#### [[Opinion about why semantic web failed]] --- This is an interesting perspective from a user/reader on Hacker News about the markup problems being high effort and computationally intractable with semantic web. ""- I was a big believer in the semantic web for years, but there is a load of things wrong with it from conceptual problems to practical ones. - For starters the Semantic Web requires an enormous amount of labor to make things work at all. You need humans marking up stuff, often with no advantage other than the "greater good". In fact you do see semantic content where it makes sense today. Look at any successful websites header and you'll see a pretty large variety of semantic content, things that Google and social media platforms use the make the page more discoverable. - This problem is compounded by the fact that ML and NLP solved many of the practical problems that the semantic web was supposed to. Google basically works like a vast question answering system. If you want to find pictures of "frogs with hats on" you don't need semantic metadata. - A much larger problem is that the real vision of the semantic web wreaked of the classic "solution in search of a problem". The magic of semantic web wasn't the metadata; RDF was just the beginning. - RDF is literally a more verbose implementation of Prolog's predicates. The real goal was to build reasoning engines on top of RDF, essentially a prolog like reasoner that could answer queries. A big warning sign for me was that the majority of people doing "Semantic Web" work at the time didn't even know of the basics of how existing knowledge based representation and reasoning systems, like prolog, worked. They were inventing a Semantic future without any sense that this problem has been worked on in another form for decades. - OWL, which was the standard to be used for the reasoning part of the semantic web was __computationally intractable__ in it's highest level description of the reasoning process. If you start with a computationally intractable abstraction as your formal specification, they you are starting very far from praxis. - For this reason it was hard to really __do__ anything with the semantic web. Virtually nobody built weekend "semantic web demos" because there wasn't really anything you could do with it that you couldn't do easier with a simple database and some basic business logic... or just write in Prolog. - A few companies did use semantic, RDF databases but you quickly realize these offered no value over just building a traditional relational database, and today we have real graph data bases in abundance so any advantage you would get form processing boatloads of XML as a graph can be replicated without the markup overhead. And that's not even considering the work in graph representation coming out of deep learning. - Semantic web didn't work because it was half-pipe dream, and not even a very interesting one at that." --- Tags: Reference: Ycombinator Related: [[Laws of form automated semantic reasoner]]