
The Semantic Web Is Dead. Long Live the Semantic Web - dennybritz
http://blog.blikk.co/long-live-semantic-web/
======
tjradcliffe
> 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
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.

------
programminggeek
When I got exposed to semantic web probably 4 years ago, I realized what a
huge mistake it was/is.

My take is that it is a bunch of ideas to make it easier for search engines to
crawl and use your data about all kinds of things. On one hand, that is great.

However, the huge problem with using it is that you end up creating your own
search engine to crawl data sources to do anything useful. That is to say, you
have to crawl the data, store it somewhere, and then build up your own systems
for querying or doing anything useful with the data.

The use case many people have is that they want to use and API to get some
particular bit of data out and that's it. Like, say you want to do a search
for a list of tweets on Twitter with the hashtag #HackerNews. The sane thing
to do is to be able to hit a twitter api endpoint and have it send you back a
list of tweets with that hash tag.

Now, imagine if instead you had to index all of twitter and filter yourself
for tweets with #HackerNews in it. Is that better for that particular use
case? No, it sucks.

There are certainly cases where you DO want to crawl data and do your own data
analysis on it. But, that is a much more limited use case for many developers
and there isn't as much value in that as people seem to believe.

A better solution would be something like REST with HATEOS on a much larger
scale. You'd be able to index things nicely, but still have the benefits of
smarter API calls.

Unfortunately, I don't see this happening anytime soon, despite the
interesting things you could build with it.

~~~
j13z
I agree, the crawling / indexing problems you describe are definitely true for
_Linked Data_. But there are still other use cases for semantic web
technology.

> The use case many people have is that they want to use and API to get some
> particular bit of data out and that's it.

 _In theory_ , that's what SPARQL and SPARQL endpoints are for. Plus you get
things like federated queries and an open data model (RDF), that allows to
combine multiple data sources without "wrapping" schemas.

But well, this is kind of utopia and yes, I doubt it will ever be "a thing".

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djulius
Having attended ISWC numerous times, this conference is long dead. It is the
perfect example of eminence-based vs evidence-based science. Technicality of
paper if low, most of the paper gathers bad and useless description logic
theorems from the very same guys each year. The consanguinity rate is higher
than any other CS conference. The quality of the conference is in fact well
disputed among academics. Core[1] ranking puts it as a B conference (later
updated to A due to request based on scholar values[2]). Arnetminer[3] and
Academic Search[4] put it in A+/A tier. These latter are drawn from
bibliographic metrics while the first ranking is the result of a poll among
australian researcher. Altough we disagree on rugby, I'm with the aussies for
this one.

The industry track exists for the record. Much of semweb companies were funded
using EU money and went bankrupt when the money went out. I can't believe the
EU continues to inject plenty of money for the semweb in H2020 despite having
wasted more than 1B in the previous decade (publicly admitted by the EU).

At ISWC 2012 in a workshop that took place the day before the conference, some
guy (don't remember his name) asked the speaker "would this building explode,
do you think the semweb would still exist ?". The speaker tried to find
examples of people doing semweb in the industry, but did not manage to
convince anyone, not sure if he did it for himself. This was (and is) a nice
summary of the situation of the semantic web.

[1] [http://core.edu.au/](http://core.edu.au/)

[2] [http://103.1.187.206/core/1338/](http://103.1.187.206/core/1338/)

[3] [http://arnetminer.org/page/conference-rank/html/All-in-
one.h...](http://arnetminer.org/page/conference-rank/html/All-in-one.html)

[4]
[http://academic.research.microsoft.com/RankList?entitytype=3...](http://academic.research.microsoft.com/RankList?entitytype=3&topDomainID=2&subDomainID=15)

~~~
sktrdie
Having attended ISWC this year, where I also published in the proceedings of a
workshop, I believe you don't understand exactly how academia works. Academic
fields such as the semantic web have nothing to give to industry.

It's like asking Einstein back in 1905 how is his work going to be used in
industry.

