Ask HN: Did APIs Kill the Semantic Web Dream? - casper345
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PaulHoule
Yes and no.

If the "semantic web" is dead it is that people are sick of updating
standards. For instance, we know now that we should have SHACL before we had
OWL (forgot the old "garbage in garbage out" thing) but it is too late.
Probably the only semantic web "standard" that realizes that RDF can do
everything JSON can do is the XMP metadata standard that Adobe has pushed.
(Somehow the librarians who made Dublin Core didn't seem to think it mattered
what order you listed the authors of a book in -- but the one guy Adobe had
thinking about it did.)

One strange thing that turned up with the semweb for instance is that maybe
80% of the time people use an ordered list in JSON they don't really care
about the order -- representing facts with set semantics actually works most
of the time but unfortunately when you do 80% of the work to get to an MVP it
is still not viable.

People at this point might be vaugely aware that SPARQL would be a lot more
useful if they added "object-relational" features similar to N1QL but the
standards fatigue is too set in. (Eg. you should be able to write queries that
know about ordered lists)

The Object Management Group has long been following a path which is parallel
to the semantic web. For instance, if you have machine readable API schemas
(eg. represent the semantics of the API) you could have API clients that "code
themselves". Thus there really is no contradiction between APIs and the
"semantic web".

