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AI is back with a revenge after 40 years of hibernation in the Utopian nuclear winter. That should tell you one shouldn't bury a good idea to quickly - althoug

AI is back with a revenge after 40 years of hibernation in the Utopian nuclear winter. That should tell you one shouldn't bury a good idea to quickly - although I appreciate your post a lot. Four remarks. - I'm not sure the lack of motivation for implementing SW is economic but rather : what's the point if no one is using it. - I don't think the shortcomings described by metacrap are foundational : it's like saying a word doesn't describe the reality of the thing it 'signifies' therefore language is useless and will not be adopted. There might be competing standards on ontology but I'm sure they'll emerge. - AI might be (one of) the tool that make semantic web actually relevant. The reason why I believe google has an important part to play in it. - and finally : developers, developer, developers !!! Bring an elegant tool in the ecosystem (JSON-LD maybe ?) : devs won't shy away in front of horrendous xml, and all of the sudden SW might get caught in a virtuous circle and become the previous big thing.

bane 12y ago
> AI is back with a revenge after 40 years of hibernation in the Utopian nuclear winter. That should tell you one shouldn't bury a good idea to quickly - although I appreciate your post a lot. You might be right, I actually would love to be wrong. But even as a thought experiment (let's suppose the SW was up and working and fully realized today) what are the use cases other than "changing everything"? Are these use case the same or similar to just doing it through API access to some set of underlying relational databases? Would the API access give us better performance, even under a federated scenario? If not, what's the advantage? > Bring an elegant tool in the ecosystem (JSON-LD maybe ?) : devs won't shy away in front of horrendous xml, and all of the sudden SW might get caught in a virtuous circle and become the previous big thing. I'm conflicted on this. A big part of me says that if something ends up taking off, it won't be the ideas posited by the W3C and it'll just be something else that happened to work and now Semanticists are just co-opting it and re-labling it as "Semantic Web". I'm deciding not to fall for it. The SW failed. If something else takes off that achieves similar goals but through entirely different means, it's not the SW, it's...whatever it is. I think it's okay the SW failed. If I sound critical it's not because it was a failure, it's because of the people that keep insisting it wasn't in the face of overwhelming evidence. The failure of the SW has brought us lots of important information about large scale distributed information systems from a technical and sociological standpoint. It's time to study those issues and outcomes and try something else. Instead, the field is like the search for the Higgs Boson, except whenever the last particle accelerator the community tried failed to produce the Higgs Boson, and instead found some other particle, the community simple decided to call the other particle the Higgs Boson instead. It's kind of mind-bending to work anywhere near the field.
- charlysisto 12y ago
  The uses is a very interesting question because the first things that pops to mind : it would be totally useless without the proper tools to take advantage of it. Basically the web is a flatland with many arrows going from one doc to the other - a one to one relational database. Semantic web (or lets call structured web) gives it a z axis to build depth. A trivial example I gave on another comment : > The way google exposes the web today is unidimensional : keywords => related website list. It's great for humans to parse. But its extremely limited for machines. Why isn't there yet an API or an UI to ask for "all books of Japanese novelists of the last 2 centuries" (website links included per book). An other example that comes to mind is : you query a person and instead of a list of related website you get a set of tabs with : bio from different sources, work, news, images & videos.... Bonus, you don't need to be google anymore to do that ! Ok that's far fetched but imagine the potential for webapps.
  - bane 12y ago
    > An other example that comes to mind is : you query a person and instead of a list of related website you get a set of tabs with : bio from different sources, work, news, images & videos.... Bonus, you don't need to be google anymore to do that ! Ok that's far fetched but imagine the potential for webapps. So that's kind of one of the canonical examples for the SW that's always given. Query for an object and get an entire dossier back on that object, assembled, federation fashion, from tons of disparate sources all over the web. It turns out that a) that doesn't refute the API access to a bunch of relational stores all over the place and the better performance you're likely to get from those stores b) the notion that just compiling all that stuff in one place works better c) really any of the issues presented by Doctorow, read his essay again with a critical eye and think about how each of his criticisms would apply to something like this. Modern search engines have largely figured out how to provide a fairly high-level ontology equivalent to this use-case by simply parsing out the content on the pages and centrally storing it. This is not the Semantic Web.
    - charlysisto 12y ago
      > Modern search engines have largely figured out how to provide a fairly high-level ontology equivalent to this use-case by simply parsing out the content on the pages and centrally storing it. If google opens up it's index to the world so you could use it as an api to query the web with the power of a relational DB, the case for semantic web would probably be pointless. But it's locked and only serves there ad system. I'm not defending Semantic Web per say, but because the lack structure in the web makes it only 'parsable' by gigantic entities like google. Their work is remarkable and they offer a nice service I can consume. But I can't really build on it. I think the debate should shift from the means to the goals... Semantic web might not be the right way to do it, but I strongly believe in the necessity of a way to (openly) connect the dots of all that data or it's a giant waste. What are the relational stores you mention in a) ?
r0s 12y ago
A developer who thinks xml is holding them back in anyway is not a very good developer.
mindcrime 12y ago
- AI might be (one of) the tool that make semantic web actually relevant. The reason why I believe google has an important part to play in it. AI is definitely big, on multiple levels. Even without AGI, the ability of AI/ML techniques to help serve as a bridge to the SemWeb world by, for example, extracting semantic data from unstructured text, is huge. This is why Apache Stanbol excites me so much. I foresee the addition of progressivly better and better enhancement engines for Stanbol, constantly improving the ability to do that structured extraction. This will make the overall Semantic Web vision that much more practical.
danmaz74 12y ago
> I'm not sure the lack of motivation for implementing SW is economic but rather: what's the point if no one is using it. "what's the point if no one is using it" IS an an economic problem.

