Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web? - <AUTHOR> https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html <comment><USER2> I have some insight here because I did a postdoc working on anatomy ontologies in the UK. A big part of the problem with the semantic web is that lots of people in European academia use it as a collection of buzzwords for making grant proposals sexier, without understanding or caring what it actually means.

Instead of saying, "Give us money to build a webpage", they say, "Give us money to expose metadata annotations using a RESTful API on the semantic web."

I would prepare conference presentations where I was just filling slides up with BS to fill time.

Devs from other universities (gotta check that international research box!) understood the technology even less than our team did. We provided them a tool for storing RDF triples for their webpage so they could store triples about anatomical relationships. They wanted to use said RDF store as their backend database for storing things like usernames and passwords. _facepalm_

So you have all these academics publishing all this extremely important sounding literature about the semantic web, but as soon as you pry one nanometer deep, it's nothing but a giant ball of crap.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, semantic web really hacked the brains of academic-facing bureaucrats. It fell into this giant gap between what administrators don't know about business and what they don't know about technology... a gap big enough to shove every utopian idea about "an effortlessly integrated, data driven society" into.

There's no such thing as "right" way to represent any given data stream, just ways that are more or less suitable to specific tasks and interests. That's why HTML failed as descriptive language (and has become fine-grained- formatting language), and it's why symantic web was doa.

<comment><USER4> > That's why HTML failed as descriptive language

I think HTML and the web failed in general. Modern HTML is really nothing more than div tags everywhere, with a handful of span tags. We went from abusing tables to abusing the _entire_ document. We, in effect, eliminated _all_ semantic meaning from a document by making everything generic tag soup.

The DOM + JS has largely supplanted HTML as the source of a web page. Especially when using tools such as React or Angular.

In terms of vision, the rise of native phone apps and the fact that every major site has a mobile version and a separate desktop version really highlights how the web failed.

I do node/React dev for a living. I'll be the first to admit this pile of hacks is total garbage. Mobile web is almost unusable. I hate it. I hate the sites I work on. Their UX is horrid. Native apps are so far superior that they make the web look like an embarrassing relic. But web development pays the bills and keeps the lights on.

<comment><USER5> I've been recently wondering if there's another, better way. The big usability win of the web is that you can run applications without installing anything. Is there a way we could build a new platform that would get us the advantages of the web without all the awful cruft?

I'm imagining starting with webassembly for sandboxing. We can then expose through to webassembly a useful set of API primitives from the underlying OS for text boxes, widgets and stuff.

Apps would live in a heavily sandboxed container and because of that they could be launched by going to the right URL in a special browser. We could use the same security model as phone apps - apps have a special place to store their own files. They have some network access, and can access the user's data through explicit per-capability security requests.

That would allow a good, secure webapp style experience for users. But the apps themselves would feel native (since they could use native UX primitives, and they would have native performance).

Developers could write code in any language that can compile to webassembly. We could make a bundler that produced normal applications (by compiling the app out of the sandbox). Or we could run the application in a normal web browser if we wanted, by backing the UX primitives with DOM calls, passed through to WASM.

<comment><USER6> How are you crossing the bridge from webassembly to having access to the native UX primitives? Are you directly making C calls to native libraries like win32?

<comment><USER7> You can do that with PWAs if they are packaged as native apps.

For example on Windows, Microsoft has rebooted hosted UWP JavaScript apps into signed PWAs.

So on that case, you can check if UWP APIs are available and use all of them, depending on UWP permissions for the app.

Chrome is following a similar route with ChromeOS and Chrome Android.

As native/Web developer I tend to have a native bias, but PWAs look like the way the Web might win back native. It isn't fully there though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What happened to the semantic web?

Well... it happened.

1) We got schema data for Job Postings that companies like Google reads to build a job search engine.

2) We got schema for recipes. [https://schema.org/Recipe](https://schema.org/Recipe)

3) We got the Open Graph schema for showing headlines/preview images in social networks. [http://ogp.me/](http://ogp.me/)

4) We got schema for reviews: [https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data- types/review](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/review)

5) We got schema for videos: [https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data- types/video](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/video)

6) We got schema for product listings.

<comment><USER9> The semantic web happened but the Semantic Web didn't. Schema.org is used because it a) solves a problem which exists in reality and b) works well with very modest requirements.

All of the crazy bikeshedding about labyrinthine XML standards, triples, etc. or debating what a URL truly means has very little to show for the immense time investment.

The main lesson I take away is that you absolutely need to start with real consumers and producers, and never get in the state where a long period of time goes by where a spec is unused. Most of the semweb specs spent ages with conflicting examples, no working tooling, etc. which was especially hazardous given the massive complexity and nuance being built up in theory before anyone actively used it.

<comment><USER10> "Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment." Maybe humanity had to first try "all of the crazy bikeshedding about labyrinthine XML standards, triples, etc. or debating what a URL truly means" in order to gain enough understanding about this domain to later create things like schema.org.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I worked on the Semantic Web, designing core data infrastructure, back when it was still hot. It disappeared because it had two fatal flaws: it was intrinsically non-scalable, both conceptually and technically.

First, there is no universal "semantic". The meaning of things is ambiguous, and given a broad enough pool of people and cultural contexts, it becomes nigh impossible to converge on a single consistent model for individual terms and concepts in practice. A weak form of this is very evident in global data interchange systems and implementations, and the Semantic Web took this bug factory and dialed it up to eleven. In short, the idea of the Semantic Web requires semantics to be axiomatic and in the real world they are inductive and deeply contextual. (Hence the data model rule of "store the physics, not the interpretation of the physics.") That said, it is often possible to build an adequate semantic model in sufficiently narrow domains -- you just can't generalize it to everything and everybody.

Second, implementation at scale requires an extremely large graph database, and graph database architectures tend to be extremely slow and non-scalable. They were back then and still are today. This is actually what killed the Semantic Web companies -- their systems became unusable at 10-100B edges but it was clear that you needed to have semantic graphs in the many trillions of edges before the idea even _started_ to become interesting. Without an appropriate data infrastructure technology, the Semantic Web was just a nice idea. Organizations using semantic models today carefully restrict the models to keep the number of edges small enough that performance will be reasonable on the platforms available.

