lie Yes. But public companies are increasingly reporting online their audited financials via standards like iXBRL and prescribed taxonomies. Increasingly they need to report environmental impact etc. I mentioned in another comment common EU public procurement ontologies. Think also the millions of education and medical institutions and their online content. In institutional context lies do happen, but at a slightly deeper level :-) > People are lazy This only raises the stakes. As somebody mentioned already, the cost of navigating random API's is high. The reason we still talk about the semantic web despite decades of no-show is precisely the persistent need to overcome this friction. > People are stupid We are who we are individually, but again this ignores the collective intelligence of groups. Besides the hordes of helpless individuals and a handful of "big techs"(=the random entities that figured out digital technology ahead of others) there is a vast universe of interests. They are not stupid but there is a learning curve. For the vast part of society the so-called digital transformation is only at its beginning.

rakoo 2y ago
You have a very charitable view of this whole thing and I want to believe like you. Perhaps there is a virtuous cycle to be built where infrastructure that relies on people being more honest helps change the culture to actually be more honest which makes the infrastructure better. You don't wait for people to be nice before you create the gpl, the gpl changes mindsets towards opening up which fosters a better culture for creating more. It's also very important to think in macro systems and societies, as you point out, rather than at the individual level

kayo_20211030 2y ago

Every time I read a post like this I'm inclined to post Doctorow's Metacrap piece in response. You got there ahead of me. His reasoning is still valid and continues to make sense to me. Where do you think he's "comically wrong"?

unconed 2y ago
The implicit metrics of quality and pedigree he believed were superior to human judgement have since been gamified into obsolescence by bots.
- kayo_20211030 2y ago
  I think that the jury is still out on that one. Human judgement is too often colored by human incentives. I still think there's an opportunity for mechanical assessments of quality and pedigree to excel, and exceed what humans can do; at least, at scale. But, it'll always be an arms race and I'm not convinced that bots are in it except in the sense of lying through metadata, which brings us back to the assessment of quality and pedigree - right/wrong, good/bad, relevant/garbage.
pessimizer 2y ago
Link counting being reliable for search. After going through people's not-so-noble qualities and how they make the semantic web impossible, he declares counting links as an exception. It was to a comical degree not an exception.
- kayo_20211030 2y ago
  Yes. There is that. Ignobility wins out again.
monknomo 2y ago
item 2.6 kneecapped item 3

PaulHoule 2y ago

One major problem RDF has is that people hate anything with namespaces. It's a "freedom is slavery" kind of thing. People will accept it grudgingly if Google says it will help their search rankings or if you absolutely have to deal with them to code Java but 80% of people will automatically avoid anything if it has namespaces. (See namespaces in XML) Another problem is that it's always ignored the basic requirements of most applications like: 1. Getting the list of authors in a publication as refernces to authority records in the right order (Dublin Core makes the 1970 MARC standard look like something from the Starship Enterprise) 2. Updating a data record reliably and transactionally 3. Efficiently unioning graphs for inference so you can combine a domain database with a few database records relevant to a problem + a schema easily 4. Inference involving arithemtic (Godel warned you about first-order logic plus arithmetic but for boring fields like finance, business, logistics that is the lingua franca, OWL comes across as too heavyweight but completely deficient at the same time and nobody wants to talk about it) things like that. Try to build an application and you have to invent a lot of that stuff. You have the tools to do it and it's not that hard if you understand the math inside and out but if you don't oh boy. If RDF got a few more features it would catch up with where JSON-based tools like https://www.couchbase.com/products/n1ql/ https://www.couchbase.com/products/n1ql/ were 10 years ago.