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The semantic web has been, in my opinion, a category error. Semantics means meaning and computers/automated systems don't really do meaning very well and certa

The semantic web has been, in my opinion, a category error. Semantics means meaning and computers/automated systems don't really do meaning very well and certainly don't do intention very well. Mapping the incredible success of The Web onto automated systems hasn't worked because the defining and unique characteristic of The Web is REST and, in particular, the uniform interface of REST. This uniform interface is wasted on non-intentional beings like software (that I'm aware of): https://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.html https://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.h... Maybe this all changes when AI takes over, but AI seems to do fine without us defining ontologies, etc. It just hasn't worked out the way that people expected, and that's OK.

dboreham 2y ago
I take the other side of this trade, and have since c. 1980. I say that semantics is a delusion our brains creates. Doesn't really exist. Or conversely is not the magical thing we think it is.
- recursivedoubts 2y ago
  man
- lo_zamoyski 2y ago
  How are you oblivious of the performative contradiction that is that statement? Please tell me you're not an eliminativist. There is nothing respectable about eliminativism. Self-refuting, and Procrustean in its methodology, denying observation it cannot explain or reconcile. Eliminativism is what you get when a materialist refuses or is unable to revise his worldview despite the crushing weight of contradiction and incoherence. It is obstinate ideology.
  - Pet_Ant 2y ago
    TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism > Eliminative materialism (also called eliminativism) is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. It is the idea that the majority of mental states in folk psychology do not exist. Some supporters of eliminativism argue that no coherent neural basis will be found for many everyday psychological concepts such as belief or desire, since they are poorly defined. The argument is that psychological concepts of behavior and experience should be judged by how well they reduce to the biological level. Other versions entail the nonexistence of conscious mental states such as pain and visual perceptions.
  - naasking 2y ago
    > Eliminativism is what you get when a materialist refuses or is unable to revise his worldview despite the crushing weight of contradiction and incoherence. Funny, because eliminativism to me is the inevitable conclusion that follows from the requirement of logical consistency + the crushing weight of objective evidence when pitted against my personal perceptions.
ftlio 2y ago
> The semantic web has been, in my opinion, a category error. Hard agree. > Maybe this all changes when AI takes over, but AI seems to do fine without us defining ontologies, etc. I think about it as: - Hypermedia controls were been deemphasized, leading to a ton of workarounds to REST - REST is a perfectly suitable interface for AI Agents, especially to audit for governance - AI is well suited to the task of mapping the web as it exists today to REST - AI is well suited to mapping this layout ontologically The semantic web is less interesting than what is traversable and actionable via REST, which may expose some higher level, reusable structures. The first thing I can think of is `User` as a PKI type structure that allows us to build things that are more actionable for agents while still allowing humans to grok what they're authorized to.
thomastjeffery 2y ago
> Maybe this all changes when AI takes over, but AI seems to do fine without us defining ontologies, etc. If you say "AI" in 2024, you are probably talking about an LLM. An LLM is a program that pretends to solve semantics by actually entirely avoiding semantics. You feed an LLM a semantically meaningful input, and it will generate a statistically meaningful output that just so happens to look like a semantically meaningful transformation. Just to really sell this facade, we go around calling this program a "transformer" and a "language model", even though it truthfully does nothing of the sort. The entire goal of the semantic web was to dodge the exact same problem: ambiguous semantics. By asking everyone to rewrite their content as an ontology, you compel the writer to transform the semantics of their content into explicit unambiguous logic. That's where the category error comes in: the writer can't do it. Interesting content can't just be trivially rewritten as a simple universally-compatible ontology that is actually rooted in meaningfully unambiguous axioms. That's precisely the hard problem we were trying to dodge in the first place! So the writer does the next best thing: they write an ontology that isn't rooted. There are no really useful axioms at the root of this tree, but it's a tree, and that's good enough. Right? What use is an ontology when it isn't rooted in useful axioms? Instead of dodging the problem of ambiguous semantics, the "semantic web" moves that problem right in front of the user. That's probably useful for something, just not what the user is expecting it to be useful for. --- I have this big abstract idea I've been working on that might actually solve the problem of ambiguous semantics. The trouble is, I've been having a really hard time tying the idea itself down to reality. It's a deceptively challenging problem space.
- brimwats 2y ago
  I would happily bite on that; I mostly deal with archives, libraries, museums and how they deal with people and communities. Because of that there is a ton of nuance when it comes to identities (there is a lot of gradation in meaning between "African American" and "Black" or gay and homosexual for example). Things that seem simple are often very complicated and I've spent a good deal of my PhD work working on that (the Homosaurus is the most popular example of this work); and lately I've been working on how to represent identities in a linked and changing way that can still be used by cultural heritage institutions (i.e. simple enough to be linked to SKOS and Wikidata). I feel pretty close on how to represent some aspects of this semantically, thanks to help from a brilliant ontologist friend.