The Semantic Web disappeared because it is an AI-Complete problem in the abstract. This was not well understood by its proponents and the systems they designed to implement it were very, very far from AI-Complete.

<comment><USER12> Third, you can't force people to use the correct semantics. They'll use them wrong on purpose for fun and profit. Mark some disturbing content as wholesome, mark it as whatever is popular at the moment to get it in front of more eyeballs, mark it as something only tangentially related in the hope there's a cross over of market, mark it wrong because they don't actually know better.

<comment><USER13> I don't really understand this argument, because there already are lies published on the internet. What difference does it make if those lies are published in a standardized machine readable format or not?

<comment><USER12> What's the point of having the marks at all if they are not actually correct?

<comment><USER14> If you're answering the question, I think it would be good to answer it directly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What happened is that the technology spawned by the Semantic Web "fad" is now absolutely everywhere but it looks and works nothing like how people thought it would.

Freebase, after being bought by Google became the foundation of the Google Knowledge Graph (aka "things not links"). This kicked off an arms race between all the major search providers to build the largest and most complete knowledge graphs (or at least keep pace with Google [1]). Instead of waiting for folks to tag every single page, it turned out that simple patterns cross referenced across billions of pages were good enough to extract useful knowledge from unstructured text.

Some companies who had easier access to structured but dirty data (like LinkedIn and Facebook) were also able to utilize (and contribute to) all of that research by building their own knowledge graphs with names like the Social Graph and Economic Graph. Those in turn are helping to power a decent amount of their search and ad targeting capabilities as well as spawning some interesting work[2]

All those knowledge graphs became a major part of Siri, Alexa and Google Home's ability to answer a wide range of natural language queries. As well as being pretty fundamental to a lot of tech like semantic search, improved ecommerce search and a bunch of intent detection approaches for chatbots.

So yeah while the technology and associated research did turn out to be incredibly useful, adding fancier meta-tags to pages was not the direction that proved the most useful.

[1] [https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub45634](https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub45634) [2] [https://research.fb.com/publications/unicorn-a-system-for- se...](https://research.fb.com/publications/unicorn-a-system-for-searching- the-social-graph/)

<comment><USER16> The problem with all this is that Google, Facebook, Linkedin et al are private companies, so their knowledge graphs are, well, _theirs_.

The idea with the semantic web was that it would be open and it would belong to its users, not to some cabal of giant corporations that would use it to control the internets.

That notion of openness and co-authorship of the knowledge on the web is now as dead as the parrot in the Pythons skit. And we're all much the worse for it- see all the debates about privacy and ownership of personal information and, indeed, metadata.

<comment><USER17> IIRC, Common Crawl exposes the semantic data from the sites they crawl. One could build their own knowledge graph (or at least bootstrap one) from that and other available data sources (DBPedia, WikiData etc.)

<comment><USER18> That's not sufficient - the "private" knowledge graphs of e.g. Google aren't "crawlable", they aren't public and don't (solely) rely on the sites. DBPedia+Wikidata+all other open data sources are not sufficient for a good knowledge graph that can be competitive (in terms of coverage, thoroughness, and recency of updates) with what the megacorps can afford to maintain behind closed doors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I thought Freebase [1] was the most promising "Semantic Web" technology, with a powerful query language (MQL) and an application platform called Acre [2]. I'm biased because I worked at Danny Hillis' adjacent company, Applied Minds, and met with the Freebase folks to talk about graph databases. I went to one of Freebase's Hack Days, and I could feel the energy around building applications on a semantically-aware global database.

Unfortunately, they got acquired by Google, and Freebase eventually shut down. Thinking back now, I wonder if there would have been a business model in hosting private data graphs to subsidize the open source data.

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase) [2] - [https://opensource.googleblog.com/2010/08/acre-open- source-p...](https://opensource.googleblog.com/2010/08/acre-open-source- platform-for-building.html)

<comment><USER20> Seems pretty clear to me that freebase was a thread to Google search. A semantic knowledge search with a powerful query language could replace a good chunk of free text google searches at least for power users.

Makes sense for them to buy it and get rid of it that way.

<comment><USER21> You can still download the data at [https://developers.google.com/freebase/](https://developers.google.com/freebase/). Looks like the data is available there and the license is "Creative Commons Attribution (aka CC-BY)". Wonder why someone hasn't created a new company starting with their dataset? It's "only" 2gb compressed, 8gb uncomp, 63 million entries. That is smaller than I expected.

<comment><USER21> I guess wikidata/wikipedia is the offshoot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I was involved in the semweb community ~7 years ago, particularly the "RDF knowledge graph" end, and it's still a bewitching idea. A lot of smart people have/still do work in it, but it never reached any kind of success on the commercial (as opposed to academic) web, because:

Serialization is not the hard part.

The semweb community was obsessed with ontologies and OWL and schemas and taxonomies. If we can just break the problem down enough, the logic went, then systems will be able to infer new data about the world. But it never worked out that way.

Eventually you just have to write some code. If you have to write code anyway, all the taxonomies and RDF in the world aren't helpful (indeed, they're almost certainly the least efficient way to model the problem). You just scrape the pieces of knowledge out of whatever JSON, HTML, or whatever else and glue them together with the code. You don't need the all-knowing semantic web, you just need a .csv of whatever tiny piece of it you care about.

I have a distinct memory of trying to sell someone on the startup I was working on, a SPARQL database. I was pitching RDF as a way to model the problem, but eventually the person I was pitching just said "well, we can just outsource the scraping to our eastern european devs and put it all in one big table." I had a kind of "oh my" moment where I realized that the startup was never going to work: in the real world, you just write code and move on. Taking part in the great semantic knowledge base of the world doesn't matter and isn't needed.

The other end of semweb, the "machine-readable web", more or less came to pass. schema.org, opengraph, and that sort of thing did 99% of what the semweb community wanted at 5% of the effort. The fact that all of that data is not in one giant database doesn't really matter to anyone; you rarely care about more than 2 or 3 web pages at once.

