7 ms·

Meh... Semantic Web is a field... it's like hating natural language processing or distributed systems for not having achieved much over the past 10 years. But t

by sktrdie 11y ago

Meh... Semantic Web is a field... it's like hating natural language processing or distributed systems for not having achieved much over the past 10 years. But the fact is they provide strong theoretical foundations for us to develop killer apps on top of.

ma2rten 11y ago
What strong theoretical foundations do they provide? (this is a genuine question)
- DyslexicAtheist 11y ago
  CSS/HTML, and its syntax validators, DOM, RDF, HTTP, MathML, PNG, heck here is a full list: http://www.w3.org/TR/ http://www.w3.org/TR/
  - icebraining 11y ago
    W3 != Semantic Web.
    - DyslexicAtheist 11y ago
      The question was "What strong theoretical foundations do they provide? (this is genuine question)" which "they" I assumed referred to the W3C. http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/ http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/
      - ma2rten 11y ago
        I should have said "it" not "they". I was referring to the academic field. I guess I was thinking about people in the field when I wrote "they". The parent post said "they provide" but it was referring to multiple fields.
    - pestaa 11y ago
      No, but they continue to think about the problem and produce useful recommendations.
  - lambda 11y ago
    CSS/HTML are not meaningfully semantic; they encode presentational attributes of documents and applications. Syntax validation is not semantic; it's syntactic. DOM is not either; it's an API for manipulating HTML, generally used for presentational purposes. RDF is designed for semantics, but no one of interest uses it. HTTP is a transport protocol; it's a way to take an opaque URL plus some persistent state and get a blob of text or binary data back, along with just the barest of semantics about which requests are intended to make persistent changes server side. MathML is this weird semantic/presentational hybrid, of which I have only ever seen the presentational side used; I am aware of no real-world systems that produce or consume the semantic subset of MathML. PNG is an image encoding format. So out of all of that, RDF and MathML are the only things that even attempt to define any kind of semantic encoding, and as far as I can tell they completely fail at that in the real world. For the vast majority of real world services, if you want to extract semantic data out of them you use JSON.
    - icebraining 11y ago
      For the vast majority of real world services, if you want to extract semantic data out of them you use JSON. JSON is just the encoding, not the data model; it doesn't work at the same level. That's why RDF/JSON and JSON-LD exist. Without disputing the idea that the implementation of the Semantic Web is a failure, this idea that JSON (or XML, for that matter) is a data format is holding us back. Every provider is saying that they output in a "standard" format (JSON), while we keep writing new clients for each and every service out there, because every data format is different and it's impossible to write common handlers. Except for a few attributes, a Github user and a HN user could have the same structure, since conceptually they're quite similar concepts. Yet, try handling [1] and [2] with the same code. The regular claim that programmers can handle more abstraction than regular people just sounds like a sad joke whenever I think about the shortsightedness and lack of self-awareness that has led to the current situation. [1] https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/jl.json?print=pretty https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/jl.json?print=pre... [2] https://api.github.com/users/octocat https://api.github.com/users/octocat
      - nitwit005 11y ago
- sktrdie 11y ago
  Please have a look at last weeks ESWC program (one of the top semantic web conferences): http://2015.eswc-conferences.org/program/accepted-papers http://2015.eswc-conferences.org/program/accepted-papers Foundations such as query federation, graph compression (HDT), reasoning, data integration and much much more.
DyslexicAtheist 11y ago
he actually admitted in the comments that the title was clickbait. the value of the article for me was the insight into the inner workings of the W3C.
- sktrdie 11y ago
  W3C is a standard body. The semantic web is a research field. Different things.
epistasis 11y ago
No, it's not, because NLP and distributed systems are producing useful artifacts that help influence the world in positive ways. Semantic Web is a field that is obsessed with theory, without producing any useful theory, nor any practical artifacts that can be used. Hating entire fields is an entirely reasonable thing to do when they are not productive and when they draw attention away from more useful activities. And it's quite possible for social dynamics to do that, for the wrong thing to become en vogue, and for really wrong paths to be followed for long periods of time. And it's entirely possible to study something that's actually nothing, such as alchemy. Perfectly fine to hate the field of alchemy.
- sktrdie 11y ago
  I beg to differ. Being a semantic web researcher myself, I can tell you that it has produced many relevant theories and artifacts that do help influence the world in positive ways. Here's a few to get you started: http://linkeddatafragments.org/ http://linkeddatafragments.org/ - allows to query several "semantic web" datasets at runtime by issuing several concurrent HTTP requests http://www.rdfhdt.org/ http://www.rdfhdt.org/ - allows to store graph-like data in a very compressed format that is queryable directly in memory http://events.linkeddata.org/ldow2015/papers/ldow2015_paper_06.pdf http://events.linkeddata.org/ldow2015/papers/ldow2015_paper_... - (shameless plug) allows you to query and browse semantic datasets (hosted by different people on different servers) on the web using keywords The fact that they're not useful to you does not make the entire field useless.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

by sktrdie 11y ago

ma2rten 11y ago

What strong theoretical foundations do they provide? (this is a genuine question)

