3 ms·

The way I see it that technology has been on the cusp of being succesful for a long time. What the reasons are is largely a matter of opinion. In my opinion th

The way I see it that technology has been on the cusp of being succesful for a long time. What the reasons are is largely a matter of opinion. In my opinion there are several possible reasons: - the 'semantic' idea of 'strong' modeling of the world lost out to a competing approach that uses probabilistic models. The latter models don't require coordinated effort by humans and thus scale better. - the semantic approach also suffered from academicians myopically going over the same millimeters of theory for decades. And losing sight of matters of practicality. - The fundamentals of the semantic technology seem rather brittle to me. With that I mean that a tiny difference in the reasoning axioms can make the whole reasoning intractable. That might be anti-tethical to the 'tinkering until it works' approach that software engineers often use. - Somehow a broady applicable killer application didn't turn up. But that's a result as much as it might be a reason. There's still use for the technology though. If you need to unify data that follows subtly different datamodels I'd be hard pressed to think of an alternative. Which makes me wonder whether intelligence agencies use the technology. F.i. I remember a reference given by Oracle of the US Geospatial Intelligence Agency using their quad store. The new moniker 'linked data' emphasises this aspect. Government agencies do struggle with having to relate data that are obviously related but conceptually, legally subtly different. And they do spend quite some attention on linked data. They seem to stay mostly within the RDFS realm and do not stray into more interesting OWL applications. But even in government circles I get a whiff of the solution-looking-for-a-problem vibe that hounded the semantic web for so long.

irickt 12y ago
It's important to not dwell on the past. In the present here are two strong developments issuing from the original Semantic Web: Especially in Europe, research is very active and these technologies are core to many big science projects. (For example in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8510885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8510885). These projects are exploring the higher aims of TBL's proposal - with good cause. On a more down-to-earth level, there is now a solid web metadata standard in place in JSON-LD. The big search engines index it and presumably use it to give better results. Any startup can add value to published data by adding links - in a significant extension to the "API economy". Think about it. The base concept of the semantic web is simply a data exchange format that can be used to implement a distributed relational database - a pretty practical idea. By way of the false starts of any broad initiative (eg XML) and withstanding a lot of political spin that I've never understood, we now have that standard. Web developers should look at this opportunity with new eyes.
- porker 12y ago
  > On a more down-to-earth level, there is now a solid web metadata standard in place in JSON-LD. The big search engines index it and presumably use it to give better results. Any startup can add value to published data by adding links - in a significant extension to the "API economy". One pragmatic question is whether schema.org/JSON-LD is of benefit to anyone other than Google at the moment? I like the idea but with their dominance it feels like I am doing work to add value to their business, not mine.
jesuslop 12y ago
what would be you thinking about when talking about probabilistic models that were more competitive?

irickt 12y ago

It's important to not dwell on the past. In the present here are two strong developments issuing from the original Semantic Web: Especially in Europe, research is very active and these technologies are core to many big science projects. (For example in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8510885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8510885). These projects are exploring the higher aims of TBL's proposal - with good cause. On a more down-to-earth level, there is now a solid web metadata standard in place in JSON-LD. The big search engines index it and presumably use it to give better results. Any startup can add value to published data by adding links - in a significant extension to the "API economy". Think about it. The base concept of the semantic web is simply a data exchange format that can be used to implement a distributed relational database - a pretty practical idea. By way of the false starts of any broad initiative (eg XML) and withstanding a lot of political spin that I've never understood, we now have that standard. Web developers should look at this opportunity with new eyes.

porker 12y ago
> On a more down-to-earth level, there is now a solid web metadata standard in place in JSON-LD. The big search engines index it and presumably use it to give better results. Any startup can add value to published data by adding links - in a significant extension to the "API economy". One pragmatic question is whether schema.org/JSON-LD is of benefit to anyone other than Google at the moment? I like the idea but with their dominance it feels like I am doing work to add value to their business, not mine.

jesuslop 12y ago

what would be you thinking about when talking about probabilistic models that were more competitive?