<comment><USER23> I worked for semantic web startup. The idea was we'd build private "knowledge graphs" for companies especially Pharma and Biotech. We experienced something similar to what you describe. We had a nice RDF generator and a query engine. The idea was we'd parse data from clients' DB and unstructured stuff and generate semantic graphs - whcih would be used for semantic graph apps like search and inferences. Looking back, it was never going to work. Most clients came to us for "analytics dashboard". They were happy with giant tables to power these dashboards (and they were right!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's really too bad that XML+XSLT didn't take off as the "replacement" for HTML. Before you recoil in horror hear me out...

Web pages are a giant mess of content and presentation, and CSS doesn't really help much. XML is at least a way of describing data in a meaningful way. <book>, <author>, <chapter>, etc. XSLT provided a way of formatting XML _in the browser_. Sure the internet would still be full of inconsistent content structures, but it would still be way easier to machine read than the big mess of arbitrary
s and
s (most of which just display something blinky) that we have today.

<comment><USER25> The two problems here are that XML/XSLT are horrible to work with (to the extent that you want to achieve what they were supposed to, you do it with the modern "single page app" style where you write javascript that retrieves data from an API and renders it into a UI) and that no-one actually wants to separate the content from the presentation anyway.

<comment><USER26> Except you just contradicted yourself. If everyone wants to use JavaScript frameworks and APIs for data they they ARE separating the content from the presentation.

<comment><USER27> If you think JS frameworks are used only for data manipulation, you're sorely mistaken. Runtime styling has been a primary aim of JavaScript code since even before the popularization of jQuery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> With regard to the first example, lowering volume of playing media when you get a phone call, I had that set up on my Nokia N900 a decade ago (Dbus on the N900 would trigger a script to ssh into my computer and pause mpd). Naturally this was a nerdy thing and not something accessible for the general public, but I mention it here just to encourage my fellow nerds to realize how much power they might already have with existing tools.

The writer says that a business owner must add their office info to Google or Yelp and suggests there are no alternatives to such centralized repositories of information. However OpenStreetMap also has opening hours for businesses and medical practioners and that data is yours to process and play around with as you like.

In fact, there is just _so much_ data present now in OSM, we simply lack convenient end-user tools to extract and process it automatically.

<comment><USER29> OSM is open, but it is still centralized. It doesn't come to your webpage and get the information about your hours from you (as far as I can tell)

<comment><USER30> OSM is a wiki, anyone can edit things, and there's wiki-like community review. So the owner of a business can add the details if they want, or someone walking past and looking at a sign can.

<comment><USER29> Right but the semantic web idea is that the business owner puts the hours on their site and that lets everyone who wants to know the hours. No central site (OSM, google, yelp) required.

I mean the person looking for the hours would probably go to one of those sites, but the hours wouldn't be stored there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> For the same reason graphical programming languages are still unpoular, and the command line still rules: inputting normalized tags is many orders of magnitude harder than typing free text. Even on an adaptive touch interface. Even with tag completion. Even with a template to fill in. And when you do manage to input some well formed AST for your todo list, you're on an island by yourself, because everyone else is using free text (or their own, different tags or syntax). Because even if you have the same structure, you also need to use the same tags! What language are they supposed to be in?! They might as well be unique numbers unless you speak that language.

It's facepalms all the way down.

</comment><comment><USER32> I took TBL's Semantic Web class ("Linked Data Ventures") when I was a grad student in the fall of 2010. The class was well structured, and included an introduction to basic concepts and languages, lectures by people using it in production environments, and group projects. I wrote an account of the first class here ([http://www.ilamont.com/2010/09/encounter-with-tim-berners- le...](http://www.ilamont.com/2010/09/encounter-with-tim-berners-lee- and.html)) and you can see a demo of the rudimentary educational app our team built here ([http://www.ilamont.com/2011/03/challenges-of-creating- mobile...](http://www.ilamont.com/2011/03/challenges-of-creating- mobile.html)).

As the title of the class indicates, the idea was to encourage the creation of real-world applications, and to that end the class groups were encouraged to have a mix of Course 6 and business school team members. At the time, it seemed that the Semantic Web was more of an academic/open source project rather than something that was widely embraced by developers, although some guest speakers did have working applications at their places of business. I think the hope was to seed the Cambridge startup ecosystem with SW/Linked Data examples that could encourage its spread into the real world.

One of the teams in our class actually turned their project into a startup that was later acquired. I ran into one of the co-founders a few years later and asked if they continued to use the Semantic Web/Linked Data model that they had demoed in class. The answer: No, because it couldn't scale. That was an issue that was anticipated and discussed during the class, but there was hopeful talk that scaling issues would be resolved in the near future through various initiatives.

</comment><comment><USER33> I worked on the Semantic Web. It has so many fatal flaws, that I am amazed in hindsight that I didn't see them back then.

Berners-Lee was successful with the Web because it was not an academic idea like Nelson's and Engelbart's hypertext, but it was a pragmatic technology (HTTP, HTML and a browser) that solved a very practical problem. The semantic web was a vague vision that started with a simplistic graph language specification (RDF) that didn't solve anything. All the tools for processing RDF were horrendous in complexity and performance and everything you could do with it could typically be solved easier with other means.

Then the AI-people of old came on board and introduced OWL, a turn for the worse. All the automatic inference and deduction stuff was totally non- scalable on even toy examples, let alone web scale. Humans in general are terrible in making formal ontologies, even many computer science students typically didn't really understand the cardinality stuff. And how it would bring us closer to Berners-Lee vision? No idea.

Of course, its basic assumptions about the openness, distributedness and democratric qualities of the Web also didn't hold up. It didn't help that the community is extremely stubborn and over confident. Still.They keep on convincing themselves it all is a big success and will point at vaguely similar but successful stories built on completely different technology as that they were right. I think this attitude and type of people in the W3C also has lead to the downfall of the W3C as the Web authority.

