5 ms·

As your last line clearly indicates this is political spin, not technical reality.

by irickt 12y ago

bane 12y ago
I think the technical aspects of the original proposal are reasonably well understood. I mean, there's what, 6 screens full of triplestores on wikipedia's page about the topic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplestore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplestore IMHO, I've observed that Semantic Technologies have continuously hit the same hard edge cases over and over again and most of those are human factors and social issues. Moreover, there's a number of technologies that provide near-enough functionality without the huge painful social overhead associated with STs, basically worse is better. What really needs to happen is for somebody to take a few of the huge publicly available triplestores and write some really compelling reasoning systems on them and demonstrate almost effortless merging across the datasets. Outside of fairly trivial examples, almost all of which are similarly or outperformed by near-enough technologies, really complex reasoners haven't happened. I think the other problem is that most web pages these days are generated from some datastore somewhere. It's a fool's errand to go from this nicely related data to generate a human readable webpages with embedded semantic markup and try to SparQL your way across a hugely federated search domain when you can just get API access to the underlying data in the first place. Semanticists will probably call this "the Semantic web", but querying several databases and merging results programmatically is something that came along decades before the Semantic Web.
- mindcrime 12y ago
  It's a fool's errand to go from this nicely related data to generate a human readable webpages with embedded semantic markup Right, you mostly wouldn't do that. If you want access to data in a relational store, from a semweb perspective, you use R2RML with something like D2RQ. There's also a lot more to the Semantic Web than just extracting structured data from otherwise unstructured content like HTML. If you have semantic data you want to expose, depending on the use-case, you just expose it using the remote SPARQL protocol, for direct M2M use.
- salex89 12y ago
  My opinion is that a very small portion of all those triplestores is really production ready. We tried some of the most popular, and only Virtuoso came half as way to be treated as a viable solution (in terms of stability and predictability of performance). But as for the performance, mostly writing, it was not really that good. Other mostly have bugs and issues which make them unusable. Also, DB people are used to have some lower level things in their toolbox, while with these you really don't have an idea what's happening with data structures. A fair portion of these database is not even maintained today. Just to conclude, it's very hard to find an alternative in the triplestore world to Neo4J, Cassandra, MongoDB, Couch, <put_your_db_here>, (especially free or cheap) which developers can just get up and running easily and experiment, learn and scale latter. Documentation and community support is another topic altogether, don't make me start on that one...

As your last line clearly indicates this is political spin, not technical reality.

by irickt 12y ago

As your last line clearly indicates this is political spin, not technical reality.

bane 12y ago

I think the technical aspects of the original proposal are reasonably well understood. I mean, there's what, 6 screens full of triplestores on wikipedia's page about the topic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplestore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplestore IMHO, I've observed that Semantic Technologies have continuously hit the same hard edge cases over and over again and most of those are human factors and social issues. Moreover, there's a number of technologies that provide near-enough functionality without the huge painful social overhead associated with STs, basically worse is better. What really needs to happen is for somebody to take a few of the huge publicly available triplestores and write some really compelling reasoning systems on them and demonstrate almost effortless merging across the datasets. Outside of fairly trivial examples, almost all of which are similarly or outperformed by near-enough technologies, really complex reasoners haven't happened. I think the other problem is that most web pages these days are generated from some datastore somewhere. It's a fool's errand to go from this nicely related data to generate a human readable webpages with embedded semantic markup and try to SparQL your way across a hugely federated search domain when you can just get API access to the underlying data in the first place. Semanticists will probably call this "the Semantic web", but querying several databases and merging results programmatically is something that came along decades before the Semantic Web.

mindcrime 12y ago
It's a fool's errand to go from this nicely related data to generate a human readable webpages with embedded semantic markup Right, you mostly wouldn't do that. If you want access to data in a relational store, from a semweb perspective, you use R2RML with something like D2RQ. There's also a lot more to the Semantic Web than just extracting structured data from otherwise unstructured content like HTML. If you have semantic data you want to expose, depending on the use-case, you just expose it using the remote SPARQL protocol, for direct M2M use.
salex89 12y ago
My opinion is that a very small portion of all those triplestores is really production ready. We tried some of the most popular, and only Virtuoso came half as way to be treated as a viable solution (in terms of stability and predictability of performance). But as for the performance, mostly writing, it was not really that good. Other mostly have bugs and issues which make them unusable. Also, DB people are used to have some lower level things in their toolbox, while with these you really don't have an idea what's happening with data structures. A fair portion of these database is not even maintained today. Just to conclude, it's very hard to find an alternative in the triplestore world to Neo4J, Cassandra, MongoDB, Couch, <put_your_db_here>, (especially free or cheap) which developers can just get up and running easily and experiment, learn and scale latter. Documentation and community support is another topic altogether, don't make me start on that one...