Re: Keeping the Faith

On 30 April 2017 at 12:24, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> wrote:

>
>
> On 29 April 2017 at 00:11, Brent Shambaugh <brent.shambaugh@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > General Question:
> >
> > How do you keep the faith or vision with respect to semantic web and
> > linked data? I'm also in an area where there is not a lot of venture
> > capital (well some) nor (many) people having a lot of understanding of
> > the area. At least it does not score you a talk. Is the field of
> > dreams mentality of "if you build it, he will come"?
>
> First and foremost, this effort is not a religion. People do seem to care
> about it, and the larger notion of a healthy standards-based,
> vendor-neutral etc World Wide Web, with the passion that others do reserve
> for religious matters. This may or may not be a bug! That passion can drive
> creativity and collaboration but it can also foster stubbornness and tribal
> thinking.
>

Great post, danbri (as usual).  So much covered, I'd like to just field one
point, which I think is on topic regarding the original post.

Two subjects which are close to my heart, and that I have studied in quite
detail over the past years are comparative religion and the (semantic)
web.  So this is particularly interesting to me.  Especially as I spent
about 10 years being a semantic web skeptic, then became a "believer".  At
some point I must have "seen the light".  Note: I put the word "semantic"
in brackets in line with Dan C's classic comment, "The important word in
Semantic Web is Web".  The semantic web (small s small w) is just the
machine readable layer of the web, both aspects coexist together.

Back to your comment, another word for the term you use "passion", might be
"enthusiasm".  It's a little known fact that the word "enthusiasm" means,
"inspired by God".  Are people enthused by the (semantic) web.  But you
need a bit more than that to have a religion.  I'm guided by the great
comparative mythologist Joseph Cambpell, here, who studied all the world's
religions and dissected what was in common.  It breaks down like this.

You dont necessarily need a God for a religion, but you do need a powerful
entity, that directs energy, in certain ways.  You could say the web does
this.  The means of directing energy are through symbols and rituals.  I
could be stretching here but is an http request / response one such
example, is a web search, is a social status update -- quite possibly yes.
You need a sense of mystery, something bigger than all of us (the web is
that) and you need an art form that will explain the world we live in to us
(the web does that), you also need an art form that will guide you through
the various stages of life (the web does that), and finally you need a
system of rules by which to live a live (I am unsure if the web does that,
or maybe it does so subtly and it's hard to notice), and maybe this last
part is work in progress.  And finally you need it to be popular.

So if the web is not a religion, it's quite close, it certainly ticks a lot
of boxes, in a quite unique way.

It may help to explain the mindset of a skeptic.  The things the semantic
web community worry about, are not the things the skeptic worries about.
The skeptic worries about: is this worth learning?  Is this useful?  Is
this going to be a good time investment?  What does this thing do?  And
importantly, is it easy to get started?

That last part is critical, and I think is where there is quite a high bar
for new people.  I once saw an online poll 10+ years ago, asking what will
be the 'next big technology'.  The Semantic Web was there and I smile to
myself in typical skeptic fashion, 'oh not that again' -- 'is that still
going' -- 'wont it just die'.  But actually skeptics might say those things
but they dont believe them.  And I actually voted for SW in that poll, in
my head was the thought: 'its way too complex, but once they work that bit
out, everyone knows this will be huge'.  When / if the sem web takes off,
no one will be surprised, they will only say, 'well, that took a long time!'

At some point I decided to make the dive and learn what this thing was
about.  To my surprise and pleasure it was much easier than I thought.  I
think when Kingsley explained it's just an Entity attribute value (EAV)
model I realized how ridiculously easy it was.  That's when I became a
believer.  And I have never looked back.

Perhaps my only frustration with SW is that there is so much amazing
technology there, but it is barely used, and barely explained to people.  I
love the experiments danbri used to do, but he's just one of a handful of
people that would hack on the sem web, for fun.  This made the whole thing
more fun.  Its inspiring to see things working.  But I think now we are
starting to see a few more create things, and it's fascinating to watch
evolve.  I heard the analogy of the bobsled, at the beginning you have to
push it, then at some point you jump in, and it starts to push you!  I
think we are almost at that point, just need 1-2 more people to give the
final push (famous last words!) :)

One big thing missing was social, but with the creation of technologies
like Solid, I think we are at the point were we can start to be inspired
again by what this technology can do.  I am now a "believer" in the
semantic web.  I was marveling only yesterday just how useful this
technology is.  And I hope to encourage others to benefit from the amazing
world this technology can open up!