<comment><USER34> There are different flavors of OWL nowadays. Some of them are especially dedicated to reason on huge volumes of data (polynomial algorithms), although they are not very expressive. Some are more expressive, but don't scale very well. Some are incredibly expressive, but are undecidable, so you can only use them as a formal representation of a domain, not something you can reason from.

The practice in the community is to choose a fragment of OWL/description logic that fits your needs. Different tools for different uses. In practice I'm especially fond of the simplest languages, just a little more expressive than a database schema or an UML class diagram, as they are easy to describe things with and yet very useful, with lots of efficient algorithms to infer new things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Nothing "happened to" the Semantic Web. It's here, and it's growing in utility and capability as the technology matures. What isn't necessarily growing is understanding of what the Semantic Web really is, who it's for, how to use SemWeb capabilities, etc.

I'll accept some responsibility for that last bit, as somebody who has been active in promoting, and advocating for the adoption of, SemWeb tech. I could do more / do a better job in that regard.

<comment><USER36> Well, now's as good a time as any to start! Let's say I wanted to throw a layer of semantic markup over an existing site - where would I go to figure out what schemas to use and how to use any given schema (it's been a while since I tried to SemWeb up a site.)

<comment><USER35> That's an interesting question, because it has a few assumptions baked into it. I'd love to write a long eassy on that right now, but I don't really have time. But to answer the core question, one good place to start familiarizing oneself with the various schemas that are available is:

[https://schema.org/docs/schemas.html](https://schema.org/docs/schemas.html)

There's also a lot of good information at

[http://linkeddata.org/guides-and-tutorials](http://linkeddata.org/guides-and- tutorials)

although I fear that site doesn't get as much love / attention as it should, and some of the links might be stale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The main downfall of the Semantic web efforts are not technological, but due to a misalignment of incentives. Semantic web formats require content creators to annotate metadata for machines where webpages are intended for human readers.

We think that the main way to achieve a practical semantic web is to have AI synthesize a Knowledge Graph from applying CV/NLP techniques to understanding all webpages. More about our project here:

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-web-as-a-database-the- bigg...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-web-as-a-database-the-biggest- knowledge-graph-ever/)

</comment><comment><USER38> We actually are on the semantic web for healthcare. See:

[http://wiki.hl7.org/index.php?title=RDF_for_Semantic_Interop...](http://wiki.hl7.org/index.php?title=RDF_for_Semantic_Interoperability)

Other fields are moving towards semantic also

<comment><USER39> It's used in power systems as well: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Information_Model_(elec...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Information_Model_\(electricity\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> What happened is that it became. We learned that we can't trust anything on the Web, but joly it is rather nice that you marked up your opening hours.

In the end the semantic Web uptake was on the data not the meta data.

Regards to the academic semweb grant story these same idiots are now chasing the cloud with out a clue. And before it was grid.

For some fields there is uptake because it solves problems. But they hardly market themselves as semweb.it's more profitable to market they solve solutions.

</comment><comment><USER41> The only way this works is if there is some central agency enforcing and standardizing the tags/APIs.

People (and programmers) are lazy, and ignorant. If its not in their face broken it frequently won't get fixed. I used to have html validator default enabled in firefox, which would point out HTML errors for every page I landed on. The percentage of web pages that had in your face HTML errors despite all the tools to check for broken HTML still didn't mean people put in the effort to assure their pages were error free. Basically, if the page rendered "correctly" in the developers browser and maybe another test browser or two, then it was job done.

</comment><comment> mickael-kerjean The potential of the semantic web is massive. It's hard to understand why it hasn't been a massive game changer. I remind a few years ago making crazy query to answers questions that still today has no equivalent like: Find companies CEO that has less than 100k employees and was created before Neil Amstrong walked on the moon. The winner take all approach we have today with all those sillos doesn't benefit human kind in any way.

<comment><USER42> I just had to try this with Wikidata. Unfortunately did not work well

[https://query.wikidata.org/#SELECT%20%3FpresLabel%20%3Fcompa...](https://query.wikidata.org/#SELECT%20%3FpresLabel%20%3FcompanyLabel%20%3FfoundingTime%20WHERE%20%7B%0A%20%20%3Fpres%20wdt%3AP31%20wd%3AQ5.%0A%20%20%3Fpres%20p%3AP39%20%3Fposition_held_statement.%0A%20%20%3Fposition_held_statement%20ps%3AP39%20wd%3AQ484876.%0A%20%20%3Fposition_held_statement%20pq%3AP642%20%3Fcompany.%0A%20%20%3Fcompany%20wdt%3AP1128%20%3Femployees.%0A%20%20%3Fcompany%20wdt%3AP571%20%3FfoundingTime.%0A%20%20%0A%20%20SERVICE%20wikibase%3Alabel%20%7B%20bd%3AserviceParam%20wikibase%3Alanguage%20%22en%22.%20%7D%0A%20%20FILTER%28%3Femployees%20%3C%20100000%29%0A%20%20FILTER%28YEAR%28%3FfoundingTime%29%20%3E%201965%29%0A%0A%7D)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I am surprised that the author did not mention the semantic web we did get. It's in his source, after all. If you look at the header of the page, you'll see the lines below. Sure they are not the utopian version of the semantic web we were promised. Instead, it's even better: it's the pragmatic semantic web we need:

        <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary" />
        <meta name="twitter:site" content="@TwoBitHistory" />

        <meta property="og:image" content="https://twobithistory.org/images/logo.png" />
        <meta property="og:url" content="https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html" />
        <meta property="og:title" content="Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?" />
        <meta property="og:description" content="In 2001, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, published an article in Scientific American.

" />

<comment><USER44> The author specifically mentioned opengraph, or are you referencing something else?

<comment><USER43> The author does but as an aside. I think OpenGraph is the practical application of a more utopian semantic web and it deserves a lot more recognition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is why we can't have nice things. When someone (sure, W3C- anyone) tries to, you know, _design_ stuff before it's built, everyone whines and complains about how it's all too "mathy", how the standard is bloated so we shouldn't have any standards at all, how the standard is not good for "real work", etc etc. Then, since all those hard-working programmers are, allegedly, too dumb to get their heads around XML (XML! Oh, the complexity!), RDF and OWL, along come the big companies and crate their own, de facto standards. So now, if you want to do work, you have to abide by those standards, whether you like it or not _and_ you don't even get to influence them, because they're not some open web committee that you can badger about the quality of their standards, but closed, walled-up conglomerates that don't care how nice the web is, only that they can control it.

