JSON-LD and Why I Hate the Semantic Web (2014)(manu.sporny.org)
manu.sporny.org
JSON-LD and Why I Hate the Semantic Web (2014)
http://manu.sporny.org/2014/json-ld-origins-2/
69 comments
There are some real and difficult problems the Semantic Web tries to solve, like finding a common language to talk about things and automate information discovery, merging and interpretation.
This may become even more relevant with trends like the IoT (how smart can that be if every company uses its own home-bred standards and the devices can't automatically understand (and react to) each other? This also applies to Robotics / AI.
I'm really not sure the Semantic Web is on a good road there, but they are actually thinking about those hard (and interesting) problems.
There is at least one project where I can see true value, even today: Schema.org (http://schema.org/). And if you're only creating semantic annotations, it really isn't that difficult. Sadly, to smartly combine and make real value out of Semantic Web Data you probably need to be a BIG company like Google.
This may become even more relevant with trends like the IoT (how smart can that be if every company uses its own home-bred standards and the devices can't automatically understand (and react to) each other? This also applies to Robotics / AI.
I'm really not sure the Semantic Web is on a good road there, but they are actually thinking about those hard (and interesting) problems.
There is at least one project where I can see true value, even today: Schema.org (http://schema.org/). And if you're only creating semantic annotations, it really isn't that difficult. Sadly, to smartly combine and make real value out of Semantic Web Data you probably need to be a BIG company like Google.
Here's a discussion from a couple hundred days ago that talks about lots of this from some different angles.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8510401
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8510401
"Every successful project which is linked in any way to semantic web, would have been successful without the semantic web."
I was thinking many times of it. For most of the time it is true, but not always. I still can find few good examples. Look at dbpedia. It may look messy, but there is vast amount of data there, that is taken advantage of by many projects (also commercial). While i can imagine making a database with the same data, it is the "linked data" initiative that gave it such possibilities.
I agree that there were huge loads of money spent on it, and many projects simply didn't deliver what was promised. But anyway, does research always succeeds in 100% of the cases?
I was thinking many times of it. For most of the time it is true, but not always. I still can find few good examples. Look at dbpedia. It may look messy, but there is vast amount of data there, that is taken advantage of by many projects (also commercial). While i can imagine making a database with the same data, it is the "linked data" initiative that gave it such possibilities.
I agree that there were huge loads of money spent on it, and many projects simply didn't deliver what was promised. But anyway, does research always succeeds in 100% of the cases?
You think if not for semantic web, the dbpedia folks would've just shrugged and said "oh well, if only someone had invented a way for us to share knowledge"?
It's like saying J.K. Rowling couldn't have written Harry Potter if not for Bloomsbury Publishing's in-house style rules.
That's semantic web for you. Dbpedia is a project whose value is 99.9999999999% comprised of its content, 0.00000000001% comprised of semantic web scaffolding, and semantic web comes along and claims full credit for the entire thing.
It's like saying J.K. Rowling couldn't have written Harry Potter if not for Bloomsbury Publishing's in-house style rules.
That's semantic web for you. Dbpedia is a project whose value is 99.9999999999% comprised of its content, 0.00000000001% comprised of semantic web scaffolding, and semantic web comes along and claims full credit for the entire thing.
Yes, but then again, everything would be much harder if there wasn't a framework for that. (As if there wasn't a concept of "publisher" for J.K. Rowling's books. She would need to invent everything from the scratch.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You should think of the SW more of a thing that exists in nature rather than a piece technology. You seem to use the technology part of the SW and fail to understand that it would exist even if it wasn't thought about.
I really wish that, in addition to two videos, he linked some regular text telling us what JSON-LD is and why it matters. Videos, for me, have a much lower information density than text, and are much less amenable to skimming to see if I'm interested enough to go further.
The reply to the very first comment has a link to the JSON-LD spec:
http://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld/
http://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld/
Especially after he slags off so many other writers before him.
It seems silly to see so much stuff being recast as JSON, both formally (standards like this one) and informally.
Growing up in the 80s, I was mostly too young to remember the rise of XML. (Or more: too young to care much about work around a data format.) Presumably a similar thing happened then? I.e. there were existing formal and ad-hoc standards for representing a variety of concepts, and entirely new formal and ad-hoc standards were created to represent the same concepts in XML?
Why not create standards around abstract representations of things, and then create standards for serializing those into concrete formats?! So then we'd already have e.g. Abstract-LD and XML-LD; and JSON-LD would be new. That seems less wasteful than throwing everything out when a different data representation format becomes the new hotness.
