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Expresses a longing for the semantic web. > Remember Semantic Web? The web was supposed to evolve into semantically structured, linked, machine-readable data t

Expresses a longing for the semantic web. > Remember Semantic Web? The web was supposed to evolve into semantically structured, linked, machine-readable data that would enable amazing opportunities. That never happened. I think the lesson to be learned is in answering the question "Why didn't the semantic web happen?"

Mikhail_Edoshin 1y ago
Because you cannot build it with merchants. This is a job for monks.
Workaccount2 1y ago
>"Why didn't the semantic web happen?" Because web content is generated by humans, not engineers.
- abeppu 1y ago
  But also because companies that produce web content wanted it to be seen by humans who would look at ads, not consumed by bots and synthesized with other info into a product owned by some other firm.
  - dreamcompiler 1y ago
    And yet today most websites are being scraped by LLM bots which don't look at ads and which synthesize with other info into a product owned by some other firm.
    - 1gn15 1y ago
      Optimistically, the semantic web is going to happen. Just that instead of the original plan of website owners willingly making data machine-readable, LLMs will be the ones turning non-machine-readable data machine-readable (which can then be processed by user agents), even if the website owner prefers you looked at the ads instead.
neilalexander 1y ago
> "Why didn't the semantic web happen?" Advertising.
- throwaway346434 1y ago
  To a degree re ads on pages, but why didn't big business end up publishing all of their products in JSON-LD or similar? A lot did, to get aggregated, but not all.
cognivore 1y ago
"Why didn't the semantic web happen?" I have literally been doing we development since their was a web, and the companies I developed for are openly hostile to the idea of putting their valuable, or perceived valuable, information online in a format that could be easily scraped. Information doesn't want to be free, it wants to be paid for. Unless the information shared pulls visitors to the site it doesn't need to be public.
- gvurrdon 1y ago
  I've encountered a similar issue in academia - PI's don't want to make their data available to be scraped (or, at least not easily) because the amount of grant funding is limited, and a rival who has scraped one's data could get the grant money instead by using that scraped data to bolster their application.
- HankB99 1y ago
  I was thinking of that in terms of siloed web sites but your description of walling off information is broader and more appropriate.
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  > Information doesn't want to be free, it wants to be paid for. Unless the information shared pulls visitors to the site it doesn't need to be public. That's a cultural and societal problem, not a technology problem. The motivations (profit) are wrong, and don't lead to true innovations, only to financialization. So long as people need to pay to eat, then information will also want to continue to be paid for, and our motivations will continue to be misaligned with true innovations, especially if said innovations would make life easier but wouldn't result in profit.
  - llbbdd 1y ago
    You need profit or you need post-scarcity or nothing works at all
    - thewebguyd 1y ago
AlienRobot 1y ago
Semantic web never existed. There was Google and Google had an API to get breadcrumbs to show on search results. And that's what people called "semantic web." A few years later they gave up and made everything look like a breadcrumb anyway. And that sums up the whole semantic web experience.
seydor 1y ago
because semantic web was more limited than language
jandrese 1y ago
The semantic web was theoretically great for data scientists and metadata scrapers, but offered close to zero value for ordinary humans, both on the publishing side an the consumption side. Also, nobody did the hard work of defining all of the categories and protocols in a way that was actually usable. The whole concept was too high minded and they never got the implementation details down. Even if they did it would have been horrendously complex and close to impossible to manage. Asking every single publisher to neatly categories their data into this necessarily enormous scheme would have resulted in countless errors all over the web that would have seriously undercut the utility of the project anyway. Ultimately the semantic web doesn't scale very well. It failed for the same reason command economies fail: It's too overwhelming for the people in control to manage and drowns in its own bureaucracy.

Mikhail_Edoshin 1y ago

Because you cannot build it with merchants. This is a job for monks.

Workaccount2 1y ago

>"Why didn't the semantic web happen?" Because web content is generated by humans, not engineers.

abeppu 1y ago
But also because companies that produce web content wanted it to be seen by humans who would look at ads, not consumed by bots and synthesized with other info into a product owned by some other firm.
- dreamcompiler 1y ago
  And yet today most websites are being scraped by LLM bots which don't look at ads and which synthesize with other info into a product owned by some other firm.
  - 1gn15 1y ago
    Optimistically, the semantic web is going to happen. Just that instead of the original plan of website owners willingly making data machine-readable, LLMs will be the ones turning non-machine-readable data machine-readable (which can then be processed by user agents), even if the website owner prefers you looked at the ads instead.

neilalexander 1y ago

> "Why didn't the semantic web happen?" Advertising.

throwaway346434 1y ago
To a degree re ads on pages, but why didn't big business end up publishing all of their products in JSON-LD or similar? A lot did, to get aggregated, but not all.

cognivore 1y ago

"Why didn't the semantic web happen?" I have literally been doing we development since their was a web, and the companies I developed for are openly hostile to the idea of putting their valuable, or perceived valuable, information online in a format that could be easily scraped. Information doesn't want to be free, it wants to be paid for. Unless the information shared pulls visitors to the site it doesn't need to be public.

gvurrdon 1y ago
I've encountered a similar issue in academia - PI's don't want to make their data available to be scraped (or, at least not easily) because the amount of grant funding is limited, and a rival who has scraped one's data could get the grant money instead by using that scraped data to bolster their application.
HankB99 1y ago
I was thinking of that in terms of siloed web sites but your description of walling off information is broader and more appropriate.
thewebguyd 1y ago
> Information doesn't want to be free, it wants to be paid for. Unless the information shared pulls visitors to the site it doesn't need to be public. That's a cultural and societal problem, not a technology problem. The motivations (profit) are wrong, and don't lead to true innovations, only to financialization. So long as people need to pay to eat, then information will also want to continue to be paid for, and our motivations will continue to be misaligned with true innovations, especially if said innovations would make life easier but wouldn't result in profit.
- llbbdd 1y ago
  You need profit or you need post-scarcity or nothing works at all
  - thewebguyd 1y ago

AlienRobot 1y ago

Semantic web never existed. There was Google and Google had an API to get breadcrumbs to show on search results. And that's what people called "semantic web." A few years later they gave up and made everything look like a breadcrumb anyway. And that sums up the whole semantic web experience.

seydor 1y ago

because semantic web was more limited than language

jandrese 1y ago

The semantic web was theoretically great for data scientists and metadata scrapers, but offered close to zero value for ordinary humans, both on the publishing side an the consumption side. Also, nobody did the hard work of defining all of the categories and protocols in a way that was actually usable. The whole concept was too high minded and they never got the implementation details down. Even if they did it would have been horrendously complex and close to impossible to manage. Asking every single publisher to neatly categories their data into this necessarily enormous scheme would have resulted in countless errors all over the web that would have seriously undercut the utility of the project anyway. Ultimately the semantic web doesn't scale very well. It failed for the same reason command economies fail: It's too overwhelming for the people in control to manage and drowns in its own bureaucracy.