Not to mention, the end result is a hairball alright, a big pile of tangled up hacky, ad-hoc APIs, bashed together as fast as possible, "to get things done quickly".

... and everyone is still using XML anyway.

<comment><USER16> HN, sorry for the rant. RDF was such a good idea, especially as human- readable, human-editable turtle.

There was a lot of clunkiness there, in the W3C standard, but, W3C standards are made to be openly debated and revised. Facebook APIs, on the other hand - not so much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> It's been replaced by the Decentralized Web as the latest fad (also with the backing of Tim Berners Lee). Let's see how far this one goes as well (though I'm really rooting for it to succeed).

</comment><comment><USER46> The semantic web relies on people not lying. Unfortunately, meta tags were instantly filled with seo spam as soon as they were implemented. It's a trusted client approach to data integrity.

</comment><comment><USER47> It was supplanted by AI and machine learning.

Not only did these outbuzzword the Semantic Web, but as it turns out it's much easier to have a bunch of GPUs running CNNs to extract semantic info from the dirty data you have rather than attempting to cram that data into a well- specified ontology and enforcing that ontology on new incoming data.

<comment><USER48> Extracting information is not the issue. Figuring out what it is is what the Semantic Web (or any good Ontology) helps solve.

For a AI/ML to provide that insight - requires the ML to have access to a good Ontology.

The reason is more nuanced. The main reason being money: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036041](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036041)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> "The Semantic Web will never work because when it works, you won't know it's the Semantic Web". Source: [https://twitter.com/TomDeNies/status/653572860766781440](https://twitter.com/TomDeNies/status/653572860766781440)

</comment><comment><USER50> It couldn't make money...

One of the best examples of the semantic web was Daylife[1], and they wound up being "acquired" by two bit players[2] that figured out how to monetize things better.. :-/

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylife](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylife)

[2] [https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/17/content-licensing- service-...](https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/17/content-licensing-service- newscred-acquires-publishing-startup-daylife-appears-to-be-raising-more- funding/)

<comment><USER48> Yup!

I made a few observations in my own comment.

One being that there is no usable graph store you and I can use as of 2018.

Another being about monetizing the Semantic Web when playing the role of the data/ontology provider. You provide all the data while the consumers (Siri, Alexa and Google Home) get the glory: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036041](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036041)

<comment><USER51> Store is easy, you put your triples to linearly scaleable cassandra. What you want is some fancy query language on top of that, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> The financial incentives have become stronger for building walled gardens than a semantically open web. The semantic data has been more useful to giants that monetize it, than to millions of small publishers who are supposed to abide by the rules and maintain it. The issue is even bigger if you are listing valuable goods - from products, to jobs, to real estate/rental listings as a part of your marketplace or business. Aggregators like google can scrape and circumvent you, by taking away your users earlier in the acquisition chain, so why bother giving them your product graph.

</comment><comment><USER53> There is great power in rdf graph databases (Allegrograph) and the rapidly growing collection of valuable ontologies [https://lov.linkeddata.es/dataset/lov/](https://lov.linkeddata.es/dataset/lov/)

The barrier to entry is thinking in "graph" instead of relational dB, which is a big cultural change, and then shifting focus and attention to the information science of building valuable ontologies. Once you make the leap, it's hard to go back - it's an order of magnitude productivity gain.

</comment><comment><USER12> The Semantic Web would never have worked IMO. All you have to do is take a look at Soundcloud's tags. People will tag their songs with whatever tags they think will help their music get hits.

</comment><comment><USER54> The Semantic Web is alive and well and doing great, thank you very much. You should drop by some time and check out the real thing. Unfortunately, hype in any field will attract losers and opportunists, but why focus on the negative? Never mind academia: Some of the world's largest companies are investing serious money in semantic-web approaches to get a grip of their information resources. You won't see it because it's mostly behind the scenes, in intranets and infrastructure that feeds data to your nice shiny restaurant recommender, or whatever.

The software stack is getting better and more robust-- you can do things quickly with billions of triples that would take you weeks of development to program in a non-trivial relational database environment. The Semantics 2018 conference just took place in Vienna. It was heavy in industry presence and there was __a lot __of money going around. These guys guys don 't give money outside the company unless they're going to get value for it.

So yes, reports of the imminent arrival of the Semantic Web ten years ago were greatly exaggerated. But if you're looking for a topic with an amusingly clueless commentariat, you'll do better to google "PHP object-oriented programming" (or just "hacker", for that matter).

</comment><comment><USER55> I was in the unfavourable position of trying to implement a commercial, performance product on top of a triple store with OWL inferencing. It was unworkable. A slightest error in the entire dataset was able to break inferencing elsewhere (butterfly effect), not to mention the performance. We worked out the performance, by adding layers of caching but the data correctness is in my view unrealistic.

</comment><comment><USER56> As it is now, the one who provides the data is the one who pays for everything (production, storage, compute, bandwidth), while middleman search engines take all the money. What if the middleman was required to pay a fee to index the data ? For example build money transactions into the HTTP protocol, where web sites could automatically ask for a small fee in order to "see more".

<comment><USER57> IIRC, the (by some definition) original hypertext system, Xanadu, had this. It was supposed to (among many other things) keep track of who quoted who and how much and make sure everybody got paid fairly. It was much too complex and never got anywhere, and was completely replaced when the WWW came along with its dead simple model of URLs and HTML.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> The Semantic Web was not XML but RDF. XML was the serialisation format.

</comment><comment><USER59> I thought the addition of elements to HTML5 like nav, main, article, etc. was the end result of the semantic web.

