
JSON-LD and Why I Hate the Semantic Web (2014) - walterbell
http://manu.sporny.org/2014/json-ld-origins-2/
======
throwaway9216
Due to shitty academic job market, I was forced to take a job part of which
could be described as "semantic web evangelist". If you read some incredibly
optimistic article about the semantic web and how it solves all life's
problems, there's a non-negligible chance that I wrote it.

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.

~~~
jerven
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
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
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
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.

------
cwyers
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.

~~~
vog
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/)

------
sktrdie
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.

~~~
ma2rten
What strong theoretical foundations do they provide? (this is a genuine
question)

~~~
DyslexicAtheist
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/)

~~~
icebraining
W3 != Semantic Web.

~~~
DyslexicAtheist
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/)

~~~
ma2rten
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.

------
WalterGR
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...)

~~~
jerven
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.

~~~
haddr
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.

~~~
jerven
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!

------
nickbauman
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_syllogism.html)

~~~
woodman
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:

    
    
      US citizens are people 
      The First Amendment covers the rights of US citizens 
      Nike is protected by the First Amendment
    

He then goes on to say that one would conclude that Nike, being a person, has
kidneys according to some medical database. First, the ontology: why would you
join a medical ontology on "person", instead of something more rational like
"human" (you know you're going to have medical data for animals as well)?
Second, logical failure: the second statement is not one of exclusivity, you
cannot actually link the third statement to the prior two.

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...

~~~
haddr
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.

~~~
nickbauman
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.

~~~
icebraining
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)

~~~
nickbauman
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.

~~~
icebraining
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.

------
jplur
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.

~~~
mehh
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.

~~~
Fannon
[http://schema.org/](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.

------
bshimmin
I'll be honest: "the alter of pedantic technical accuracy" made me snigger a
little.

~~~
WalterGR
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](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..."

~~~
bshimmin
I was actually poking fun at the misspelling of "altar" \- seemed quite
amusing given the context!

~~~
WalterGR
Ah, yes. :)

------
mark_l_watson
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.

~~~
Rezo
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.

~~~
mark_l_watson
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 :-)

------
mehh
This was posted before ...

~~~
detaro
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

~~~
mehh
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.

