I don’t use Semantic Web technologies anymore, though they still influence me (opens in new tab)

> I can hardly remember all of the RDF/RSS/Atom stuff from way …

You're mixing in some stuff, that aren't really Semantic Web related.

RSS vs. Atom was less about the Semantic Web than an squibble between different XML formats, one very loosely specified, the other more ... well-formed. The Semantic Web did had a small foot in the RSS wars - the very first RSS (RSS 0.9 from Netscape) was RDF based and for a short time RSS 1.0 wanted to rebuild RSS on an RDF basis for the expandability of the Semantic Web, but the later discussion were about the XML variants of RSS and then Atom, wether the spec was adequate, wether it was frozen or how and wether it should be fixed, etc.

The XHTML discussions were less about elements in my recollection but about parsing models. XHTML reformulated HTML als XML which meant an error model with no error correction but failure on the first error. And XHTML 2 tried to evolve structural elements by being not backward compatible but defining a somewhat different new dialect. The backslash against XHTML was against that, a group sponsored by the browser makers then formed which wanted to evolve backwards-compatible and to standardize the parsing of tag soup → HTML5.

(„Semantic elements“ were often a shorthand for „instead of a dumb div use the appropriate HTML element. That was more the quest of the web standards project than the Semantic Web.)

(Slight overlap: How to embed Semantic Web statements has a small relationship with XHTML - RDFa started imho in an XHTML 2 module.)

I somewhat miss that time. All these bloggers with an interest in web standards and how to do them best had their own idealism and the cross blog and W3C discussions were always interesting. Today web standards don't have that publicity and idealism anymore, they seem more like an engineering collaboration of the 2½ big browser makers which get to decide among themselves. Maybe it was always so, but it seemed different at that time.

Yes, there are some wonderful people in there. Andy Seaborne has always impressed me with his thoughtful responses. I won't call out any of the bad apples. Usually a question goes something like, "Uh, I'm new to the semantic web and I'd like to do X" and the response is, "this is how it works, you're a dummy and you need to understand how brilliant the semantic web is and you don't need to be doing what you're asking for" or academics who will complain that they're not getting enough credit for providing their brilliant intellectual scaffolding.

Databases, that are run on a shoe string, aren't stable so we're going to make everything federated with linked fragments? Fine, give it a go but you don't need to go on and on about how databases are inadequate because someone isn't willing to foot the AWS bill so they can host dbpedia for ya.

Lets have a go at JSON-LD. RDF/XML is finally recognized as a mistake. A somewhat reasonable mistake because everyone was XML crazy at the time. So what do we do? The exact same thing except this time it's JSON. But it's even worse. We choose a serialization that is prized for its simplicity and we foist the entire RDF stack onto it? Then they claim that JSON-LD isn't about the semantic web so we're good and Jedi mind trick it with, "This isn't the RDF you're looking for".

Because we aren't done overcomplicating simple things we take aim at CSV with CSVW. Granted CSV has some subtle complexities but it's easy and reasonably compact. So now we're going to add metadata to csv files with rdf and then serialize it into JSON as JSON-LD. Great. How do I find this metadata. Either a well known location or in a link header. Whoops I can't publish metadata and reference your csv file. Lets convert your csv fie to rdf. WTF. my 500Mb csv file just became 1.5B triples and it's taking 8hrs. to load it into my triple store!

Don't get me started on people who call themselves ontologists. They're really zombies but instead of eating brains they eat budgets. They should be dispatched the same way, with a shotgun blast to the face. They generally can't justify their decision even though there is a framework to do that, onto clean. I have yet to meet one who even knew what that was. They just convince management that what they're doing is intellectually unattainable by mere developers although they'd be lost without protege, top braid, or excel and what they produce is generally an incomputable pile of garbage. It's always OWL full. "Class or property? Class or Property? Well is is an "is a" relationship."

I'm done writing so I'll just include a list of the half baked ideas that sound good but are a day late and a dollar short. LDP, R2RML, ShEX, SHACL, DCAT, RDF Data Cube, WebID.....

My wife always says to say something nice so I'm going to say SKOS. SKOS is ok.

I shared the experience described by the grand parent. In particular I remember I had some argument on HN with a few people and the sheer amount of bad faith and technical inaccuracy thrown at me was jaw dropping. At this point I consider SW more a cult than a technology.

On the research side there are two kinds of research papers: the one that proposes an ontology for a domain, and the one that describes the conversion of an existing resource to RDF. I've never seen a paper where SW was used for something new and interesting and that would have been impossible without SW.