<comment><USER35> Not really. That stuff does relate to "semantics" in the "Semantic Markup" sense, but it doesn't actually have much to do with the "Semantic Web" per-se. I mean, yeah, there is a weak sort of connection there, but when people talk about the "Semantic Web" they are mostly talking about RDF, whether it's encoded using RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, JSON-LD, or "other". And along with RDF are related technologies like OWL, inference engines that reason over a triplestore, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> One core problem is that the attention economy of the conventional web has driven content creators so far away from the path of truthfulness that they would just ruin any truly distributed ontology with lies.

As soon as you start actually consuming semantic data it becomes a protocol that begs to be "hacked".

</comment><comment><USER61> The $64,000 question is: how do you implement the semantic web without changing any HTML or backend code?

Because the web is never going to change to adopt a semantic web standard. What we have now are facsimiles of the semantic web, things like Open Graph (which only provides the gist of page media, if that), proprietary search engine results, and proprietary APIs for walled gardens like Facebook.

It's looking like machine learning is going to provide richer gists and then manually-coded directories will provide user interface controllers for those gists in Alexa and other agents. It's a far cry from a truly semantic web but most people won't know the difference.

This is actually a pretty easy problem to solve, but to do it, we'd be running against the wind of capitalism. The semantic web is running behind the scenes at Google, ad agencies, even the NSA. Except they've built it around people's private data instead of publicly accessible documents.

Just to throw some ideas out there, I would start with the low-lying fruit: we need a fully-indexed document store that doesn't barf on mangled data. We need a compelling reason for people to have public profiles again (or an open and secure web of trust for remote API access). We need annotated public relationship graphs akin to ImageNet or NIST for deriving the most commonly- used semantics (edit: DBpedia is a start). Totally doable, but developers gotta pay rent.

</comment><comment><USER62> > _Imagine a Facebook that keeps your list of friends, hosted on your own > website, up-to-date, rather than vice-versa. Basically, the Semantic Web was > going to be a web where everyone gets to have their own personal REST API, > whether they know the first thing about computers or not._

Sounds more or less like what the Urbit project ([https://urbit.org/](https://urbit.org/)) is trying to accomplish. Not an endorsement; it has serious flaws just like everything else. This is a very hard problem to solve. But I sure do hope someone manages to figure it out.

</comment><comment><USER63> It was the answer to a problem that nobody had, straight out of the dotcom bubble days where those answers could be sold as a business cases or for university grants.

Basically any form of structured data, be it in XML or JSON, served through some channel of data, is everything people need. There is no benefit in further standardization. Simple, informal standards work better than monstrous specifications that nobody ever bothers to deal with properly. The most important part is reducing friction, that's why JSON is the most successful format despite its shortcomings.

<comment><USER48> Yup!

I made a few observations in my own comment.

One being that while a set of SPARQL Federated Queries would elegantly replace my assorted, custom collection of python scripts, scrapy and PhantomJS (slowly porting over to puppeteer) programs talking to Postgres, there is no usable graph store you and I can use as of 2018.

Another being about monetizing the Semantic Web when playing the role of the data/ontology provider.

The majority of your clients will want your data in relational formats than turtle/RDF files/format anyways.

.. and if you do provide all the data, the consumers (Siri, Alexa and Google Home) get the glory: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036041](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036041)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> If you ask that question in 5 years perhaps the answer will be that it came alive with AI. As AI becomes more important so should the Semantic Web since it will provide data to train the machines.

</comment><comment><USER65> Someone commented recently in another thread that you can make software from order (via languages) or from chaos (ML), or often a combination of the two.

Perhaps determining "meaning" on the web is similar, where the synthetic "order" approach is semantic markup, but the analytical "chaos" approach is NLP, image object recognition, etc.

I think you need both, since human produced content doesn't always follow discrete predefined categories, but also has patterns that can be pre- classified to solve real problems more easily.

</comment><comment><USER66> The web is just a subset of the internet, and a shrinking one as a share.

More communication over the internet is between client-server apps rather than between browsers and other open standards, as was envisaged when the web started. JavaScript apps and mobile apps are tightly coupled with their services.

Although HTTP has proven resilient, HTML/XML has not. XML's verbosity that enables semantic meaning is exactly its undoing compared to JSON. When meaning is built into both client and server, communication needs to be skinny not rich.

</comment><comment><USER67> > _Sean B. Palmer, [...], posits that the real problem was the lack of a truly > decentralized infrastructure to host the Semantic Web on. To host your own > website, you need to buy a domain name from ICANN, configure it correctly > using DNS, and then pay someone to host your content if you don't already > have a server of your own._

Exactly that was the lacking brick of true distributed linked (semantic) web which now has a chance to be fulfiled by IPFS/IPNS/IPLD or some upcoming standarized equivalent.

</comment><comment><USER68> Every few months my mind circles around that topic.

I think it won't work if the underlying transport/presentation is "the web" (i.e as in Web 2.0).

Instead of decorating semantics/hints around the actual information mostly for SEO reasons it should work the opposite: using all available semantic hints and information bits there already are to create new information by aggregating and putting things in a new context.

It adds value while building upon previous knowledge and allows information and context to be relevant indefinitely.

<comment><USER63> Try expressing not such a vague concept, but a concrete, real world application that actual stakeholders would be interested in investing into.

You will find that:

A) It's probably not _that_ valuable

B) None of the hard problems are technological

<comment><USER68> You're right, I didn't go into concrete detail.

It's also hard to describe but the best analogy I can come up with: picture a CMS that actually is about _content_ instead of being tied to presentation. So e.g. writing an article about a certain historical event at a certain place consists of stringing all the information and relationships together.

Bringing the correct pieces together eliminates errors and gives a piece of information more meaning when used in different contexts.

Being able to correctly reference e.g. Venice, Italy instead of Venice LA, CA makes a huge difference when looking up time schedules, weather forecast, flight connections etc. Sure there are IATA codes for airports. Wouldn't it be great to mention Springfield in an article and having all information about that place (as well as all "backlinks")?

I also don't think it is a technology problem.

However, I'd like to think about this more in terms of DRY principle of information. There are publications on the web that solely exist to duplicate short-lived, relatively low quality information and putting ads on it. This may be acceptable for some consumer's point of view, but fails to create long- lasting contribution to mankind.