>
> W3C's RDF work embodies a lot of good ideas, and has proved useful, but it
> is just one tool in the toolkit. When we were working on the RDF specs
> nearly 20 years ago, it felt sometimes like they were positioned in a
> "david vs goliath" struggle with the XML family of technologies. There were
> competing visions for what data on the Web might amount to. In later years
> RDF-based approaches get contrasted with JSON or SQL/CSV or whatever, but
> the debate often takes roughly the same form. Do we treat data as a graph
> representation of factual claims, or do we focus on the concrete form that
> such claims might take - as an HTML or XML DOM or a JSON tree or a simple
> flat table? And the answer is generally the same --- that there is value in
> both perspectives. When we neglect the concrete notation / file format
> details, the usability of the concrete formats suffers (c.f. RDF/XML); when
> we neglect the abstract commonalities, information becomes needlessly
> fragmented across different representations and publication systems.
>
> This community has always tended a little towards blaming two things for
> the (real or perceived) failure of its ideas to burst triumphantly into the
> technology mainstream. We have blamed poor syntaxes, leading to a range of
> specs and experiments endlessly pursuing a more usable notation --- from
> RDF/XML through RDFa (and its hybrid cousin, Microdata), JSON-LD, Turtle,
> N-Triples, as well as mapping-based systems like GRDDL and CSVW. And we
> have also blamed failures in understanding. There is a persistent tone
> around here that eventually the wider world will "get it" and see the
> point, value, importance etc of the approach to data embodied in RDF,
> Semantic Web and Linked Data. I think there is some truth to the claim that
> RDF was the right idea at the wrong time, and that the success of graph
> databases shows that there is a more mainstream technology audience waiting
> for it. But there is also some self-deception here, and failure to face up
> to a fairly boring truth. Dealing with RDF data is difficult, annoying,
> frustrating and suchlike. Not because of any intrinsic failing in the W3C
> specs, tools or practices, but because dealing with highly hetrogenous,
> lumpy, quirky dataset with all kind of bits missing, and all kinds of
> unanticipated extensions or novel patterns arbitrarily appearing in it, is
> just a really hard problem space to be working in. There is something of a
> tragedy of the commons pattern here. Any individual project can generally
> get by without needing RDF, and may make progress faster focussing on their
> exact data format needs using any of XML, JSON, CSV or whatever. But when
> we stand back and look at the wider Web, this creates a very fragmented
> landscape. This kind of thinking motivated W3C's GRDDL work (using XSLT to
> map XML files into RDF, e.g. see http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/
> 08/09/rdfdb/ https://www.w3.org/2000/08/w3c-synd/ etc.
>
> Some years ago, Murray Maloney (of SGML and XML fame) popped into W3C
> Semantic Web Interest Group meeting we held as part of the TPAC conference.
> I forget his exact words but afterwards he made the point that it reminded
> him of the (in Brent's terms) faith and vision that people in the SGML/XML
> community also had, and that it might be that we were attaching those
> things overly specifically to some particular technology. He was right.
> Round about that time, Linked Data took off as a variation of the Semantic
> Web idea, but with more of an emphasis on open data in the public Web, and
> less emphasis on fancy rule systems. Two healthy consequences of that for
> RDF was that it re-affirmed the link to the broader Web standards community
> --- by focussing on putting data in that actual Web and using related
> standards like HTTP well --- and also it tapped into the underlying
> motivations Murray had noted. We had perhaps mis-identified our common
> interest as being RDF, but for many of us it was more about data sharing /
> knowledge sharing / large scale collaborative infrastructure, and RDF was
> just a means to an end. RDF is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
>
> If you look at the history there are also plenty of things to feel good
> about. When the Web was young, RDF was always talked about in terms of its
> rivalry with XML. But then if you look at the actual people involved over
> the years, those individuals (I won't namecheck everyone) have had careers
> that touch into XML, RDF, open data, JSON, CSV, whatever tool gets the job
> done. The rivalries and "XYZ is the ABC killer" framing, aren't the story
> of how these technologies inter-relate in practice.
>
> The RDF community has the endearing tendency to over-criticise itself for
> not single-handedly saving the planet from its perceived data-sharing
> failings. I think we should instead just take a bow and acknowledge that
> we've done good here. We built some useful tools and technologies that are
> finding a niche, and we've progressed the state of the art around
> annoyingly heterogeneous data handling. Is it the last word in anything,
> absolutely not. Is RDF (or Perl or XML or ...) "dead", ... absolutely not.
> Are factual triples the answer to 'fake news'? Not quite. Could our Web
> technologies be improved, the representations made simultaneously more
> usable, expressive and useful --- probably/maybe/dunno. People worry too
> much. These are good tools in a growing Web standards toolkit and it is
> worth continuing to work on them, but also worth reminding ourselves that
> this isn't in opposition to the wider technology landscape. It is nothing
> but healthy for "RDF people" to take a break from thinking just about these
> technologies and to spend some time in related work, e.g. Javascript, Web
> components, machine learning, security ... rather than slipping into
> thinking about our efforts here as a kind of religious struggle against the
> unbelievers...
>
> Thinking of particular practical areas I'd suggest as worth putting time
> into: ShACL and Shex for RDF validation may turn out to be very important.
> Also for my part, I have worked mostly on Schema.org
> <https://research.googleblog.com/2015/12/four-years-of-schemaorg-recent-progress.html>
> these last years. It is very widely used across the entire Web, and is
> broadly in the "RDF family", but currently tends to be published and
> consumed on a page-by-page basis rather than site-by-site. I suspect the
> latter is where we'll see more scope for integration with the tools and
> techniques of this community (SPARQL etc) and hope to put some time into
> that in the coming months.
>
> verbosely,
>
> Dan
>
> (somwhat absentee SemWeb Interest Group chair)
>