(Certainly we learn things about the abstract representations as time goes on. That could be handled by versioning. So maybe there'd be XML-LD 1.0 and 2.0, but JSON-LD would only exist in 2.0 form because nobody was interesting in doing the work to define the JSON serialization of Abstract-LD 1.0...)
Growing up in the 80s, I was mostly too young to remember the rise of XML. (Or more: too young to care much about work around a data format.) Presumably a similar thing happened then? I.e. there were existing formal and ad-hoc standards for representing a variety of concepts, and entirely new formal and ad-hoc standards were created to represent the same concepts in XML?
Why not create standards around abstract representations of things, and then create standards for serializing those into concrete formats?! So then we'd already have e.g. Abstract-LD and XML-LD; and JSON-LD would be new. That seems less wasteful than throwing everything out when a different data representation format becomes the new hotness.
(Certainly we learn things about the abstract representations as time goes on. That could be handled by versioning. So maybe there'd be XML-LD 1.0 and 2.0, but JSON-LD would only exist in 2.0 form because nobody was interesting in doing the work to define the JSON serialization of Abstract-LD 1.0...)
Funnily that's what the s semantic web stack achieved.
JSON-LD, RDF/XML, turtle, n3 etc etc
all different serialisations for the same knowledge. Choose the serialisation on the use case but no need to remodel your data evertime.
Not 100%.. N3 and Turtle don't have the same expressiveness. Then there is XML...
Semantic web is quite easy when it comes to Linked Data (and RDF/S subset), but is becoming painful when more expressiveness is necessary.
Unfortunately, in many cases using only RDF/S is not enough, and some more heavyweight reasoning is required. This is both hard and not scalable for bigger sets of data. Then there is the Open World Assumpltion, which is somehow contrary to what a typical person would expect. You can't easily validate your data for some missing property, because of what OWA assumes: we don't know so we can't tell if it's false...
Anyway Semantic Web has left a nice and mature technology stack, that is great for many tasks. Most of knowledge modelling use cases can be done with RDF and with multiple tools that supports it's creation, editing, reasoning, querying, visualisation, etc.
Semantic web is quite easy when it comes to Linked Data (and RDF/S subset), but is becoming painful when more expressiveness is necessary.
Unfortunately, in many cases using only RDF/S is not enough, and some more heavyweight reasoning is required. This is both hard and not scalable for bigger sets of data. Then there is the Open World Assumpltion, which is somehow contrary to what a typical person would expect. You can't easily validate your data for some missing property, because of what OWA assumes: we don't know so we can't tell if it's false...
Anyway Semantic Web has left a nice and mature technology stack, that is great for many tasks. Most of knowledge modelling use cases can be done with RDF and with multiple tools that supports it's creation, editing, reasoning, querying, visualisation, etc.
You are right meant to write NTriples not N3 but editing on the phone is such a disaster. N3 adds a rule language next to the data description over RDF. XML disallows a few things that are possible in turtle but in practical terms there are very few cases where that could make a possible difference, e.g. who has a \beep code point in their normal text.
OWL is powerfull but hard like all description logics, they ar e tools that very very few developers really master. Yet can be used for very interesting things.
Validation is not the goal of OWL and is therefore not well supported. ShACL or whatever comes out of W3C for schema descriptions and constraints will be easier and more performant for this use case.
On the last para: yes, yes and yes. Very mature stack with a lot of competition and innovation.
Cheers!
OWL is powerfull but hard like all description logics, they ar e tools that very very few developers really master. Yet can be used for very interesting things.
Validation is not the goal of OWL and is therefore not well supported. ShACL or whatever comes out of W3C for schema descriptions and constraints will be easier and more performant for this use case.
On the last para: yes, yes and yes. Very mature stack with a lot of competition and innovation.
Cheers!
Yeah, all I could think of while skimming the spec was "Those who do not learn from XML are doomed to repeat it".
Still, this was a great wrap-up discussion, and the specification is easy to read, which is an achievement in its own right and should be recognized.
Still, this was a great wrap-up discussion, and the specification is easy to read, which is an achievement in its own right and should be recognized.
Why not create standards around abstract representations of things
That's RDF in a nutshell.
That's RDF in a nutshell.
And SGML (which XML is an application of)
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.
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.
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.
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/ - allows to query several "semantic web" datasets at runtime by issuing several concurrent HTTP requests
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_... - (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.
http://linkeddatafragments.org/ - allows to query several "semantic web" datasets at runtime by issuing several concurrent HTTP requests
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_... - (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.
What strong theoretical foundations do they provide? (this is a genuine question)
Please have a look at last weeks ESWC program (one of the top semantic web conferences): http://2015.eswc-conferences.org/program/accepted-papers
Foundations such as query federation, graph compression (HDT), reasoning, data integration and much much more.