Just dumping all bits we currently store into massive archives is possible but taking measures to keep the amount of "information archeology" needed to understand this data feels the right thing to do.

I'll iterate on that.

Sorry if this reads even more confusing and esoteric, need some sleep now.

<comment><USER18> It's worth looking at what you wrote once more from the parent poster suggested perspective "that actual stakeholders would be interested in investing into".

You're giving an example about an improved CMS. If I imagine myself in the shoes of any actual stakeholder who's got a bunch of employees using (or is paying for the development of) a nontrivial CMS system, I _don 't_ really see why they would consider your proposed features as needed and valuable. They don't have a problem with referencing the correct Venice, they can say what they want to say as accurately they want with the current CMS systems. If they're writing an article, then either the weather forecast and flight connections would be relevant to the _intended_ message and included by the writer/editor, or otherwise they should be avoided in order not to distract readers from what the publisher wants. Similarly, having 'backlinks' may be considered harmful if the publisher doesn't want the reader to easily go to another resource.

 _That_ is the point of looking at the benefit to stakeholders. It doesn't matter if some approach will or will not "create long-lasting contribution to mankind", that's not why technologies get chosen - if the stakeholders who are making the decision on whether to use this technology have an incentive to do so, it will get used, and if they don't have such an incentive, then the technology will die.

And that's the prime weakness of semantic web - its usefulness requires content creators to adopt the technology, but it doesn't provide any strong incentives for these content creators to do so; the main potential benefits accrue to someone else e.g. the general public, not to those who would need to bear the costs of adapting the content. I don't see how it can be successful without addressing this important misalignment of incentives, since incentives matter far more than technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Mixing semantic web techs with ML is hot in the domain right now.

Because ML solves problems symbolic approaches cannot solve (dealing with huge amounts of raw, poorly structured data) and symbolic approaches solve problems ML cannot (dealing with logical reasoning and inferences, like in the query "give me all cities of more than 1 million inhabitants that are less than 300km away from Paris, sorted from southernmost to northernmost").

</comment><comment><USER69> Interesting, this post implements the og tags for social sharing (image and description) but skips the full og:article tags with author, date etc.

Edit: [https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing- tool/u/0/#...](https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing- tool/u/0/#url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwobithistory.org%2F2018%2F05%2F27%2Fsemantic- web.html)

</comment><comment><USER70> Blogger/blogspot and RSS. We already had it, and still have it. It's not as pretty as Instagram, though. It's all over.

<comment><USER71> The RDF-based RSS versions never saw anywhere near as much adoption as the non-RDF based ones, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> On a related note, I'd also be interested to know how the semantic web was related to the rise of "knowledge graphs". That's another term that we heard about for a while (and clearly was implemented - Facebook, Google and Microsoft have them, for example), but I haven't heard much more publicly for a while.

</comment><comment><USER48> Companies that don't have pressing revenue issues and a large petty cash allowance use it. A LOT. As a result, most BigCo and BigGovts use a lot of Semantic Web. There are full time employees at these places where all they do, full time, is write pages of documents about applying the Semantic Web to solving a problem. For example, thousands of man hours are spent by the U.S. Military on the Semantic Web every year.

The reality for the rest of us: It does not make financial sense to build the Semantic Web.

It's a chicken and egg problem.

No one has been able to find a way to monetize the Semantic Web when playing the role of the data/ontology provider.

You cant slap on an ad. You hand off the data and someone else renders it and slaps on an ad raking in all the money.

If you are a data provider, it's much more practical going the traditional way: using relational databases and importing/exporting/feeding data using relational formats than turtle/RDF files. The majority of your clients will want your data in that format anyways.

Designing, Building, Maintaining, Querying an Ontology takes a huge amount of expertise/resources.

Even if you had all the money in the world to obtain the data: there currently exist, in single digits, with none of them being open source/free, capable/scalable triple stores that can store an Ontology/Graph that's dense enough to be meaningful while providing any level of practical turnaround time for queries.

Individuals like you and I or small businesses just don't have this expertise/resources.

We would be spending too much time writing our own graph database, carrying out alignments between entities from various datasets, looking at and correct bad data etc before we even get to what we originally set out to do.

Instead, most of us scrape the data from HTML/REST+JSON; use taxonimies at best and custom code to do what we need to get done and call it a day.

12 years ago when I started learning about the Semantic Web, I envisioned we will be, in 2018, using software agents to make our lives simpler:

1\. My software bot looks at my calendar to figure out my day's trip and queries the traffic data from the endpoints relevant to my route

2\. It also tries to estimate when I will have time to eat and generate a list of nearby restaurants or fastfood locations depending on my available time

3\. It would be able to query endpoints from gas stations relevant to my route to figure out whether and if I should fill up gas

4\. If portions of my route has toll roads on it, to find out if I already have a pass and remind me to put it in my car ...

A critical component of this happening would be support for federation: la SPARQL Federated Query.

While SPARQL does support Federated Queries, no one has an incentive to support the feature because of the above mentioned monetization challenge.

So is my vision in shambles?

No. I still things done but now through an assorted, custom collection of python scripts, scrapy and PhantomJS (slowly porting over to puppeteer) programs talking to Postgres.

There is not a single line of SPARQL involved in the whole pipeline and it does what I want it to do.

... just like everybody else, we are getting along just fine with our hacky solutions.

</comment><comment><USER73> Who needs the semantic web when we have machine learning to extract the information we want?

<comment><USER74> Yes, Google surprised us all and made the semantic web unnecessary, even though I doubt it would have come to pass anyway. Consider a paper in 1998 by Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and others, that showed them finding the titles of books and the names of their authors amid the sludge of the World Wide Web:

> We begin with a small seed set of (author, title) pairs [...]. Then we find > all occurrences of those books on the Web [...]. From these occurrences we > recognize patterns for the citations of books. Then we search the Web for > these patterns and find new books. --- > [http://dis.unal.edu.co/~gjhernandezp/psc/lectures/MatchingMa...](http://dis.unal.edu.co/~gjhernandezp/psc/lectures/MatchingMarketDesign/GooglePageRankAdwords/brin98what.pdf)

Starting with a seed of just five author-title pairs, their formula found thousands more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Web API's happened instead.

