There is an alternate timeline where the semantic web took off and there was wide investment in ontological tooling to ensure that the information in academic papers, websites, and applications was structured and accessible to future processing.
We instead live in a world where all the useful data is trapped inside proprietary formats, and entangled in meaningless prose - a world primed for large language models to come along and hallucinate the data that might contained therein.
@Madagascar_Sky @sarahjamielewis I found this one painful and I don't agree with all of it, but very well written:
https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html
In my opinion it misses Wikidata, but I'm biased.
@vrandecic @Madagascar_Sky @sarahjamielewis
Okay, right, Denny is biased, he helped make #Wikidata the right way :)
I used to teach how worthless the promises of Semantic Web were. But since Wikidata reached a useful size, there is now quite a lot of useful things one can do with the data, so now I teach that there is a glimmer of hope called Wikidata and federated databases....
@shriramk @WiseWoman @Madagascar_Sky @sarahjamielewis
Those are very relevant observations, and this leads to the one large question the Semantic Web never answered: how does the incentive infrastructure look like? The few parts of the Semantic Web that provided a decent answer to that question were the ones that were successful: schema.org, Wikidata and the wider GLAM world, usage inside emails, inside organizations as a data integration technology.
@vrandecic @shriramk @WiseWoman @Madagascar_Sky @sarahjamielewis
Very interesting debate, I guess one upcoming incentive for semantic tech could be archiving and note keeping. For those that encounter so much info on feeds this could provide better private and collaborative means to collect stuff: ordering, selecting, describing, developing. I am thinking of the experience of using pinterest, tumblr, pinboard, obsidian, etc. as kind of cross-platform extensions to feeds and online collections.
@lukasfx @shriramk @WiseWoman @Madagascar_Sky @sarahjamielewis
Yes, I agree, I think Semantic Web technology is underused in the personal and collaborative note taking space. Hypothes.is is an interesting approach in that direction.
But I'm this space you have to explain what the difference is to bookmarking extensions in your browser, delicious, and the Google Sidewiki, and why it would succeed where these things are not widely used today.
Sarah Jamie Lewis
Madagascar_Sky
Denny Vrandečić
Debora Weber-Wulff
Shriram Krishnamurthi
Lukas Fuchsgruber
jonny (good kind)