Re: What Happened to the Semantic Web?

Excellent response, Kingsley!

On 11/11/2015 6:37 PM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
> On 11/11/15 3:49 PM, Ruben Verborgh wrote:
>> Hi Kingsley,
>>
>> Some valid points. Two quick remarks:
>>
>>>> For me, the Semantic Web vision has always been about clients.
>>> I think the "Semantic Web" has always been about "The Web" (clients and
>>> servers) :)
>> Of course—but the emphasis in the community has mostly been on servers,
>> whereas the SemWeb vision started from agents (clients) that would do things (using those servers).
>> Now, the Semantic Web is mostly a server thing, which the Google/CSE example also shows.
>
> Okay, I certainly agree with that observation. Too much emphasis on
> servers and large datasets has starved the crucial need for
> collaboration on the client side.
>
> Areas of starvation include:
>
> 1. Bindings various UI/UX frameworks to data access controls capable of
> handling JSON-LD, Turtle, RDFa etc..
> 2. Constructing sophisticated data access controls that simplify Linked
> Data exploitation by client-centric developers.
>
> Collaboration taking shape on the Javascript front re. rdflib.js,
> rdfstore.js, SoLID, and RWW in general etc.. are great examples of
> movement in the right areas (IMHO).
>
>>
>>>> At the moment, consuming seems only within reach of the big players,
>>>> who have the capacity to do it otherwise anyway.
>>> No, you can craft a CSE yourself right now and triangulate searches
>>> scoped to specific entity types.
>> Do you mean making a CSE through the Google interface?
>
> Google offers CSEs as a kind of service. If you leave said service with
> Google trimmings there's no cost. If you seek to remove Google trimmings
> then they charge a fee. Either way, that's fair enough in my eyes.
>> But then I'm actually querying the Google servers, not the Web…
>
> Google is a major Web hub, via CSEs you can find pathways to other
> places on the Web. What useful about these CSEs is that they return a
> boatload of documents that include RDF based structured data [1].
>
>> Then intelligence is with a centralized system, not between clients and servers.
>
> Google is just one of many hubs from which RDF documents can be
> discovered and access.
>> Not yet the Semantic Web for me.
>
> I the "Semantic" and "Web" components of the meme breakdown as follows,
> in my experience:
>
> 1. Semantic -- structured data endowed with machine- and human-readable
> relationship type semantics.
>
> 2. Web -- hyperlinks functioning dually as mechanism for entity
> denotation and connotation  (i.e., names resolve to RDF Language based
> descriptor documents).
>
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Ruben
>>
>
>

Received on Thursday, 12 November 2015 01:17:14 UTC