I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me

I could write a book on what's wrong with the semantic web. One of the worst isn't even technical, it's the community. There are some great people in the community but there are also a large number of extremely toxic people that drive people away. If the technology ever takes off it's going to be because some outside community cherry-picks the good parts and tells those people to f-off. That's already starting to happen and you'll hear no end of bitching from people in the semantic web community about how they're reinventing what they've already done years ago. Guess what? You're right. You're so toxic that it's worth redoing everything if it means they don't have to deal with the toxic attitudes.

Semantic web tech solves a common problem. You have a database where you want to have some shared schema among many groups, and you want a way to infer facts based on first order logic. You want to be able to query multiple sources and reason about facts when taking into account multiple sources.<p>Whether you use semantic web tech or not that&#x27;s still a common problem that doesn&#x27;t always have a good plug and play solution. There&#x27;s still a lot of places using jsonld format for metadata and cataloging information. You can google cooking recipes and get ratings, cook time; search for movies and see how high rated the movie is and who made it with a synopsis of the plot, all of these are product metadata powered by rdfs or jsonld metadata, a relic of the semantic web. It would be incorrect to say semantic web is dead. Any AI that can effectively use wikidata as a fact table would be jeopardy grade. There&#x27;s still new tools coming out like RDFox that apply first order logic at multicore speed across huge datasets for reasoning. There is work being done to make it horizontally scalable. I think people will just go on an endless loop of getting the same pain points and creating new tools using the trending tech of the day, but even in this day and age, sometimes something like prolog or picat is what you need.

I am still a fan of Googles OpenRefine tool. It&#x27;s reconciliation feature that helps disambiguate Named Entities etc based on wikidata is really powerful - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;OpenRefine&#x2F;OpenRefine&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Reconciliation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;OpenRefine&#x2F;OpenRefine&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Reconciliation</a><p>You can hook in your own reconciliation end point which we do at work to expand internal knowledge graphs.

I had a lot of interest in the semantic web when I first started learning about it.<p>However, the efforts I&#x27;ve seen seem to be missing some critical factors for longer-term success. I think we&#x27;ve got a lot of work to do with regards to knowledge representation in general.<p>One of the big things for me is that the context for any fact is critical for it to be true or not.<p>You can have a fact like &quot;Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple&quot;, represented in a graph like you would expect. However, that is only true <i>today</i>. Ten years ago it was Steve Jobs. Without explicit context encoded in the information graph, this web of data isn&#x27;t as useful as it could be.<p>Context is important for reasoning in all kinds of situations. &quot;What if Steve Ballmer was CEO of Apple?&quot;, is a hypothetical context, where it may be useful to do reasoning about. The context of &quot;Who is the most distinguished captain of the Enterprise?&quot; could be about the real world US Navy, or a fictional Star Trek universe (of which there are multiple).

Shoutouts to the 11 other people on HN still working with rdf and similar in 2020.

At an old job, I knew some very idealistic folks who kept pushing semantic web business. &quot;Let&#x27;s do that everywhere!&quot; As an exercise, I would have them open a browser, visit various sites, and then look at the source. &quot;Go on, check to see if it validates,&quot; I would say with an anticipatory grin. Whether hand-crafted HTML or generated by any number of frameworks, many sites can barely manage to close their tags, asking for semantic references is a &quot;just won&#x27;t happen in practice&quot; thing.<p>I have also seen a great deal of consultant money, programmer time, sys-admin sweat, and the like focused on these toweringly-designed, completely-unused triple stores, layer upon layer of hot technologies (ever-moving, construction on the tower never ceased) fused together to create a resource-intense monstrosity that, at the end of the day, barely got used. But hey, let&#x27;s look at that jazz semantic web example one more time.<p>The most painful part is that I understand the urge to build a gleaming repository for information, where the cool URIs never change; SPARQLing pinnacles, ready to broadcast the Library of Alexandria, glimmer; and the serene manifold of abstract information lies RESTful ... but I have come to understand that the web of today is an endlessly bulldozed mudscape where Someone Very Important has to have <i>that</i> URL top-level <i>yesterday</i> (never mind that they will forget about it tomorrow), of shoddy materials and wildly varying workmanship, and where nobody is listening to your eager endpoints because the commercials are just too loud. I too once labored for information architecture, to have the correct thing in the obvious place, with accurate links and current knowledge, to provide visitors with the knowledge they desired ... but PR preempted all of it to push yet more nice photographs in yet another place: the Web as a technology for distributing images that would once live on glossy pamphlets.<p>The vision is lovely, but we who have always lived in the castle have walked alone.

These a fair criticisms of the semantic web. One thing the author misses (does not touch on at all) is domain specific RDF resources for biology, medicine, etc.<p>schema.org and WikiData are great resources and for large companies, using these as a foundation for their own internal Knowledge Graphs can make sense. This expense is (maybe?) too large for small and medium size companies, they would not get enough benefit for the cost.<p>I worked with Google’s Knowledge Graph as a contractor, and I am still a believer in the technology but I also respect other people’s well founded scepticism.

With the recent widespread interest in Category theory I still think it&#x27;s a damn shame that RDF wasn&#x27;t designed to treat relationships as stand-alone entities. Perhaps property graphs work better in that regard, although it&#x27;s a bit weird how properties aren&#x27;t themselves relationships, but perhaps that&#x27;s a necessary concession to keep things efficient.

I have some low-level hate for the Semantic Web. I run a small personal blog that I maintain using a relatively simple static site generator that I created that turns markdown files into clean(ish) html.<p>A couple of months ago I got interested in adding semantic information to my posts so I modified the generator to add some of the common semantic tags. It was an annoying job, since the semantic information pollutes the structure of the html.<p>Can anyone tell me what the semantic web does for me as a small-time publisher? Is it for search engines? Does it really matter that a book review (for instance, I have a few) is tagged properly?

I wouldn&#x27;t call semweb dead; it just has found its niche(s) and is even stabilizing and gaining in those areas. I actually landed a gig for graph DBs, SPARQL, etc. in lab informatics for bio&#x2F;chem. Earlier this year I attended a keynote held by Wikimedia Deutschland&#x27;s Franziska Heine pushing for large publicly available RDF data sets, etc.

I&#x27;m really interested in semantic authoring (not really structuring data with semantics--but marking semantics within running text), though I guess I&#x27;m disinterested in the semantic web.<p>I agree with a lot of the problems noted in other posts, and would add two other problems from the authoring side:<p>1. Identifying and employing sound semantics requires a level of thought and clarity that I don&#x27;t think most people are habituated to working at. It raises the bar somewhat on who can be contributing (either they have to understand and take care with the semantics, or you need a separate person to handle them?)<p>2. I may be missing some good tools, but I haven&#x27;t been able to find a good low-friction semantic authoring experience. Even if you are mentally prepared to write with explicit semantics, it still adds a lot of friction to the writing process (or requires subsequent semantic-edit passes).

modern NLP makes the semantic web completely obsolete. if anything, you need less markup because it&#x27;s confusing and more often than not, just wrong.

I really want to like semantic web technologies, but every time I try to get into them I&#x27;m stymied: * A zillion standards that all reference each other * Two zillion incomplete and incompatible implementations of those specifications * No sense of direction within it all (what&#x27;s the easy path?) * Multiple rebrandings of the same ideas (Semantic Web, Linked Data, Solid...)

When writing data structures that are not for describing or defining services I still can&#x27;t help but think in triples. I also can&#x27;t help but think of each data facet as though it were something described with meta-data would provide sufficient context that it would make sense if it were read out loud to a stranger.

Or responsive web design techniques apparently.