Foundations such as query federation, graph compression (HDT), reasoning, data integration and much much more.
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/
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.
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.
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=pre...
[2] https://api.github.com/users/octocat
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=pre...
[2] https://api.github.com/users/octocat
Github users are tied to social interaction, job hiring, integration with multiple version control systems, and a pile of other crap, including systems not part of the website itself. Hacker News users are pretty much just tied to posts and comments on the site.
The only piece of data that seems in common is that they both have user names.
There is no reason user data should be similar across different systems. Products are generally unique, or they don't have much value. That means the data tied to a user is often also unique.
The only piece of data that seems in common is that they both have user names.
There is no reason user data should be similar across different systems. Products are generally unique, or they don't have much value. That means the data tied to a user is often also unique.
Each site has a set of attributes, which partially overlaps. The data formats should reflect this, allowing for software clients that know the base attributes to interact with both, while still having their non-overlapping attributes. Why can't I add both profiles to my PIM software without special adapters?
This is what RDF allows you to do: instead of designing a custom format, or being tied to a rigid standard one, you can simply add standard attributes to the element in an ad-hoc fashion, so the client can use whatever attributes it supports while allowing for the ones it doesn't. And if there is no standard attribute, fine, you can add custom ones as well.
There's no reason the same code shouldn't be able to process HN, Slashdot and Reddit threads, for example - and even a Github issue.
This is what RDF allows you to do: instead of designing a custom format, or being tied to a rigid standard one, you can simply add standard attributes to the element in an ad-hoc fashion, so the client can use whatever attributes it supports while allowing for the ones it doesn't. And if there is no standard attribute, fine, you can add custom ones as well.
There's no reason the same code shouldn't be able to process HN, Slashdot and Reddit threads, for example - and even a Github issue.
W3 != Semantic Web.
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/
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.
The parent post said "they provide" but it was referring to multiple fields.
No, but they continue to think about the problem and produce useful recommendations.
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.
W3C is a standard body. The semantic web is a research field. Different things.
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Hating the Semantic Web is like shooting fish in a barrel ever since Clay Shirky wrote an essay that lays bare the goals as being irrelevant and immaterial.
http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/semantic_s...
http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/semantic_s...
That essay isn't very convincing. All of his examples of logical failures would only work with the most poorly defined ontology and the most brain dead reasoner, which is probably why he described everything using the term "syllogism". For example:
I'm sure this guy is very clever, and has plenty of great qualities - but he has built his argument around the failure of logic, when it is clear that he doesn't know very much about it. The use of very poorly defined terms makes it look like he is aware of this...
US citizens are people
The First Amendment covers the rights of US citizens
Nike is protected by the First Amendment
I'm sure this guy is very clever, and has plenty of great qualities - but he has built his argument around the failure of logic, when it is clear that he doesn't know very much about it. The use of very poorly defined terms makes it look like he is aware of this...
Spot on.
That given example neither convinces me.
The second sentence is actually false/incomplete and would mislead not only a reasoner, but a human too.
The problem with author's thesis is that he want's semantic web to universally describe the whole world. This is impossible because the world is changing and sometimes contradictory.
OWL for instance doesn't cover such assumptions, and in general most knowledge representation frameworks are monotonic, so it's impossible for instance to withdraw some fact by adding a new one. That what might be a real limitation of the Semantic Web as we know it.
The problem with author's thesis is that he want's semantic web to universally describe the whole world. This is impossible because the world is changing and sometimes contradictory.
OWL for instance doesn't cover such assumptions, and in general most knowledge representation frameworks are monotonic, so it's impossible for instance to withdraw some fact by adding a new one. That what might be a real limitation of the Semantic Web as we know it.
The second sentence is something being debated as a result of the Citizen's United ruling, so his essay seems oddly prescient.
> the world is changing and sometimes contradictory
If you think ontologies don't change and will not require constant maintenance I have a bridge to sell you.
> the world is changing and sometimes contradictory
If you think ontologies don't change and will not require constant maintenance I have a bridge to sell you.
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Not particularly prescient; the issue didn't appear with Citizen's United. Back then, there was already a law proposal (the McCain-Feingold bill) to limit spending by corporations and other groups on political ads.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McConnell_v._FEC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McConnell_v._FEC
McCain-Feingold is about limiting corporations behaving like citizens. Citizens United is the expansion thereby making the conclusion much more logical today than when it was first written in 2003.
