Sarah Jamie LewisFeb 24, 2023

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.

Show threadTim Bray

@sarahjamielewis Nice thread you launched there. Back in the day I was heavily involved at W3C and kind of TimBL's loyal opposition, a Semantic-Web skeptic. I still sort of am, but remain open-minded, there's a there there but we haven't found it. In this timeline anyhow.

Having said all that, I object to the phrase “entangled in meaningless prose”. That prose is the real payload, we are language-centric creatures.

Feb 28, 2023 at 10:17pmWeb