Three reasons why the Semantic Web has failed

19 pointsby rhythmvsover 11 years ago

11 comments

MrZongle2over 11 years ago

Warning: snark ahead."The result is an inherently boring web of data. Google’s Knowledge Graph promotional video is a great example of how boring this web can be. “Let’s say you’re searching for Renaissance Painters”…. Really? Who searches for that?"Somebody with a brain that is used for more than gross muscle control over a TV remote?" I really don’t care what Leonardo DaVinci’s height was or which Nobel prize winners were born before 1945. I care about how other people feel about last night’s Breaking Bad series finale. How did they find the ending? What other series or movies might I enjoy based on those experiences?"This made me throw up in my mouth a little.I can understand that the author wants results to be more applicable to the everyday life of the searcher, but I don't see his vision of a Semantic Web any more useful than the current one.Finding out what other like-minded people think about my favorite TV show improves the Web, and thus my life? Really?I'm all for more accurate classification of online data. What I don't want is "boring" (in the author's words) data being pushed aside in favor of what somebody thinks is "interesting".We've already got companies doing that, in the form of "targeted ads".

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001skyover 11 years ago

We need a web in which information (both questions and answers) finds you based on how your attention, emotions and thinking interconnects with the rest of the world.This article sounds like it was written by an ad.

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bctover 11 years ago

This is one of the worst articles I've read on the subject, and that's a pretty strong statement.> “Let’s say you’re searching for Renaissance Painters”…. Really? Who searches for that?"It's an example that happens to be easy to demonstrate. It's pretty easy to think of other cross-dataset queries that you might be more interested in.

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toggleover 11 years ago

The author is from a company called Bottlenose, which (Wikipedia says) is a "company that analyzes social media and business data to detect trends for brands."So it's pretty clear that he has an angle here.

smackayover 11 years ago

Instead of the semantic web trying to create knowledge from data the author wants to take all that data and create more chatter and noise, oops, I mean buzz.Don't waste your time reading this nonsense.

pencilcheckover 11 years ago

This author has no real deep understanding of current AI research and the what semantic web actually means. Throughout the article, the author not only ignores and reference any authentic websites for defining semantic web, but also trying to make fun of it by unrelated example such as Google's Knowledge Graph.... Comparing semantic web with the Knowledge Graph is like comparing graphs with oranges. Those are completely different beast and for different purposes. This goes to show the understanding of the author and his/her intent. And ironically, everything that the author tried to sell us on are spot on part of semantic web. For example, the Stream data he/she defined is precisely what semantic web is trying to do, is to label and give meaning to a certain data instead of a big chunk of text/binary. The author also mentioned about pushing and pulling, I argue that the way information/data is disseminated has nothing to do with the ontology or the semantics of data.And there you go, such a shallow article with a very aggressive link title bait, just pathetic.

quizoticover 11 years ago

Yeah, the article is crap. But did you take a look at the site: bottlenose.com? It's kinda gorgeous.Having been in the biz (NLP search with sentiment extraction) once, it still comes down to precision and recall, with poor precision being the fastest way to lose sales. I didn't see any indication of bottlenose accuracy. But maybe I was too blinded by the beautiful d3.js.Speed is also an issue. Machine Learning takes setup time and good corpus sets, after which it's pretty fast. Traditional NLP is faster to start but slower and less accurate after. Neither is remotely close to real-time, which makes me wonder what they're really delivering.Also, at least in my experience, I couldn't get product managers/marketers to give a hoot. But ad-agencies ate it up. And boutique survey shops. And sometimes CEOs. And sometimes customer-service organizations that had too much inbound hate mail and had to triage.I think they may be smoking it to think they're going to get inbound traffic. I had to pound doors.

taericover 11 years ago

So, I actually somewhat agree with the idea that many of the search examples ads and such use are ridiculously misguided.Consider, when I'm looking at a blog or an article, it is easy to see other people's reactions if there is a comment box. What is sometimes harder to find is the general context of why a blog/article exists. Did its existence prompt the creation of other blogs and articles? More, is the article still relevant? I think some pushed for this concept with "trackback" and such. But I don't think that really took off. (Maybe I just need to learn to use some tools better.)However, I think I get lost around the notion that things should be pushed to you. I mean, unless you are referring to twitter style "you probably ignore 90% of what is pushed at you."

