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> AI is back with a revenge after 40 years of hibernation in the Utopian nuclear winter. That should tell you one shouldn't bury a good idea to quickly - although I appreciate your post a lot.

You might be right, I actually would love to be wrong. But even as a thought experiment (let's suppose the SW was up and working and fully realized today) what are the use cases other than "changing everything"?

Are these use case the same or similar to just doing it through API access to some set of underlying relational databases? Would the API access give us better performance, even under a federated scenario? If not, what's the advantage?

> Bring an elegant tool in the ecosystem (JSON-LD maybe ?) : devs won't shy away in front of horrendous xml, and all of the sudden SW might get caught in a virtuous circle and become the previous big thing.

I'm conflicted on this. A big part of me says that if something ends up taking off, it won't be the ideas posited by the W3C and it'll just be something else that happened to work and now Semanticists are just co-opting it and re-labling it as "Semantic Web".

I'm deciding not to fall for it. The SW failed. If something else takes off that achieves similar goals but through entirely different means, it's not the SW, it's...whatever it is.

I think it's okay the SW failed. If I sound critical it's not because it was a failure, it's because of the people that keep insisting it wasn't in the face of overwhelming evidence.

The failure of the SW has brought us lots of important information about large scale distributed information systems from a technical and sociological standpoint. It's time to study those issues and outcomes and try something else.

Instead, the field is like the search for the Higgs Boson, except whenever the last particle accelerator the community tried failed to produce the Higgs Boson, and instead found some other particle, the community simple decided to call the other particle the Higgs Boson instead. It's kind of mind-bending to work anywhere near the field.

The uses is a very interesting question because the first things that pops to mind : it would be totally useless without the proper tools to take advantage of it. Basically the web is a flatland with many arrows going from one doc to the other - a one to one relational database. Semantic web (or lets call structured web) gives it a z axis to build depth.

A trivial example I gave on another comment :

> The way google exposes the web today is unidimensional : keywords => related website list. It's great for humans to parse. But its extremely limited for machines. Why isn't there yet an API or an UI to ask for "all books of Japanese novelists of the last 2 centuries" (website links included per book).

An other example that comes to mind is : you query a person and instead of a list of related website you get a set of tabs with : bio from different sources, work, news, images & videos.... Bonus, you don't need to be google anymore to do that ! Ok that's far fetched but imagine the potential for webapps.

> An other example that comes to mind is : you query a person and instead of a list of related website you get a set of tabs with : bio from different sources, work, news, images & videos.... Bonus, you don't need to be google anymore to do that ! Ok that's far fetched but imagine the potential for webapps.

So that's kind of one of the canonical examples for the SW that's always given. Query for an object and get an entire dossier back on that object, assembled, federation fashion, from tons of disparate sources all over the web.

It turns out that

a) that doesn't refute the API access to a bunch of relational stores all over the place and the better performance you're likely to get from those stores

b) the notion that just compiling all that stuff in one place works better

c) really any of the issues presented by Doctorow, read his essay again with a critical eye and think about how each of his criticisms would apply to something like this.

Modern search engines have largely figured out how to provide a fairly high-level ontology equivalent to this use-case by simply parsing out the content on the pages and centrally storing it. This is not the Semantic Web.

> Modern search engines have largely figured out how to provide a fairly high-level ontology equivalent to this use-case by simply parsing out the content on the pages and centrally storing it.

If google opens up it's index to the world so you could use it as an api to query the web with the power of a relational DB, the case for semantic web would probably be pointless. But it's locked and only serves there ad system.

I'm not defending Semantic Web per say, but because the lack structure in the web makes it only 'parsable' by gigantic entities like google. Their work is remarkable and they offer a nice service I can consume. But I can't really build on it.

I think the debate should shift from the means to the goals... Semantic web might not be the right way to do it, but I strongly believe in the necessity of a way to (openly) connect the dots of all that data or it's a giant waste.

What are the relational stores you mention in a) ?

> I think the debate should shift from the means to the goals

Yes yes yes. The conversation needs to change from "if we build the Semantic Web it will change everything" (where everything is unspecified and not discussed) to we need to do this, what do we need to do it.

> What are the relational stores you mention in a) ?

Behind most modern on-line connected websites there's a big Postgres/Oracle/SQL Server database somewhere (and increasingly non-relational no-SQL type of stores). The SW basically chose to turn the web into a giant federated RDF triple-store which, if you think about it, is kind of ridiculous from any kind of sensible performance POV, just accessing the information from the source, the databases that are used to generate the pages, seems to make more sense.

