3 ms·

But how do you explain the large amount of research going into these topics? They must be linked to industry and therefore used otherwise there wouldn't be so m

by sktrdie 13y ago

But how do you explain the large amount of research going into these topics? They must be linked to industry and therefore used otherwise there wouldn't be so many publications on things like RDF. Perhaps HN and the startup culture likes to concentrate on less academic things, but you can't just ignore an entire field of research simply because the tools weren't mature enough or minimal enough when you first used them. Perhaps the Semantic web community is doing a bad job at making these topics exciting, but the concepts still stand or else there wouldn't be an entire branch of research dedicated to them. So in my opinion we should be more positive about the very valuable knowledge being generated by these communities, and perhaps transform it or create tools around them to make them more user friendly and more exciting. I guess overall what I'm saying is that the concepts of the Semantic web are valid no matter the cumbersome culture around them. We should judge the ideas not the tools.

Someone 13y ago
There's a lot of literature on Turing machines, too, but nobody builds them in silicon, either. RDF is for databases what Turing machines are for computation: the minimal model that abstracts away as much as is possible without sacrificing capabilities but ignoring anything performance (memory usage, execution time) related.
acdha 13y ago
There are two separate thoughts here: 1. I'm not saying the sem web concept is useless but that poor quality and unnecessarily high costs make it a worse deal. More practical focus on specs and solid software engineering would avoid making that trade-off worse unnecessarily. 2. Many topics which are of interest to academics either aren't generally useful and too many academics are dismissive of mundane concerns like software engineering. My first point falls solidly into that latter case. The former case isn't proven – it's entirely possible that we'll eventually see something interesting develop with more time, although as another commenter pointed out, it's likely that we'll see something different which uses the good parts but doesn't give up as much for theoretical purity. Of course, it's also possible that they'll spend more time having academic debates over HTTP range-14 and what will actually be adopted will come from outside the current semweb community entirely – after all, the “Web” in SemanticWeb refers to a technology which saw rapid growth due to ease of adoption, even though the academic hypertext community wasn't impressed because it was too simple. In every case, more attention to building useful tools would massively increase the number of people working with semweb technology and lower the cost for everyone doing research. Everyone who wants that class of technologies to succeed should be focused on lowering that barrier to entry.

by sktrdie 13y ago

Someone 13y ago

There's a lot of literature on Turing machines, too, but nobody builds them in silicon, either. RDF is for databases what Turing machines are for computation: the minimal model that abstracts away as much as is possible without sacrificing capabilities but ignoring anything performance (memory usage, execution time) related.

acdha 13y ago

There are two separate thoughts here: 1. I'm not saying the sem web concept is useless but that poor quality and unnecessarily high costs make it a worse deal. More practical focus on specs and solid software engineering would avoid making that trade-off worse unnecessarily. 2. Many topics which are of interest to academics either aren't generally useful and too many academics are dismissive of mundane concerns like software engineering. My first point falls solidly into that latter case. The former case isn't proven – it's entirely possible that we'll eventually see something interesting develop with more time, although as another commenter pointed out, it's likely that we'll see something different which uses the good parts but doesn't give up as much for theoretical purity. Of course, it's also possible that they'll spend more time having academic debates over HTTP range-14 and what will actually be adopted will come from outside the current semweb community entirely – after all, the “Web” in SemanticWeb refers to a technology which saw rapid growth due to ease of adoption, even though the academic hypertext community wasn't impressed because it was too simple. In every case, more attention to building useful tools would massively increase the number of people working with semweb technology and lower the cost for everyone doing research. Everyone who wants that class of technologies to succeed should be focused on lowering that barrier to entry.