dboreham 2y ago

I take the other side of this trade, and have since c. 1980. I say that semantics is a delusion our brains creates. Doesn't really exist. Or conversely is not the magical thing we think it is.

recursivedoubts 2y ago
man
lo_zamoyski 2y ago
How are you oblivious of the performative contradiction that is that statement? Please tell me you're not an eliminativist. There is nothing respectable about eliminativism. Self-refuting, and Procrustean in its methodology, denying observation it cannot explain or reconcile. Eliminativism is what you get when a materialist refuses or is unable to revise his worldview despite the crushing weight of contradiction and incoherence. It is obstinate ideology.
- Pet_Ant 2y ago
  TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism > Eliminative materialism (also called eliminativism) is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. It is the idea that the majority of mental states in folk psychology do not exist. Some supporters of eliminativism argue that no coherent neural basis will be found for many everyday psychological concepts such as belief or desire, since they are poorly defined. The argument is that psychological concepts of behavior and experience should be judged by how well they reduce to the biological level. Other versions entail the nonexistence of conscious mental states such as pain and visual perceptions.
- naasking 2y ago
  > Eliminativism is what you get when a materialist refuses or is unable to revise his worldview despite the crushing weight of contradiction and incoherence. Funny, because eliminativism to me is the inevitable conclusion that follows from the requirement of logical consistency + the crushing weight of objective evidence when pitted against my personal perceptions.

ftlio 2y ago

> The semantic web has been, in my opinion, a category error. Hard agree. > Maybe this all changes when AI takes over, but AI seems to do fine without us defining ontologies, etc. I think about it as: - Hypermedia controls were been deemphasized, leading to a ton of workarounds to REST - REST is a perfectly suitable interface for AI Agents, especially to audit for governance - AI is well suited to the task of mapping the web as it exists today to REST - AI is well suited to mapping this layout ontologically The semantic web is less interesting than what is traversable and actionable via REST, which may expose some higher level, reusable structures. The first thing I can think of is `User` as a PKI type structure that allows us to build things that are more actionable for agents while still allowing humans to grok what they're authorized to.

thomastjeffery 2y ago

> Maybe this all changes when AI takes over, but AI seems to do fine without us defining ontologies, etc. If you say "AI" in 2024, you are probably talking about an LLM. An LLM is a program that pretends to solve semantics by actually entirely avoiding semantics. You feed an LLM a semantically meaningful input, and it will generate a statistically meaningful output that just so happens to look like a semantically meaningful transformation. Just to really sell this facade, we go around calling this program a "transformer" and a "language model", even though it truthfully does nothing of the sort. The entire goal of the semantic web was to dodge the exact same problem: ambiguous semantics. By asking everyone to rewrite their content as an ontology, you compel the writer to transform the semantics of their content into explicit unambiguous logic. That's where the category error comes in: the writer can't do it. Interesting content can't just be trivially rewritten as a simple universally-compatible ontology that is actually rooted in meaningfully unambiguous axioms. That's precisely the hard problem we were trying to dodge in the first place! So the writer does the next best thing: they write an ontology that isn't rooted. There are no really useful axioms at the root of this tree, but it's a tree, and that's good enough. Right? What use is an ontology when it isn't rooted in useful axioms? Instead of dodging the problem of ambiguous semantics, the "semantic web" moves that problem right in front of the user. That's probably useful for something, just not what the user is expecting it to be useful for. --- I have this big abstract idea I've been working on that might actually solve the problem of ambiguous semantics. The trouble is, I've been having a really hard time tying the idea itself down to reality. It's a deceptively challenging problem space.

brimwats 2y ago
I would happily bite on that; I mostly deal with archives, libraries, museums and how they deal with people and communities. Because of that there is a ton of nuance when it comes to identities (there is a lot of gradation in meaning between "African American" and "Black" or gay and homosexual for example). Things that seem simple are often very complicated and I've spent a good deal of my PhD work working on that (the Homosaurus is the most popular example of this work); and lately I've been working on how to represent identities in a linked and changing way that can still be used by cultural heritage institutions (i.e. simple enough to be linked to SKOS and Wikidata). I feel pretty close on how to represent some aspects of this semantically, thanks to help from a brilliant ontologist friend.