DyslexicAtheist 11y ago
CSS/HTML, and its syntax validators, DOM, RDF, HTTP, MathML, PNG, heck here is a full list: http://www.w3.org/TR/ http://www.w3.org/TR/
- icebraining 11y ago
  W3 != Semantic Web.
  - DyslexicAtheist 11y ago
    The question was "What strong theoretical foundations do they provide? (this is genuine question)" which "they" I assumed referred to the W3C. http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/ http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/
    - ma2rten 11y ago
      I should have said "it" not "they". I was referring to the academic field. I guess I was thinking about people in the field when I wrote "they". The parent post said "they provide" but it was referring to multiple fields.
  - pestaa 11y ago
    No, but they continue to think about the problem and produce useful recommendations.
- lambda 11y ago
  CSS/HTML are not meaningfully semantic; they encode presentational attributes of documents and applications. Syntax validation is not semantic; it's syntactic. DOM is not either; it's an API for manipulating HTML, generally used for presentational purposes. RDF is designed for semantics, but no one of interest uses it. HTTP is a transport protocol; it's a way to take an opaque URL plus some persistent state and get a blob of text or binary data back, along with just the barest of semantics about which requests are intended to make persistent changes server side. MathML is this weird semantic/presentational hybrid, of which I have only ever seen the presentational side used; I am aware of no real-world systems that produce or consume the semantic subset of MathML. PNG is an image encoding format. So out of all of that, RDF and MathML are the only things that even attempt to define any kind of semantic encoding, and as far as I can tell they completely fail at that in the real world. For the vast majority of real world services, if you want to extract semantic data out of them you use JSON.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    For the vast majority of real world services, if you want to extract semantic data out of them you use JSON. JSON is just the encoding, not the data model; it doesn't work at the same level. That's why RDF/JSON and JSON-LD exist. Without disputing the idea that the implementation of the Semantic Web is a failure, this idea that JSON (or XML, for that matter) is a data format is holding us back. Every provider is saying that they output in a "standard" format (JSON), while we keep writing new clients for each and every service out there, because every data format is different and it's impossible to write common handlers. Except for a few attributes, a Github user and a HN user could have the same structure, since conceptually they're quite similar concepts. Yet, try handling [1] and [2] with the same code. The regular claim that programmers can handle more abstraction than regular people just sounds like a sad joke whenever I think about the shortsightedness and lack of self-awareness that has led to the current situation. [1] https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/jl.json?print=pretty https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/jl.json?print=pre... [2] https://api.github.com/users/octocat https://api.github.com/users/octocat
    - nitwit005 11y ago
sktrdie 11y ago
Please have a look at last weeks ESWC program (one of the top semantic web conferences): http://2015.eswc-conferences.org/program/accepted-papers http://2015.eswc-conferences.org/program/accepted-papers Foundations such as query federation, graph compression (HDT), reasoning, data integration and much much more.

DyslexicAtheist 11y ago

he actually admitted in the comments that the title was clickbait. the value of the article for me was the insight into the inner workings of the W3C.

sktrdie 11y ago
W3C is a standard body. The semantic web is a research field. Different things.

epistasis 11y ago

No, it's not, because NLP and distributed systems are producing useful artifacts that help influence the world in positive ways. Semantic Web is a field that is obsessed with theory, without producing any useful theory, nor any practical artifacts that can be used. Hating entire fields is an entirely reasonable thing to do when they are not productive and when they draw attention away from more useful activities. And it's quite possible for social dynamics to do that, for the wrong thing to become en vogue, and for really wrong paths to be followed for long periods of time. And it's entirely possible to study something that's actually nothing, such as alchemy. Perfectly fine to hate the field of alchemy.

sktrdie 11y ago
I beg to differ. Being a semantic web researcher myself, I can tell you that it has produced many relevant theories and artifacts that do help influence the world in positive ways. Here's a few to get you started: http://linkeddatafragments.org/ http://linkeddatafragments.org/ - allows to query several "semantic web" datasets at runtime by issuing several concurrent HTTP requests http://www.rdfhdt.org/ http://www.rdfhdt.org/ - allows to store graph-like data in a very compressed format that is queryable directly in memory http://events.linkeddata.org/ldow2015/papers/ldow2015_paper_06.pdf http://events.linkeddata.org/ldow2015/papers/ldow2015_paper_... - (shameless plug) allows you to query and browse semantic datasets (hosted by different people on different servers) on the web using keywords The fact that they're not useful to you does not make the entire field useless.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]