4 ms·

I strongly disagree. Mostly because the semantic web is very, very useful in the life sciences. And over the next 5 years will save more money being wasted in t

by jerven 11y ago

I strongly disagree. Mostly because the semantic web is very, very useful in the life sciences. And over the next 5 years will save more money being wasted in this field than was ever spend on grants for the semantic web tech. Not just on the academic side but also on the big pharma side. For the rest I would say this holds true for to much of any CS research e.g.: Grid, Cloud, P2P and GPU compute. Looking at the vast sums spend on this the practical benefits are from outside the academic labs. I.e. all those other buzzwords that are used to justify grants. OWL reasoning at least standardised the format of many logical constructs and allowed for competitive improvements. Now you can at least change your prover while maintaining your axioms. So you get something like StarDog which is vastly better than the Pellet you are probably familiar with.

throwaway9216 11y ago
I work directly in the life sciences side of it. When the microphone is off, other peoples' interaction with me is basically: "Oh great, we have this data which would be pretty straightforward to store and transmit as JSON, but we have to work with this fucker to turn it into some sort of triple format or something." (Can you tell I don't like my job?) If you pry beneath the surface the life science ontologies are garbage. Full of subtle errors, disagreement between different ontologies, incorrect changing of namespaces which causes backward incompatibility. You have to have 100% knowledge of the ontology's idiosyncrasies in order to use it with confidence (i.e.: you can't). Funny you mention StarDog. Semantic web is supposedly this great open data thing that's going to unite the world. Except it's such a miserable community there aren't even any decent non-proprietary tools to satisfactorily fulfill the most basic premises of semantic web, after all these years.
- sktrdie 11y ago
  That's just wrong if you're "in the field". Have a look at Fuseki, or HDT, or Virtuoso (hell even Oracle supports RDF). The tools are very mature at this point so I had enough with people saying the Semantic Web never lived up to its expectations because the tools are never mature enough.
  - throwaway9216 11y ago
    StarDog/Pellet are referred to here for their reasoning capabilities, not their "neo4j except more obtuse" capabilities. Fuseki/HDT aren't reasoners, Virtuoso is a partial reasoner but not complete. Don't know about Oracle, they're certainly not non-proprietary.

by jerven 11y ago

throwaway9216 11y ago

I work directly in the life sciences side of it. When the microphone is off, other peoples' interaction with me is basically: "Oh great, we have this data which would be pretty straightforward to store and transmit as JSON, but we have to work with this fucker to turn it into some sort of triple format or something." (Can you tell I don't like my job?) If you pry beneath the surface the life science ontologies are garbage. Full of subtle errors, disagreement between different ontologies, incorrect changing of namespaces which causes backward incompatibility. You have to have 100% knowledge of the ontology's idiosyncrasies in order to use it with confidence (i.e.: you can't). Funny you mention StarDog. Semantic web is supposedly this great open data thing that's going to unite the world. Except it's such a miserable community there aren't even any decent non-proprietary tools to satisfactorily fulfill the most basic premises of semantic web, after all these years.

sktrdie 11y ago
That's just wrong if you're "in the field". Have a look at Fuseki, or HDT, or Virtuoso (hell even Oracle supports RDF). The tools are very mature at this point so I had enough with people saying the Semantic Web never lived up to its expectations because the tools are never mature enough.
- throwaway9216 11y ago
  StarDog/Pellet are referred to here for their reasoning capabilities, not their "neo4j except more obtuse" capabilities. Fuseki/HDT aren't reasoners, Virtuoso is a partial reasoner but not complete. Don't know about Oracle, they're certainly not non-proprietary.