Semantic web is not an industry or engineering field. It's theoretical and
academic and it has its purpose because it lays strong theoretical
foundations.

~~~
djulius
The Semantic Web is developing a technology, like the Web is a technology. It
is something that aims to be used by people, so to be implemented in real
systems. Therefore it aims at giving smth to the industry. The theoretical
argument of the semweb is absolutely meaningless.

Physicists study law of nature, there is no such thing in the Web which is a
deeply human field. It's quite an insult for Einstein to be compared to the
Semantic Web ...

------
B5geek
Will the KDE people get the message? </troll> Sorry I had to get that out of
the way.

In all seriousness, 'Semantic Web' has always felt like a SciFi inspired
version of AI intelligence. A concept that sounds cool, but in reality can't
ever work.

Take movie ratings & "suggested viewings" for example. Jim, Bob, and Steve all
watch the same movie. Jim thinks it's funny because of the physical gags. Bob
thinks it's funny because of the dialog & jokes. Steve likes it because the
hot new actress is naked. Dave likes the director and cinematography. All 4
guys give it a rating of 4/5.

With this one data point Streaming-movie-place.com cannot ever 'guess' what to
suggest to these guys to offer more movies for them to watch. The hope is that
once these guys start watching and rating other films a pattern will emerge.
That pattern can then be marketed and offer valid suggestions.

BUT reality is too different. We like different things for different reasons,
and no algorithm can ever get it 100% right. How many of you have a Netflix
queue of things that you want to see, but the suggested movies are full of
crappy suggestions? most or all of us I bet.

Which brings me back to my point; it's a sci-fi illusion. It can never exist
in real life. Humans are too damn fickle. (Which brings me back to KDE; I wish
they would give up on neopunk/symantic desktop crap. it's bloated, slows the
system down and offers nothing in return. Or I am just using it wrong.)
</rant>

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FranOntanaya
All I want from the Semantic Web is to know if I see that an API follows the
standard, things with the same name will be the same kind. For all I care,
that API's underlying model could output to HTML, rendered PNGs, ASCII art or
3D plastic.

In particular, scraping the View is pretty much a last resort. If you have to,
it's likely that either the source doesn't have the manpower to become
semantic anytime soon, or it's hostile to providing easy to parse data anyway.

------
th0ma5
I have some personal insights from following the SW world for some time:

1\. Most of the implementations and formats and everything really boil down to
a great way to publish graph data on the web, and query it using a pretty nice
graph query language, and for most general cases everything just works.

2\. A lot of the web is implementing incomplete select parts of SW
technologies even if they don't realize it, and then promptly putting it all
behind an API key and shared secret. When SW takes hold, that will all have to
be different, IE a common mechanism for authentication / authorization, and
some kind of way to quantify what is supported by a service, and all of that
exists but again, every service is different it seems right now, and they all
fear unfettered access.

3\. You can use all of it today if you want, and the library ecosystem is very
rich, IMHO. Plop it all into Neo4J / Jena / rdflib (etc etc) and have at it.

------
drawkbox
Humans are all unique so there will be differing views of semantics. It does
exist in pockets but not to the schema or spec as imagined. For instance,
hashtags and geolocation on tweets, categories/tags within wordpress blogs,
the social graph within facebook and others. Small pockets of semantic culture
within.

When implementation is left to a large population, there will be
differentiation as that is our nature. The semantic web wanted it easy, it
wanted the implementers to organize. Organizing it with all the differences is
how it will have to be. Unless a system implements the standard for you and
each author upon creation, there will be differences, deltas and no standard.

Probably the best semantic web / metadata system that has been built does do
this and that one is at the NSA.

------
david927
The approach currently used is in its death throes, to be sure.

But a working Semantic Web is a _huge deal_ (think: bigger than Google) and
will happen, make no mistake. But when it happens, it will be via a different
approach.

Edit: spelling (thx Joshua)

~~~
pacala
We are on the cusp of solving natural language understanding, which will
enable natural language for humans and relational databases for computers.
There will be no "Semantic Web", there will the "Web" and the machines that
read it just as well as humans.

~~~
elpachuco
>>We are on the cusp of solving natural language understanding

Why do you think this? Is it just a feel or is there some company that is
really close. As another user mentioned in this thread natural language
understanding seems to be the same thing as solving strong AI. Solving strong
AI is a huge deal. So big that the people in control of it will probably
become the most powerful people in the world.

