Re: Test of Independent Invention: RDF

On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 3:53 AM, Melvin Carvalho
<melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 29 April 2015 at 03:11, Harry Halpin <hhalpin@ibiblio.org> wrote:
>>
>> Not convinced. From my conversations with engineers there like Mischa
>> Tuffield, I believe the answer is "yes" it could have been done
>> without the Semantic Web and *the part of the company Experian
>> bought*, i.e. the honeypot for identity fraud,  the main part of the
>> business was done out without RDF. Thus, Experian is not maintaining
>> the RDF infrastructure (at least 4store).
>>
>> So, I still haven't seen RDF used in any start-ups that have succeeded
>> yet. I suspect there is probably some ones that *will* succeed in the
>> healthcare space. However, in general there are major flaws in the
>> entire Semantic Web concept ("follow your nose" URIs lead to
>> accidental denial of service attacks, basic CS tells us graphs will
>> always be slower than hash tables, etc.) that will likely prevent it
>> from ever occupying the place XML or JSON has IMHO. That being said,
>> it will likely to continue to be useful in niche markets involving
>> data merger with dynamic schemas
>
>
> Couldnt every statement you made above about the web of data, be applied to
> the web of documents, and be contrary to experience?

Melvin - which is why Google exists. The reason why Semantic Web stuff
doesn't scale in most real-world apps would be that you would
basically need a Google-style infrastructure. Yet search over Linked
Data seems to have stopped working (Sindice) and I haven't heard of
real-world caching. But for a non-SemWeb example of "follow-your-nose"
failing hard, when W3C made XML processors think the XML DTD had to be
retrieved from w3.org, the server basically couldn't handle this
well-meaning DOS attack :) However, I do think the DOS attack
problem/caching/searching are very solvable.

Another  reason why Semantic Web stuff doesn't actually scale is basic
computer science and so isn't likely solvable -  and the reason we are
seeing JSON take off (rather than RDF) as the lingua franca of the
Web: array-values pairs map well to hash tables and what programming
languages actually do. I would be shocked if graph DBs (see travelling
salesman problem) ever got nearly as fast as hash tables (O(1) vs NP
complete), so thus in general I think as a core technology the main
problem with moving to RDF is a huge performance loss.

Also, it would be useful if Semantic Web people really thought through
decentralization. URIs are not decentralized, they are rented from
ICANN, which runs a number of quite centralized name-servers. Yes,
once you buy one you can mint infinite URIs, but that's pretty far
from decentralized - and TimBL has said as much: "We could
decentralize everything but this"

That being said, I agree with Juan - in specialized cases involving
data merger and a natural graph structure, Linked Data makes tons of
sense. I think the domain of health care is likely to work out in real
companies, and likely social network analysis for the
military-industrial-surveillance complex. Can't think of too many
other domains where it makes tons of sense off the top of my head, but
would be happy to hear more and hope to see many SemWeb related
start-ups make the next million bucks.


   cheers,
      harry
>
>>
>>
>> And as a source of academic papers :)
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 8:58 PM, Bob DuCharme <bob@snee.com> wrote:
>> > I never said that they were purchased "due to RDF." Sampo asked about "a
>> > company or consortium out there which has made 1-10 million bucks
>> > applying
>> > technology, which couldn't have been without the Semantic Web." Garlik
>> > applied this technology and made a million bucks, so they were an
>> > obvious
>> > answer to Sampo's question.
>> >
>> > Could they have done it without RDF technology? See what their CTO Steve
>> > Harris said at
>> >
>> > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9159168/triple-stores-vs-relational-databases.
>> >
>> > Bob
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > On 4/28/2015 5:51 PM, Harry Halpin wrote:
>> >
>> > On Apr 28, 2015 9:59 AM, "Bob DuCharme" <bob@snee.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> On 4/27/2015 5:08 PM, Sampo Syreeni wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>> All of this Semantic Web stuff has existed for a while now. One would
>> >>> expect that there is a company or consortium out there which has made
>> >>> 1-10
>> >>> million bucks applying technology, which couldn't have been without
>> >>> the
>> >>> Semantic Web.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> If you're looking for a dramatic success story in which one company is
>> >> 100% about semantic web technology and then makes a million dollars,
>> >> here's
>> >> one: http://www.dataversity.net/experian-acquires-garlik-ltd/
>> >>
>> >
>> > Bob, they were not purchased due to RDF. Their triplestore and use of
>> > RDF
>> > was at best support for their main project  They were purchased because
>> > they
>> > would use honeypots to identify identity fraud. It's possible they used
>> > RDF
>> > to help combat identity fraud, but they were not purchased because of
>> > RDF.
>> > That's like saying a social networking company was purchased because
>> > they
>> > were using this thing called a SQL database :)
>> >
>> > That being said, there's more investment in RDF than there used to be.
>> > Has
>> > the technology hit a home-run like XML and taken over the industry?
>> >
>> > The honest answer is "no, not yet." And XML is rapidly being eroded by
>> > JSON
>> > and Javascript. Who knows what will be next?
>> >
>> >    cheers,
>> >          harry
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >> Companies such as TopQuadrant, Franz, and Cambridge Semantics are doing
>> >> just fine, and more importantly, their customers are doing quite well
>> >> using
>> >> this technology. I think the more interesting thing to look at is the
>> >> number
>> >> of well-known companies that while not devoting themselves 100% to this
>> >> technology, are still getting more and more work done with it:
>> >> http://www.snee.com/bobdc.blog/2014/05/experience-in-sparql-a-plus.html
>> >>
>> >> It's been interesting to see different divisions of Bloomberg joining
>> >> these ranks lately.
>> >>
>> >> Bob DuCharme
>> >> @bobdc
>> >> snee.com/bobdc.blog
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >
>>
>

Received on Sunday, 3 May 2015 02:38:29 UTC