I'm conflicted on this. A big part of me says that if something ends up taking off, it won't be the ideas posited by the W3C and it'll just be something else that happened to work and now Semanticists are just co-opting it and re-labling it as "Semantic Web".

So you're arguing that JSON-LD isn't a Semantic Web technology?

JSON-LD is not a Semantic Web technology, at least as proposed by TBL et al. in the original vision. It's just syntactic sugar on what was already there and once again falls into the "technology that wasn't for the SW that's been co-opted by SW advocated".

It doesn't solve any of the fundamental problems that the Semantic Web has. Just taking JSON (not a SW tech) and specifying a serialization method on it doesn't suddenly make it SW.

In fact, because JSON is easier to handle the XML, it should make the failure of the idea even more apparent.

Instead it's acted as a distraction, emulating "progress" while everybody starts to move their semantic graph engines to support it while not actually kicking the ball forward on any specific front. There's really nothing new that JSON-LD introduces other than being easier to parse. Except that it somehow specifies a syntax that turns JSON into something about as ugly and verbose as XML.

The original vision was just a starting point. Did you really expect nothing to change or evolve over the past ~15 years?

Honestly, your argument, to me, sounds like saying "cars have failed since Henry Ford didn't mention fuel injection, overhead cams, or turbochargers".

If the goal is getting to the moon, then proposing cars is a failure. A short thought experiment would reveal this. And it's not really useful to start co-opting rocketships and calling them "cars" and claiming that cars have been the path to the moon all along and amazing things are coming. This is a particularly pernicious habit I've noticed in the KM field.

The short thought experiment that would reveal that cars won't work simply hasn't been done as a field with the SW and it's usually not done in any kind of Semantic technology circles. You end up with "just tweak the model!" and "it'll start to work when there's sufficient data" and "we just need to build the reasoning engines" is what the field has been spinning on for more than a decade.

Even in SW circles, there's a general consensus that the SW has not arrived. In some more honest pieces it's recognized that it was a failure. But there's tremendous momentum behind the idea because of TBL and people aren't willing to give it up and jump ship onto what's actually working until it gets a big name and W3C (or some other notable committee) to back it.

Are these use case the same or similar to just doing it through API access to some set of underlying relational databases?

That question suggests that you see "The Semantic Web" as being exactly equivalent to "HTML with semantic metadata added". But that most definitely is not the case, and "API access" is part of the Semantic Web. An HTTP based protocol for SPARQL has been around for forever, and continues to evolve, as do the standards around semantic discovery of API services.

The whole RDFa, microformats, microdata, GRDDL thing is just a small part of the overall picture.

"There's a group of people I like to call "Semanticists" who've come to latch onto Semantic graph projects, not as a technology, but as a religion. They're kind of like the "6 minute ab" guy in "There's Something About Mary" ... There's then another group of Semanticists, they recognize the approaches that have been proposed have kind of dead-ended, but they won't publicly announce that. Then when some other approach not affiliated with the SW makes progress (language understanding AI for example) will simply declare this new approach as part of the SW and then claim the SW is making progress."

Some of these things in your list were proposed specifically because the Semantic Web technology inventory had failed to produce anything useful.

Some of these things in your list were proposed specifically because the Semantic Web technology inventory had failed to produce anything useful.

Well, that's one possible narrative one could believe in. Another would be that a lot of people engaging their NIH tendencies invented a parallel technology track, covering a lot of the same ground, and offering no real advantages, just because they could. shrug

Well yeah, people do that all the time.

I know we disagree on this topic, but thanks for having a sensible debate on it!

I know we disagree on this topic, but thanks for having a sensible debate on it!

Likewise!

> I'm not sure the lack of motivation for implementing SW is economic but rather: what's the point if no one is using it.

"what's the point if no one is using it" IS an an economic problem.

A developer who thinks xml is holding them back in anyway is not a very good developer.

- AI might be (one of) the tool that make semantic web actually relevant. The reason why I believe google has an important part to play in it.

AI is definitely big, on multiple levels. Even without AGI, the ability of AI/ML techniques to help serve as a bridge to the SemWeb world by, for example, extracting semantic data from unstructured text, is huge. This is why Apache Stanbol excites me so much. I foresee the addition of progressivly better and better enhancement engines for Stanbol, constantly improving the ability to do that structured extraction. This will make the overall Semantic Web vision that much more practical.