bane 12y ago

> AI is back with a revenge after 40 years of hibernation in the Utopian nuclear winter. That should tell you one shouldn't bury a good idea to quickly - although I appreciate your post a lot. You might be right, I actually would love to be wrong. But even as a thought experiment (let's suppose the SW was up and working and fully realized today) what are the use cases other than "changing everything"? Are these use case the same or similar to just doing it through API access to some set of underlying relational databases? Would the API access give us better performance, even under a federated scenario? If not, what's the advantage? > Bring an elegant tool in the ecosystem (JSON-LD maybe ?) : devs won't shy away in front of horrendous xml, and all of the sudden SW might get caught in a virtuous circle and become the previous big thing. I'm conflicted on this. A big part of me says that if something ends up taking off, it won't be the ideas posited by the W3C and it'll just be something else that happened to work and now Semanticists are just co-opting it and re-labling it as "Semantic Web". I'm deciding not to fall for it. The SW failed. If something else takes off that achieves similar goals but through entirely different means, it's not the SW, it's...whatever it is. I think it's okay the SW failed. If I sound critical it's not because it was a failure, it's because of the people that keep insisting it wasn't in the face of overwhelming evidence. The failure of the SW has brought us lots of important information about large scale distributed information systems from a technical and sociological standpoint. It's time to study those issues and outcomes and try something else. Instead, the field is like the search for the Higgs Boson, except whenever the last particle accelerator the community tried failed to produce the Higgs Boson, and instead found some other particle, the community simple decided to call the other particle the Higgs Boson instead. It's kind of mind-bending to work anywhere near the field.

charlysisto 12y ago
The uses is a very interesting question because the first things that pops to mind : it would be totally useless without the proper tools to take advantage of it. Basically the web is a flatland with many arrows going from one doc to the other - a one to one relational database. Semantic web (or lets call structured web) gives it a z axis to build depth. A trivial example I gave on another comment : > The way google exposes the web today is unidimensional : keywords => related website list. It's great for humans to parse. But its extremely limited for machines. Why isn't there yet an API or an UI to ask for "all books of Japanese novelists of the last 2 centuries" (website links included per book). An other example that comes to mind is : you query a person and instead of a list of related website you get a set of tabs with : bio from different sources, work, news, images & videos.... Bonus, you don't need to be google anymore to do that ! Ok that's far fetched but imagine the potential for webapps.
- bane 12y ago
  > An other example that comes to mind is : you query a person and instead of a list of related website you get a set of tabs with : bio from different sources, work, news, images & videos.... Bonus, you don't need to be google anymore to do that ! Ok that's far fetched but imagine the potential for webapps. So that's kind of one of the canonical examples for the SW that's always given. Query for an object and get an entire dossier back on that object, assembled, federation fashion, from tons of disparate sources all over the web. It turns out that a) that doesn't refute the API access to a bunch of relational stores all over the place and the better performance you're likely to get from those stores b) the notion that just compiling all that stuff in one place works better c) really any of the issues presented by Doctorow, read his essay again with a critical eye and think about how each of his criticisms would apply to something like this. Modern search engines have largely figured out how to provide a fairly high-level ontology equivalent to this use-case by simply parsing out the content on the pages and centrally storing it. This is not the Semantic Web.
  - charlysisto 12y ago
    > Modern search engines have largely figured out how to provide a fairly high-level ontology equivalent to this use-case by simply parsing out the content on the pages and centrally storing it. If google opens up it's index to the world so you could use it as an api to query the web with the power of a relational DB, the case for semantic web would probably be pointless. But it's locked and only serves there ad system. I'm not defending Semantic Web per say, but because the lack structure in the web makes it only 'parsable' by gigantic entities like google. Their work is remarkable and they offer a nice service I can consume. But I can't really build on it. I think the debate should shift from the means to the goals... Semantic web might not be the right way to do it, but I strongly believe in the necessity of a way to (openly) connect the dots of all that data or it's a giant waste. What are the relational stores you mention in a) ?

r0s 12y ago

A developer who thinks xml is holding them back in anyway is not a very good developer.

mindcrime 12y ago

- AI might be (one of) the tool that make semantic web actually relevant. The reason why I believe google has an important part to play in it. AI is definitely big, on multiple levels. Even without AGI, the ability of AI/ML techniques to help serve as a bridge to the SemWeb world by, for example, extracting semantic data from unstructured text, is huge. This is why Apache Stanbol excites me so much. I foresee the addition of progressivly better and better enhancement engines for Stanbol, constantly improving the ability to do that structured extraction. This will make the overall Semantic Web vision that much more practical.

danmaz74 12y ago

> I'm not sure the lack of motivation for implementing SW is economic but rather: what's the point if no one is using it. "what's the point if no one is using it" IS an an economic problem.