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__afk__'s comments

__afk__ | 3 years ago | on: What Every Competent Graph DBMS Should Do

Great read, thank you. Also nice that you brought in RDF databases to help expand and refine the problem space. When I come across a graph database topic here at HN and it leads with an LPG approach, 99% of the time, there is hardly a mention of RDF. That leaves everyone a little worse off.

__afk__ | 3 years ago | on: A Brief Defense of XML

There are more ways to type (at schema and inline) and more types (see the common XSD types) available OOB in XML than JSON could ever have. Then we can introduce custom types. JSON looks rather impoverished in comparison.

__afk__ | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: I realise data science is not for me and feel depressed

Take up a specialty that sits somewhere between SW and Data Science? I'm a freelancer specializing in knowledge graphs and see a world of promise in this area. It's still a very young area but promising. Get deep on some graph databases, learn the ropes with W3C semantic web, and start looking for companies that have ongoing graph/semantics projects. All the big tech companies have significant investments in this area, Pharma and science are not far behind, enterprise will bring be joining in soon as they realize their data landscapes are hopeless. And of course, finish your degree.

__afk__ | 4 years ago | on: An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology

I understand that. I recommend listening to the podcast if you want to understand the issue in more detail. It's a heavy subject but people here generally want to see both sides of an issue, and I am pretty confident that most people have not really taken in the untold damage this brings to the abuse victims and their families as they are continuously notified about past images of their abuse being found and circulated. Which is how this actually works.

I would be worried about a model predicting child sexual abuse content from unknown images but I am not in the least concerned with one that fingerprints known images.

__afk__ | 4 years ago | on: An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology

I applaud Apple for this. It reaffirms the reasons why it's one of the few companies I feel strongly about. If you can't understand the logic of a decision like this, maybe you don't realize the mountain of suffering that is caused from people trading this material. I recommend listening to Sam Harris's podcast with Gabriel Dance (#213 - THE WORST EPIDEMIC) to get a better picture of the problem.

The main beef people seem to have here is the slippery slope argument. Binary choices are nice, I agree - but almost always they obscure a complex surface that deserves nuance.

__afk__ | 6 years ago | on: Rules for Data Modeling with DynamoDB

Self-describing?

Maybe to someone who could make sense of the DDL and read the language the label col names are written in. And understand all the implicit units, rules around nulls/empties, and presence of magic strings (SSN, SKU) and special numbers (-1) and on and on. For that you need something like RDF and a proper data model.

__afk__ | 6 years ago | on: Knowledge Graphs

Graph databases can hold totally bespoke data that makes sense only to the consuming application or they can hold data that has been factored and connected to outside terminologies and external datasets. One holds data, one holds knowledge.

__afk__ | 6 years ago | on: Schema.org v6.0

The amazing part of about json-ld is you can make up your own terms when you have missing terminology! And, if you care enough, you can push for them in Schema.org and get them introduced.

__afk__ | 6 years ago | on: Ontology for the life sciences: genes, proteins, diseases, all expressed in OWL

As a semantic architect, this is not my experience. In fact, I see very few large graphs in the wild. The problem is, unsurprisingly, that describing data is difficult. Relating your own conceptualization of a domain to anothers is frustrating and time consuming. It will always be easier to create a bespoke model. So, people just don't do it. As for OBO, there are many interesting comments here. The OBO ontologies all utilize BFO as an upper-level and in this regard they are united. But otherwise, their quality and utility varies tremendously. I still believe in this work and hope that one day everyone will think about their data as being longer-lived and more important than the software that generated it.

__afk__ | 6 years ago | on: Microsoft Academic Knowledge Graph

Lovely to finally see Microsoft adopting RDF and taking on projects like this. There is hope yet for those of us who believe in the promise of semantic data.
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