

In defense of semantic value (a 2-in-1 rant) - onderhond
http://www.onderhond.com/blog/work/in-defense-of-semantic-value

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jerf
My objection to "the semantic web" is:

    
    
       1. Semantics only have meaning in a given context.
       2. "Global context" is an oxymoron.
    

And most of the song-and-dance routine about how wonderfully fantastic the
semantic web will be implicitly assumes the creation of a global context, in
which we all reasonably precisely agree on all the semantics of everything,
and that's total pie-in-the-sky.

Recommended reading (which has the advantage of being a war story and not an
exercise in theoretical handwaving):
[http://reprog.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/semantic-mapping-
is-h...](http://reprog.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/semantic-mapping-is-hard/)
Also, follow those first two links down too ("the MARC format" and "Dublin
Core") for full comprehension. You can't even get agreement on being what an
_author_ is between two contexts, and you think you're going to build a
glorious semantic web‽ The semantic issues aren't going to get _easier_ after
that attribute....

~~~
irickt
This is a red herring. The shared context of two documents is the schema that
they both declare and nothing more. The promise of linked data is that a lot
of the relations will (and does now for example in music) allow discovery of
interesting relations.

As for library science, yes, it is a hard problem.

~~~
jerf
If declaring a schema meant that the two documents _actually_ shared a schema,
rather than just _claiming_ they shared a schema, I wouldn't have had to post
my comment, because the problem would have been long since solved and we
wouldn't be awaiting the Semantic Web because it would have been here for
about 10 years now.

Semantics is about more than slathering tags and attributes on things;
semantics is about actual, factual agreement. Merely claimed agreement isn't
enough when it's generally not true. If professionals in library sciences
can't get it right, the closest thing to a discipline devoted to the study of
metadata, who can or will?

------
Homunculiheaded
I don't think it's just an issue of people wanting a "now" solution as the
article suggests. Whenever I spend time with semantic web stuff it always
reeks of the problematic "over-engineered solution in search of a problem".
For instance OWL starts off by defining a computationally intractable model
for reasoning. That would be fine if you wanted to use it as a framework for
abstractly reasoning about a subject, but no one trying to solve an actual
problem starts this way.

The other major warning sign (and indication of over-engineering on it's way)
is a complete lack of historical context. For example rdf triples are a more
verbose, and yet limited form of Prolog clauses (in a similar way that XML is
essentially verbose, restricted s-exps), yet, in my experience, the vast
majority of rdf 'experts' have never written a single line of Prolog, or are
even loosely familiar with the idea of logic programming. Additionally if you
were really trying to solve a problem you'd already have a working prototype
kludged together with something that looked a lot like Prolog.

The combination of a general ignorance of the problem space (knowledge
representation and reasoning, logic programming etc) and a poorly defined
problem imho can lead to absolutely no good, and are pretty strong evidence
that most semantic web project will go nowhere.

------
icebraining
I agree completely with the second rant, but I don't really get what's
difficult about marking up the various tidbits of data. Most websites use HTML
templates; it's just a matter of adding certain classes to the elements.

It's also funny to notice the lack of semantic metadata in that page - you
can't tell me that adding rel=me and rel=author to the links, as Scott
Hanselman describes in his blog[1], is difficult.

[1]:
[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/EmbraceAuthorshipTheImportance...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/EmbraceAuthorshipTheImportanceOfRelmeAndRelauthorOnYourContentsSEOAndGoogle.aspx)

~~~
onderhond
Actually, the meta data you're talking about is there. You can even test the
page to see that it should work (though it never appears like that in Google
search results for me):
[http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http...](http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.onderhond.com%2Fblog%2Fwork%2Fin-
defense-of-semantic-value&view=)

As for complexity, some classes are hard to grasp without a good reference
list (like wtf is FN (formatted name)? I'm not saying it's rocket science, but
it's still a lot more work (front-end and back-end) than adding class="contact
person" to your base tag.

~~~
icebraining
_Actually, the meta data you're talking about is there. You can even test the
page to see that it should work (though it never appears like that in Google
search results for
me):[http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http...](http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http..).
_

Hmm, sorry. I looked at the source and missed it.

