Re: Developers don't use the Semantic Web because they shouldn't

I think we should stop considering (non-SW) developers as the
end-users of the SW technology. They are not; the real end-users are
domain experts, researchers, data analysts, entrepreneurs etc.

The idea that "everyone can code" and "everyone should learn to code"
because everyone will be writing software in the future is quite
silly, if you consider a long-term perspective.

A few quotes that illustrate this:
“I’m not sure that programming has to exist at all. Or at least
software developers.” - Bret Victor,
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/saving-the-world-from-code/540393/
(can't recommend this article enough)
"In the future apps will be programmed in models not code" - Norm
Judah, https://in.pcmag.com/microsoft/112748/in-the-future-apps-will-be-programmed-in-models-not-code-mic

In other words, programmers as a group is destined to shrink, because
they are constantly replaced by new (more) generic self-service
software platforms, be it https://webflow.com or
https://powerapps.microsoft.com or something similar.
Of course, there will still be a need to develop those platforms
themselves, but that number of developers is pretty small compared to
the total.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be great more people could develop with
RDF. But I think the more interesting and important direction is those
generic platforms, and the technologies that enable them. That is what
I am focusing on at least.

Martynas
atomgraph.com
On Thu, Nov 22, 2018 at 5:20 PM ajs6f <ajs6f@apache.org> wrote:
>
> I've expressed this opinion before in other venues, and it's gone over like a lead balloon, so why not again? :grin:
>
> The "middle third" of developers don't generally use SemWeb technologies for the same reason that the "upper third" and "lower third" don't; they have no reason whatsoever to do so.
>
> SemWeb technologies show their strength when crossing boundaries (between disciplines, between organizations, even between technical stacks or individual data sources). Most developers don't do that for a living. They work within relatively tightly-focussed areas, like building a single app for mobile phones that works off a single API, or a website that caters to one organization's users, or a management system for one business unit. RDF tooling delivers no value to such teams and costs a fortune compared with simpler approaches. Why would they use it? They shouldn't!
>
> On this view, technical changes like bnodes for predicates or better support for list constructs aren't to the purpose. (Whether or not they are good ideas on other grounds is a different question, of course.) But to my eye this view does disclose (at least) two potential avenues towards real change:
>
> • I know of little OLAP work that is currently done with open semantic technologies, although OLAP frequently brings together multiple sources of data and the kinds of queries that people use for that work could benefit enormously from semantic lifting. It seems to me that that could change, if the perception of poor performance and intractable constructions changed. (I'm not making any argument about the _actual_ performance of semantic web tooling, which is of course a complex question that I have rarely heard discussed usefully without specific examples. The perception, however, is pretty clearly pretty awful.) This could mean work to clarify and publicize the real potential for performance, and to improve it.
>
> • I believe that semantic technologies might really benefit so-called "data lake" approaches in which data is quickly ingested and indexed without normalization and then transformations are applied more-or-less dynamically to query or process different sections of data together. Again, the common factor is the need to bring together disparate data sources and the immediate obstacle (or at least, _an_ immediate obstacle) is perceived performance.
>
> To be clear, I'm in no way opposed to technical improvements! (If nothing else, as a committer for Apache Jena, I'm excited to make our own work easier and to make it easier to involve and excite others.) And as someone who (substantially) makes his living applying linked data ideas for cultural heritage and scientific research, I want these ideas to spread widely!
>
> I see some pretty hopeful developments, like technologies that make it easer to use semantic tech in "big data" settings be they open [1] or as a service [2] or the beginnings of work on using the power of statistical methods for semantic lifting [3].
>
> All is all, my claim is that working to get a great bulk of developers using semantic tech may not the right problem to work on. Working to get the much smaller number of developers with really on-point needs using (or able to use) semantic tech  is a better task, and one for which this community is truly fitted.
>
> ---
> Adam Soroka
> Research Computing : Office of the CIO : the Smithsonian Institution
>
> [1] http://sansa-stack.net/
> [2] https://aws.amazon.com/neptune/
> [3] http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/content/machine-learning-internet-things-semantic-enhanced-approach-1

Received on Friday, 23 November 2018 21:19:15 UTC