That being said, they are also both technical and conceptual pain points that are plaguing RDF. Basically the tech is trying to address too many things: both metadata and data, and every kind of data. "IRIs that can be URLs than can be sometimes dereferenced and sometimes not, but it's better if they are and then it's Linked Data" kind of thing makes it hard to assume (and thus build) anything.

So, RDF have been success in a few domains (biology) but in most case it doesn't offer a real competitive advantage over simpler and more expressive technologies such as graph databases.

PS: @zcw100 if you where to really write a book about semantic web, drop me a line please.

My take on the attitude in academia: Here we describe a set of algorithms that can solve a class of problems that previous algorithms can't. In the 60' someone published a solution to a problem we have improved upon with the novel innovation of called "hyperlinks". The technical, social and economical shortcomings of our solution are invalid because it is decentralised and therefor morally superior to the current offerings, used the world over, of industry practitioners who are only doing it for the money. More funding is needed for further research.

So not an expert in this area, would love if someone corrects me. My understanding is generally FOL is infeasible. Propositional logic even can be computationaly difficult [1]. My understanding is that most of the semantic web stuff is done using a description logic of some flavor. These will be named based on the properties of the logic. The important thing is that they are generally decidable, and you can use something like MALET or some other solver to infer things from your database or ontology.(You give up some expressivity for decidability) Not sure how much stuff is going on with that these days. Played with a petrology ontology in protegé some back in college, but haven't followed the space. I remember OWL being important, but can't remember why at the moment.

[1] For example if you try to figure out if a formula is satisfiable. You can for sure do this using truth tables. The catch is that you're looking at 2^n complexity where n is the number of propositions in your formula.

The OP mentions property graphs as a way around this problem. They can be seen as natural extensions of "RDF quads" which in turn are based on common RDF triples (Subject / Property / Object)

“better” is too strong: in many cases, structured data is not a problem (and if it is, people will scrape it anyway), but there's simply no business case for spending time on it. Most of the semweb stack had a horrible developer experience — bad documentation, tools, validators, etc. — and rarely had tangible benefit from spending time slogging through it.

The semantic data which has actually been implemented on a wide scale happened because someone could go to their boss and say “Spending time on x will mean better Google ranking” or “Facebook will use their new sharing display for our pages”, and it was orders of magnitude simpler to implement so the time and risk were far more palatable.

Well, whether it's better depends on local incentives. But it's true that in many cases these push against making machine-readable data available, thus "semantic" tech becomes mostly irrelevant. Similarly, Linked Data has been most successful as Linked Open Data, where these incentives are explicitly aligned.

Indeed. Why would you expose all of your data to your competitors like Google, so they can commoditize you? (Incidentally, note that the big tech companies like the search engines are some of the major proponents of microformats, like for restaurants or local businesses... As always, 'commoditize your complement': https://www.gwern.net/Complement )

That’s a proximal cause. The root cause is that the Internet is not free, despite appearances. If hosting and bandwidth were free, we wouldn’t need businesses to do what we want. Wikipedia wouldn’t need donations. Everything would be great.

Just want to pile on more kudos. Nicely written.

I think this is one of the big issues. The semantic information does make it easier for end users to find what they're looking for, but it also made denial of traffic possible.

In a lot of cases, the information was there to get eyeballs--so this is undesirable.

I guess if you don't really care about the eyeballs it can be "useful" for the big fish to pay most of the cost of serving the fraction of your server response that the end user was looking for...

That seems like it would be abused to the point of the semantic information being completely useless.

I think you might be confusing semantic HTML with the semantic web. (Which is understandable given the mention of semantic tags.)

Using semantic HTML means using <article> rather than yet another <div>. What GP is referring to, however, is adding extra information to your HTML detailing what kind of data is in your tags, e.g.:

    <p vocab="http://schema.org/" typeof="Person">
      <span property="name">Christopher Froome</span> was sponsored by
      <span property="sponsor" typeof="http://schema.org/Organization">
        <a property="url" href="http://www.skysports.com/">Sky</a></span> in the Tour de France.
    </p>

Here, the vocab, typeof and property attributes are used to add semantic information to the HTML. It might also give you an idea of why one might consider that a chore, especially if it doesn't appear to provide any benefit, like making your site accessible to users of screen readers.

Yeah, but i think there is a difference between standardized markup data formats describing e.g. proteins, and generic text with annotations. The latter are redundant

Yeah, in that sense Solid is a subset of Linked Data: linking personal data.