[mtrn]

> Maybe I am just naive, but this all seems terrible.

I do have most respect for TBH and I would consider everything he thinks and writes about, but this does not sound too good to me either.

The idea of linked data and semantic web has been around for almost two decades now and I have yet to see an application, technique or site that amazes me. On the contrary, most of the things in this space I have seen are bloated, unusable or simply unnecessary - whereas every paper sounds like revolution is around the corner. In that combination, it is the worst of both worlds: academic output, that claims practicality and fails to deliver.

Peter Norvig put it best, when he said: "The semantic web is the future of the web and always will be."

A recent discussion touches upon a few problems: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18023408.

[jacobsimon]

Maybe I'm missing something, but what does this have to do with the semantic web and why is everyone discussing that? Solid appears to be a decentralized identity platform.

[msbarnett]

The proposal here seems to be that data, as Linked Data (as RDF, specifically) be exposed directly to the web, manipulated by rich front ends written in JS using an RDF parser. The marketing speak is so thick that it’s impossible to discern much of the technical detail, but presumably the server side is an LDP server backed by something (triplestore?).

RDF, LDPs, and Linked Data in general are all child projects of the Semantic Web movement, and nigh-on inseparable from it in practice. The venn diagram of their user communities is one circle.

[reaperducer]

Maybe this disagreement about what Solid is demonstrates the GP's point that the intro site is a piece of PR puff so that nobody knows what it's supposed to do.

[mindcrime]

Peter Norvig put it best, when he said: "The semantic web is the future of the web and always will be."

Norvig is a smart guy, and maybe he meant something different by that quote than the obvious reading, but at first blush that sounds silly. If he's saying "The semantic web "always will be" the future because it will never happen, then he's objectively wrong. The semantic web is here and has been for a long time.

The key thing to remember though, is that the semantic web is about machine readable data... semantic web technologies are not, by and large, something end users interact with, or even need to know about, themselves. They empower things for developers, but are mostly invisible to the average user.

Google, Yahoo and other major search engines have been extracting semantic data - in the form of RDFa, Microformats, etc., - and using that data for at least 10 years now.

OTOH, if Norvig mean that it will always be the future because it's always evolving, adapting, and growing, then, well, yeah... of course. And that's exactly where we are. Semantic Web tech just keeps getting better and more useful.

[smacktoward]

> The idea of linked data and semantic web has been around for almost two decades now and I have yet to see an application, technique or site that amazes me.

Ted Nelson invented the idea of hypertext in the early '60s. It wasn't until the creation of HyperCard in 1987 and the WWW in 1990 that there were practical applications of hypertext that you could put your hands on and use.

Ideas can take a long time to mature.

[adventured]

The failure of the semantic Web is that it's repetitively being built by and for technologists rather than to meet a real need of real end users. It's technologists in a vacuum building approaches that don't actually solve problems that millions of people have. So long as they keep doing that, it will perpetually fail.

Freebase as a prominent example, was pointless for an average person. There was no reason for it to exist in regards to doing something for millions of people.

Wikipedia, Quora, Stack Exchange, etc. are what people want to consume. Until the semantic Web leads to a dramatic improvement on those types of end user products, it's not going to matter.

[lucas_membrane]

> The failure of the semantic Web is that it's repetitively being built by and for technologists

The failures of the semantic Web are pretty much the same as the failures of the Web of evil, i.e. the internet: 1. You cannot make people tell the truth. 2. You cannot always determine when someone is not telling the truth. 3. You cannot always make people do things the right way. 4. You cannot always determine when someone is not doing things the right way.

So, you are correct. The true creed of each hard-core technologist is: "Everything would work great if only everyone always did everything my way."

[mindcrime]

The failure of the semantic Web is that it's repetitively being built by and for technologists rather than to meet a real need of real end users.

The Semantic Web hasn't "failed" and it's not something that end users need to see, know about, or care about directly. It's those technologists that use Semantic Web tech and data to build applications for the end users.

Freebase as a prominent example, was pointless for an average person.

Likewise Github is pointless to an average person. Because the average person isn't who it's meant for.