~~~
ehsanu1
Whether we are on the cusp really depends on what we mean by "natural language
understanding" specifically. What about Watson? It seems to "understand" quite
a bit of natural language just fine and can answer interesting questions posed
in same. If that doesn't count as "understanding", I'd like to know what does?
It probably can't do extended reasoning based on its "understanding", but that
would seem to me to be moving the goal posts.

I doubt that a sufficiently well-defined notion of natural language
understanding that does not specifically include strong artificial
intelligence in its definition would require strong AI. Constructing such a
definition is left as an exercise to the reader.

Thinking that strong AI is required for natural language understanding may end
up being similar to how it was once thought that beating humans at chess would
require advanced AI. Brute forse can do wonderful things, as can weak AI.

------
mwg66
Every time I begin to explore using RDF and the associated technologies for a
knowledge rich problem I always find the tool support a major disappointment.
I understand there are exceptions (4store is a good example of a mature triple
store) but generally speaking I always leave feeling much of the core tools
never made it out of academia. And in a world where development time is a
precious commodity, I always end up going with a lower friction but ultimately
less powerful technology.

------
sktrdie
Semantic web is mainly an academic field. The theoretical research produced by
this community is a foundation valuable for a variety of different fields.
Stop thinking about the semantic web as the next big thing or the future of
the web.

Just like many other research fields it lays strong theoretical (and at times
also practical) foundations.

------
eksith
Since the site seems to be down still :
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blog.bl...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blog.blikk.co/long-
live-semantic-web/)

------
joshu
The Semantic Web is more about the semantics of schemas than amount the
semantics of data.

This is very poorly explained; people tend to think it means something about
computers understanding the data.

~~~
irickt
Any linking provides context thus semantics. Linking to a schema makes this
explicit and enhances latent semantics. So it's both right?

~~~
joshu
But that doesn't provide meaning to the data itself.

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ch4s3
The site is down. Does anyone have a mirror?

~~~
dennybritz
Sorry about that, restarted it :) I should probably upgrade that small
DigitalOcean instance.

~~~
dennybritz
I reposted it here while I'm upgrading the instance:
[https://medium.com/@dennybritz/the-semantic-web-is-dead-
long...](https://medium.com/@dennybritz/the-semantic-web-is-dead-long-live-
the-semantic-web-eddbca0a8b6)

~~~
dennybritz
Alright, should be back up again. With a bit more memory and swap space this
time :D

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smilbandit
Welcome to the party pal.

Love, RSS

------
notastartup
I wrote my counter response to this article.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8552989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8552989)

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waxjar
The semantic web as I understood it was just using the right HTML tags. Most
importantly, no tables for layout and using semantic names for CSS classes
rather than names like "blue". This has completely failed, imo. Tables are no
longer constructed with <table>, <tr> and <td> but with a combination of <div>
and <span> tags with classes that are not semantic at all :(

Edit: Not sure why this got downvoted, just trying to illustrate what I
thought the term meant.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The semantic web as I understood it was just using the right HTML tags.

Using semantic HTML (rather than presentational HMTL) for content is somewhat
related to the Semantic Web, but not equivalent to it -- the Semantic Web
is/was about open, composable ways of extracting and processing meaning from
content on the web. HTML itself (even HTML5 or the current state of the HTML
Living Standard) -- even when used in a cleanly semantic way -- isn't
expressive enough to do much with that without building additional ontological
structure on top of that, hence things like RDF and Microformats.