Yes, but I linked to McConnell v. FEC, which was a challenge to McCain-Feingold much like Citizens United v. FEC. The issue was already on the table, the decision just happen to go the other way.
You can't assume automated systems will behave "reasonably".
F=m*a is a great rule most of the time that happens to stop working at various edge cases. Sadly, you can say the same of all of physics and just about every other rule. Even things as 'simple' as living vs dead can get really complicated with lots of odd edge cases.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa new species?
F=m*a is a great rule most of the time that happens to stop working at various edge cases. Sadly, you can say the same of all of physics and just about every other rule. Even things as 'simple' as living vs dead can get really complicated with lots of odd edge cases.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa new species?
> You can't assume automated systems will behave "reasonably".
Well, automated systems constructed by people - as ontology construction and semantic reasoner writing is primarily a human activity (... yeah I see it). It would be pretty funny if we end up with a semantic web, where logic is king, having ontologies mapped by a probabilistic AI though.
As far as edge cases are concerned, that is why you use an open world assumption [0], allowing the reasoner to return "Unknown". Which would act as a compiler error for human understating. Of course that won't save you from reclassifications, but nothing will. I haven't done much thinking on the matter, but I can't think of anything that would better handle the expansion of a knowledge graph than an OWA semantic reasoner. I've done a bit of work with neural networks, and changes in the domain are not well handled by neural networks. I imagine the results of a large graph change would create in the neural network something that would look very human - confirmation bias :)
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-world_assumption
Well, automated systems constructed by people - as ontology construction and semantic reasoner writing is primarily a human activity (... yeah I see it). It would be pretty funny if we end up with a semantic web, where logic is king, having ontologies mapped by a probabilistic AI though.
As far as edge cases are concerned, that is why you use an open world assumption [0], allowing the reasoner to return "Unknown". Which would act as a compiler error for human understating. Of course that won't save you from reclassifications, but nothing will. I haven't done much thinking on the matter, but I can't think of anything that would better handle the expansion of a knowledge graph than an OWA semantic reasoner. I've done a bit of work with neural networks, and changes in the domain are not well handled by neural networks. I imagine the results of a large graph change would create in the neural network something that would look very human - confirmation bias :)
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-world_assumption
I would say that OWA is an interesting feature, but still far from being perfect. In the real world cases, we need sometimes to perform some sort of validation, where we need true/false answer rather than Unknown. This is where OWA falls short. For instance in the case of cardinality problem. (For those who doesn't know: In OWL you can say that a person can have only 1 father, but then you might add 2 fathers for one person, and the reasoner would be perfectly fine with that. It assumes that both persons might be actually the same instance)
> ...where we need true/false answer rather than Unknown.
If you've set things up with that sort of constraint, then you've set yourself up for failure - Gödel's incompleteness theorems [0]. I think OWA is the only way around that, you just need to gracefully handle unknowns. Of course, you can convert an unknown into a known pretty easily with: ¬u :)
> For instance in the case of cardinality problem.
That is exactly when I'd want my reasoner to ignore a graph edge, or else you get a non sequitur that ends with Nike belonging in the human set. Measure twice, cut once.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_t...
If you've set things up with that sort of constraint, then you've set yourself up for failure - Gödel's incompleteness theorems [0]. I think OWA is the only way around that, you just need to gracefully handle unknowns. Of course, you can convert an unknown into a known pretty easily with: ¬u :)
> For instance in the case of cardinality problem.
That is exactly when I'd want my reasoner to ignore a graph edge, or else you get a non sequitur that ends with Nike belonging in the human set. Measure twice, cut once.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_t...
If you agree with the assumptions being made by the author.
Even if you do not find it useful in your domain, not sure thats good reason to hate it.
Another classic essay on this topic is Cory Doctorow's "Metacrap", from 2001: http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm
I hadn't seen that essay before. It seems very dated since the emergence of Google. Many of the problems that he implies are fundamentally insurmountable have been largely addressed by modern search engines.
He never says any of these problems are fundamentally insurmountable. Just that you need to take any meta-data with a large grain of salt. Which, well, is exactly what Google does. It uses certain metadata, but doesn't trust it absolutely.
Also, he mentions Google in this essay; this was written after the emergence of Google, when Google was trouncing all of these other services that tried to use metadata embedded in webpages or tried to classify all websites into some big hierarchy.
Also, he mentions Google in this essay; this was written after the emergence of Google, when Google was trouncing all of these other services that tried to use metadata embedded in webpages or tried to classify all websites into some big hierarchy.
Nah, his argument goes beyond just the meta data itself. It's about meta data and whether or not we can use it.
A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities.
