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I think the main reason that "Semantic Web" has failed is that basically no one can even explain what the "Semantic Web" is or what it's good for. It's all just
by this_user 1y ago
I think the main reason that "Semantic Web" has failed is that basically no one can even explain what the "Semantic Web" is or what it's good for. It's all just a bunch of generic sounding buzzwords about exchanging data in some way.
- achierius 1y agoIs it that hard? Instead of just providing data, you provide data plus "semantic tags" that make the data machine-indexable. It was ultimately meant to solve the same sort of "fuzzy-search" problem that we today can use LLMs for: "find me a website which sells home goods" could be addressed with tags that classify a page as a marketplace, and therein one which sells home goods. I think the real problem is that this requires a cohesive ontology, and if you've ever gotten really into tagging your notes/bookmarks/whatever you'll know how hard that can be.
- fabrice_d 1y agoYes, most of the problem with the semantic web is that you end up with having to agree on how to describe the world: what are the concepts, and how they are related. This kind of work on semantic networks has been done for a while in computational linguistics for natural language processing, but it's very tedious. For instance users of the Minitel in France in the 80s could lookup vets by querying the yellow pages directory with sentences such as "my dog is sick". Nice tech, but not that useful and not very discoverable either. LLMs promise to just discover all these relations between concepts for you and do the right thing instead. Sometimes it works, sometimes not...
- jcelerier 1y ago> Sometimes it works, sometimes not... Sometimes it won't work because there just isn't agreement between humans on what the concept is. Semantic also fails there.