VladRussian2over 11 years ago

sort of a tragedy of commons. The expenses to be born individually while rewards to be ripped by the society/community. Only incarnation of semantic web profitable individually that has been discovered so far is blossoming SEO.

mindcrimeover 11 years ago

I have to admit, I haven't read TFA, and I'm not sure I want to. The Semantic Web has hardly failed - tons of people use the Semantic Web everyday and just don't know it. The thing is, the SW isn't necessarily meant to be something that the average end user knows about and uses explicitly. It's just about making it easier for machines to understand semantics around data on the web, so those machines can do a better job of helping the humans do whatever it is they are trying to do. So Google could be using the Semantic Web behind the scenes all day long, and the end user would never know it.And yes, Google do use the Semantic Web.[1][3] So does Yahoo.[2][3] Etc.[3]It doesn't matter that some people use RDFa, others use microdata, others use microformats, others use RDF/XML, others use JSON-LD or whatever. That's irrelevant syntactical details. The point is having explicitly defined semantics associated with things.Anyway, the Semantic Web is becoming more and more important with every passing day. As tools[4] for automating the process of extracting rich semantics from unstructured data mature and become better and more widely available, the number of applications for explicit semantics is just going to mushroom.Just to illustrate (and forgive me a bit of what might be seen as self-promotion here) - our Enterprise Social Network product, Quoddy, has Stanbol integration such that we can process all the various bits of "stuff" that flow through the system, do semantic concept extraction, and store those entities and relationships in a triplestore. Our Information Discovery Platform, Neddick, does the same thing as we consume RSS feed data, Tweets, Emails, etc. Now we can do things like show you, for, say, a given status update, the blog posts, emails, tweets, people, documents, etc, that are conceptually related. And while end-user use of "semantic queries" might not seem useful to some people, the bottom line is that this enables searches that you just can't do with "regular" (that is, non-semantic) tech.An example... let's say you do something with musicians. Your ESN status update messages occasionally mention, say, Jon Bon Jovi, Bob Marley, Richard Marx, and Madonna. How would you do a search without SW tech that says "show me all posts that mention musicians"? Not gonna happen. But with the semantic extraction + triplestore, we can make that kind of query trivial.It gets better though... Stanbol comes "out of the box" with the ability to dereference entities that are in DBPedia and other knowledge bases, which is cool enough in it's own right... but you can also easily add local knowledge and your own custom enhancement engines. So now entities that are meaningful only in your local domain (part numbers, SKUs, customer numbers, employee ID numbers, whatever) can be semantically interlinked and queried as part of the overall knowledge graph.Hell, I'd go so far as to say that Apache Stanbol (along with OpenNLP and a few related projects... UIMA, Clerezza, etc.) may just be the most important open source project around right now. And nobody has heard of it. Again, the Semantic Web is largely not something that the average end user needs to know or think about. But they'll benefit from the capabilities that semantic tech brings to the table.<rant-over />[1]: <a href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/99170?hl=en&ref_topic=1088472" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/99170?hl=en&ref...</a>[2]: <a href="http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/searchmonkey-support-rdfa-enabled-7458.html" rel="nofollow">http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/searchmonkey-support-rd...</a>[3]: <a href="http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2011/06/02/microdata-rdfa-google-bing-yahoo-semantic-web/" rel="nofollow">http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2011/06/02/microdata-rdfa-g...</a>[4]: <a href="http://stanbol.apache.org/" rel="nofollow">http://stanbol.apache.org/</a>

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malandrewover 11 years ago

It failed because we chose a 1 to 1 relationship between the window object and the document object. There should instead be a 1 to many relationship.