The comment at the end of the essay about Google looks to be half throw-away. It's like he showed the essay to someone before he published and they said, "but Google", so he put a comment about Google in there without acknowledging that they were wrecking his essay.
Additionally, he never mentions the positive feedback loop created by companies like Google that tend to encourage good meta data creation by punishing the obvious crap.
A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities.
The comment at the end of the essay about Google looks to be half throw-away. It's like he showed the essay to someone before he published and they said, "but Google", so he put a comment about Google in there without acknowledging that they were wrecking his essay.
Additionally, he never mentions the positive feedback loop created by companies like Google that tend to encourage good meta data creation by punishing the obvious crap.
I've been thinking about how to format meta data for my creative files - JSON-LD with my personal @context spec is an interesting idea.
There is more than likely an ontology already defined for the creative meta data, if so you should look at using that rather than inventing your own.
http://schema.org/ is probably the best choice to go with already established standards. I think there are (even today) some SEO benefits here and for the future maybe some more exciting things.
I'll be honest: "the alter of pedantic technical accuracy" made me snigger a little.
Have you read the essay "Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia" by Cory Doctorow? You may enjoy it: http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm
My favorite expression from it: "the lab-coated guardians of epistemology".
More fully: "In meta-utopia, the lab-coated guardians of epistemology sit down and rationally map out a hierarchy of ideas..."
My favorite expression from it: "the lab-coated guardians of epistemology".
More fully: "In meta-utopia, the lab-coated guardians of epistemology sit down and rationally map out a hierarchy of ideas..."
Yet in practice schema.org shows that people do put in their webpages and it has a benefit. Cory argues that you can't trust meta data therefore its useless. Newsflash nothing can be trusted, but its at least nice if you can parse it before deciding if its spam or ham!
JSON-LD is certainly valuable, but I don't understand how to use SPARQL, RDFS or OWL reasoners, etc. with it. Would a client ingest JSON-LD and store it locally in an RDF data store?
There is a ton of great work in knowledge engineering using RDFS and OWL, and tossing that seems like a bad idea.
There is a ton of great work in knowledge engineering using RDFS and OWL, and tossing that seems like a bad idea.
I think the author's point was that JSON-LD isn't primarily intended for existing users of RDF, SPARQL etc. Most developers already work with JSON on a regular basis (not so much RDF), and JSON-LD is a model for merging and combine data sources, in JSON.
It's good that conversion from and to RDF is now standardized, but it's probably not something that your average dev is going to be taking advantage of. They'll likely continue to ingest, process and store the data in JSON.
It's good that conversion from and to RDF is now standardized, but it's probably not something that your average dev is going to be taking advantage of. They'll likely continue to ingest, process and store the data in JSON.
That is a good point.
I am still trying to wrap my head around using JSON-LD. One advantage of RDFS (or OWL) is being able to integrate different data sources using different schemas. That probably is just not a typical JSON-LD use case. BTW, I have written a couple books on the semantic web, so that shows my prejudices :-)
I am still trying to wrap my head around using JSON-LD. One advantage of RDFS (or OWL) is being able to integrate different data sources using different schemas. That probably is just not a typical JSON-LD use case. BTW, I have written a couple books on the semantic web, so that shows my prejudices :-)
This was posted before ...
meh .. yes i know you can repost, but I thought it would be helpful to inform people of this, because they could then see the previous set of comments ... don't know why i bother sometimes.
The semantic web is a colossal waste of time and money. It does more harm than good. Unless you're a savvy PI (probably in a European country) who has used it to lasso a big fat grant from clueless committees who think in terms of buzzwords.
Every successful project which is linked in any way to semantic web, would have been successful without the semantic web.
The only original thing to come out of semantic web, RDF, causes more harm than good. Anyone who has had to deal with encoding sequences in RDF, or any other kind of nontrivial structured data, which is only possible with incredibly asinine "blank node" trickery, either knows this or is deceiving themselves.
Semantic reasoners are either limited to EL ontologies, which defeats the whole purpose of OWL's expressiveness; or else take dozens of gigabytes of RAM to reason over any ontology more complicated than "the pizza ontology". Utterly, thoroughly irrelevant in today's VPS-based world.
The semantic web "community" is about 75% made up of invalid URLs because all these academic geniuses are too busy theorizing about ontologies to realize that all the links into their department webpage are going to stop working when their one-year postdoc expires. Various URL-standardizing services try to address this, unfortunately the number of these services is approximately 1 per semantic web researcher, and in the long run they're no more stable than the department webpages.
The semantic web is a horrific waste of (mostly EU) grant funds that could be used on far more worthy research. The world would be a better place if the whole idea had never been invented.