4 ms·

Well, the immediate initial test failed for me: I thought, "why not apply this on one of my own sites, where I have a sort of journal of poetry I've written?"..

Well, the immediate initial test failed for me: I thought, "why not apply this on one of my own sites, where I have a sort of journal of poetry I've written?"...and there's no category for "Poem", and the request to add Poem as a type [1] is at least 9 years old, links to an even older issue in an unreadable issue tracker without any resolution (and seemingly without much effort to resolve it), and then dies off without having accomplished anything. [1] https://github.com/schemaorg/suggestions-questions-brainstorming/issues/194 https://github.com/schemaorg/suggestions-questions-brainstor...

tossandthrow 2y ago
Having worked in this field for a bit, this uncovers an even more fundamental flaw: The idea that we can have a single static ontology.
- lambdaba 2y ago
  What kind of work do you do?
  - tossandthrow 2y ago
    various. Notable I, some years ago, had a project that considered automatic consolidation of ontologies based on meta-ontologies and heuristics. The idea being that everyone have their own ontology for the data they release and the system would make a consolidated ontology that could be used to automatic integration of data from different datasources. regardless, that project did not get traction, so now it sits.
    - lambdaba 2y ago
      Thanks! Is it possible for you to share more details about the domain and problem?
- codewithcheese 2y ago
  Domain driven design is well aware that is not feasible to have a single schema for everything, they use bounded contexts. Is there something similar for the semantic web?
  - kitsune_ 2y ago
    Isn't that the point of RDF / Owl etc.?
    - dwaite 2y ago
      The point of RDF is to raise the problem to the greatest common divisor level of complexity - a hypermedia graph of arbitrary predicates about arbitrary objects. OWL is a modeling language to describe ontologies, e.g. some constraints people have agreed to follow about how to structure the information they publish in graphs. It can also be considered an advanced schema language. The idea of a bounded context in DDD is that it is not a good use of time (or indeed may not be feasible at all) to get a single ontology for an entire domain, so different subdomains may be unified by some concepts but have differing or overlapping concepts that they use internally. Two contexts know they are talking about a product called "New Shimmer", even if understands it as a floor wax and the other uses it as a dessert topping. The two pillars of the semantic web are public data and machine understanding, which IMHO pushes strongly toward the (often unachievable) goal of a single kitchen-sink schema.
  - klntsky 2y ago
    In the Semantic Web, things like ontologies and namespaces play a role similar to bounded contexts in DDD. There’s no exact equivalent, but these tools help different schemas coexist and work together
- maxerickson 2y ago
  There is also the problem that structure doesn't guarantee meaning.
- wslh 2y ago
  Mostly, the problems of a semantic web are covered in the history of Cyc[1]. When I started to use LLMs I thought that was the missing link to convert content to semantic representations, even taking into account the errors/hallucinations within them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc
lukev 2y ago
That's only schema.org! Linked data is so much bigger than that. Many ontologies have a "poem" type (for example dbpedia (https://dbpedia.org/ontology/Poem https://dbpedia.org/ontology/Poem) has one), as well as other publishing or book-oriented ontologies.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- lolinder 2y ago
  Every time I've read up on semantic web it's been treated as more or less synonymous with schema.org. Are these other ontologies used by anything?
  - mdaniel 2y ago
    My mental model of that question is: how would anyone know if an ontology was used by something? One cannot have a search facet in any engine that I'm aware of to search by namespace qualified nouns, and markup is only as good as the application which is able to understand it
  - lukev 2y ago
    They are _used_ very extensively, but not in web pages. Many industry domains rely heavily on linked data and ontologies. It's true that they are less commonly embedded as semantic data in web pages. There's a real bootstrapping problem there: no reason to embed data if no tools will read it, no reason to build tools if there's no data to read.

tossandthrow 2y ago

Having worked in this field for a bit, this uncovers an even more fundamental flaw: The idea that we can have a single static ontology.

lambdaba 2y ago
What kind of work do you do?
- tossandthrow 2y ago
  various. Notable I, some years ago, had a project that considered automatic consolidation of ontologies based on meta-ontologies and heuristics. The idea being that everyone have their own ontology for the data they release and the system would make a consolidated ontology that could be used to automatic integration of data from different datasources. regardless, that project did not get traction, so now it sits.
  - lambdaba 2y ago
    Thanks! Is it possible for you to share more details about the domain and problem?
codewithcheese 2y ago
Domain driven design is well aware that is not feasible to have a single schema for everything, they use bounded contexts. Is there something similar for the semantic web?
- kitsune_ 2y ago
  Isn't that the point of RDF / Owl etc.?
  - dwaite 2y ago
    The point of RDF is to raise the problem to the greatest common divisor level of complexity - a hypermedia graph of arbitrary predicates about arbitrary objects. OWL is a modeling language to describe ontologies, e.g. some constraints people have agreed to follow about how to structure the information they publish in graphs. It can also be considered an advanced schema language. The idea of a bounded context in DDD is that it is not a good use of time (or indeed may not be feasible at all) to get a single ontology for an entire domain, so different subdomains may be unified by some concepts but have differing or overlapping concepts that they use internally. Two contexts know they are talking about a product called "New Shimmer", even if understands it as a floor wax and the other uses it as a dessert topping. The two pillars of the semantic web are public data and machine understanding, which IMHO pushes strongly toward the (often unachievable) goal of a single kitchen-sink schema.
- klntsky 2y ago
  In the Semantic Web, things like ontologies and namespaces play a role similar to bounded contexts in DDD. There’s no exact equivalent, but these tools help different schemas coexist and work together
maxerickson 2y ago
There is also the problem that structure doesn't guarantee meaning.
wslh 2y ago
Mostly, the problems of a semantic web are covered in the history of Cyc[1]. When I started to use LLMs I thought that was the missing link to convert content to semantic representations, even taking into account the errors/hallucinations within them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

lukev 2y ago

That's only schema.org! Linked data is so much bigger than that. Many ontologies have a "poem" type (for example dbpedia (https://dbpedia.org/ontology/Poem https://dbpedia.org/ontology/Poem) has one), as well as other publishing or book-oriented ontologies.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
lolinder 2y ago
Every time I've read up on semantic web it's been treated as more or less synonymous with schema.org. Are these other ontologies used by anything?
- mdaniel 2y ago
  My mental model of that question is: how would anyone know if an ontology was used by something? One cannot have a search facet in any engine that I'm aware of to search by namespace qualified nouns, and markup is only as good as the application which is able to understand it
- lukev 2y ago
  They are _used_ very extensively, but not in web pages. Many industry domains rely heavily on linked data and ontologies. It's true that they are less commonly embedded as semantic data in web pages. There's a real bootstrapping problem there: no reason to embed data if no tools will read it, no reason to build tools if there's no data to read.