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> The Semantic Web means different things to different people. There is no better way of expressing why "the semantic web" as it was originally conceived faile

> The Semantic Web means different things to different people. There is no better way of expressing why "the semantic web" as it was originally conceived failed, and will always fail. This is not to say that automated processing to extract higher-level information of the kind the article argues for might not be both helpful and possible, but it will always be awkward, difficult and imperfect. The awkwardness and difficulty will go down as AI gets better, but the imperfection has a fairly high minimum level because the kind of meaning humans extract from language varies enormously between individuals. As a friend who works in geology put it: "If I send a bunch of geologists out to survey an area and combine their data naively, I can tell who mapped where but not what anybody mapped." The illusion of shared meaning is powerful, and with enormous effort we can get communities of shared meaning that are large and powerful enough to be extremely useful, but we do that either through top-down control (politics, corporations, militaries) or intense bottom-up interaction (the sciences), not the kind of loose, informal, disconnected mechanisms that the Web enables.

haddr 12y ago
The great idea of semantic web, as conceived in the early beginnings, was mostly visionary and rather impossible to build. This doesn't mean the that whole concept has failed. It advanced many fields of AI and created many initiatives which are quite vibrant to this day (e.g. Linked Data). The illusion of failure of the semantic web is mostly due to the fact that today there are less semantic web projects funded. The money goes to other things that are now on the rise, the same as it was with semantic web 10 years ago. However semantic web is still here, with many tools mature enough to be applied in the industry. I don't expect it to dissapear completely.
dennybritz 12y ago
I completely agree with what you are saying, but I think what you are getting is a related but slightly different problem: Interpreting/Extracting information usually leads to uncertain results, even for humans. I think the Semantic Web doesn't try to solve this problem and doesn't need to. There are other approaches, such as probabilistic programming, that are meant to reason with uncertain data. But to do that someone must make the data available to you and tell you how uncertain it is in the first place. I think that's what the Semantic Web, or whatever you may call it, can do. Make data available, but leave open the interpretation.

haddr 12y ago

The great idea of semantic web, as conceived in the early beginnings, was mostly visionary and rather impossible to build. This doesn't mean the that whole concept has failed. It advanced many fields of AI and created many initiatives which are quite vibrant to this day (e.g. Linked Data). The illusion of failure of the semantic web is mostly due to the fact that today there are less semantic web projects funded. The money goes to other things that are now on the rise, the same as it was with semantic web 10 years ago. However semantic web is still here, with many tools mature enough to be applied in the industry. I don't expect it to dissapear completely.

dennybritz 12y ago

I completely agree with what you are saying, but I think what you are getting is a related but slightly different problem: Interpreting/Extracting information usually leads to uncertain results, even for humans. I think the Semantic Web doesn't try to solve this problem and doesn't need to. There are other approaches, such as probabilistic programming, that are meant to reason with uncertain data. But to do that someone must make the data available to you and tell you how uncertain it is in the first place. I think that's what the Semantic Web, or whatever you may call it, can do. Make data available, but leave open the interpretation.