<comment><USER76> And ML also happened. If you can do pattern recognition and semantic analysis without the markup, why bother with it?

<comment><USER51> But is it that easy? Any ready to use OSS projects available?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Standards compliance is short-term expensive, someone like Facebook would have to make it cheap and/or dangle a carrot to make it worth it

</comment><comment><USER78> identical title [https://joelkuiper.eu/semantic- web](https://joelkuiper.eu/semantic-web)

</comment><comment><USER79> not only the Semantic Web, but semantic anything. All the millions of taxpayer funds spent in semantic research...

</comment><comment><USER80> This I Know Is True:

1\. There are few Internet historians. It is difficult and thankless work that doesn't pay well. And too much of the information is lost to history, or can protested by gain-saying, even the true bits.

2\. The first browser, Silversmith, was released in 1987. [[http://www.linfo.org/browser.html](http://www.linfo.org/browser.html)] (thanks BELUG). It worked in English and grew out of my work on the Association of American Publisher's Electronic Manuscript project, the first U.S. electronic publishing project using tags outside of IBM's product offerings. At the time I had been on the Internet since 1972 and I was tired of typing 128.24.67.xxx. (There was a phone book of IP addresses at the time and I was listed in it for work I was doing on satellite image processing on Illiac.)

3\. The second browser, a version of Silversmith, was designed for Old Norse for a researcher and it used Norse runes for the display; the controls were in Roman characters.

4\. The third browser, a version of Silversmith, was a semantic browser for a U.S. military application. It was successful as far as I know.

5\. The fourth browser, Erwise, [[http://www.osnews.com/story/21076/The_World_s_First_Graphica...](http://www.osnews.com/story/21076/The_World_s_First_Graphical_Browser_Erwise)] came about after I gave a paper on Silversmith in Gmunden, Austria in 1988. Erwise worked in the Finnish language. I understand that TimBL looked at it before developing the W3c browser but decided against using it because the comments were in Finnish.

6\. I have seen various dates for the browsers from TimBL and MarcA, but they were at least a few years after Silversmith. We can call them the 5th and 6th, but I'm not sure of the ordering. Both of these browsers were based on the earlier AAP Book tag set.

7\. Some of my work on Silversmith grew out of Ted Nelson's work on the Alexandria (Xanadu) project. Much of his work has still not been implemented, but that may soon change.

8\. Ted developed hypertext controls for printed documents. In that approach when you finished reading a child section a return page number was there to show you where you left off.

9\. I developed the first eHypertext system for networks that would link you back to your source document that you came from by pressing the ESC key. In Silversmith you could link between text, images, sound and semantic information.

10\. Silversmith is a scalable system. Please observe that just because you don't know how that is done, does not mean it cannot be done. That was what was told me about browsing and searching earlier also.

11\. At the time Silversmith was developed, it was understood that VC's would not talk to you without you having a working product. Once I had it working, I found that VC's would still not talk to you. I talked with about a dozen Boston VC's. They would not even sit for a demonstration. I did a demonstration for the ACM in 2007 (thanks PeterG). That is the nature of tools and the bane of toolsmiths, no one wants to pay for tools. I have a recurring nightmare of the yokel who returned his anvil to the smithy saying, "It doesn't work. I can't use it to make beautiful horseshoes like Kevin does, and he has the same anvil. There's something wrong with this one." With Silversmith I lost a competition among 80 vendors for a search application, when none of the others even had an application. One competitor even called me and demanded all my specs and internal design documents. That is largely why you will not find any published information on Silversmith.

12\. I can't tell you how many times I have been schooled on programming languages. "You should program that using ThinkC/ObjectiveC/SmallTalk/the X-System." "You need to switch to Ruby-On-Rails/Perl/Python/Awk, that's the way to do it." People, it's not the language, it's the data structures and the code that is important. And, enough with "speed is important." We are all using supercomputers and they will never be fast enough.

13\. Silversmith predated the W3c work by several years, that is why I prefer to use the term "semantic web" (lower case) to distinguish it from the W3c term. I discussed the term "web" with Ted and he agreed that was in use earlier before the WWW.

14\. Monitizing a tool is an interesting discussion. No one wants to pay $1 every time they pick up a hammer. But for a cabinetmaker, his/her primary tool is the table saw. This means that they are more than willing to pay on a regular basis for maintenance. They must, it is their livelihood, and the manufacturer is going to make money on that maintenance. He does not expect to be able to charge the cabinetmaker a portion of his sales. That is not how that market works. To me, even razor and blades are not fully monitized if you sharpen your own blades.

15\. Semantic work is "path dependent" work. Once you start down a certain path it becomes very difficult to retrace your steps. I used to be critical of academics who "sold out" to the W3c vision, but now I realize that for the most part they are trying to provide what the industry wants and uses.

16\. Work on Silversmith continues and I'm pleased to say that it is progressing well. The next version will assist in finding and using knowledge in a more conceptual way.

<comment><USER81> Appreciate the history.

History's written by the victors, so this is a little SGML oriented -- I still recall my own transition from developing Gopher sites to WWW sites for Lynx, and how at the time, these things felt the same -- though it was clear what would win.

Wikipedia's discussion of browser history also omits Gopher + clients, which is too bad, it was kind of a big deal at the time.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_web_browser#Pre...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_web_browser#Precursors)

To put it on the timeline, your Silversmith was 1987, Berners Lee's WWW browser 1990, McCahill's Gopher 1991, Lynx 1992, and Andreessen's Mosaic 1993.

Still blown away by the force of an idea trying to happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> And VRML.

</comment><comment><USER83> The author of semantic web forgot about money. What is the profit of website owner if he freely shares markup?

<comment> cody-burleson I don't think the use of Semantic Web technologies presupposes open data. Linked Data doesn't have to be Linked Open Data. One could create services that adhere to the standards while still monetizing them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> Javascript

</comment><comment><USER85> Rest API/JSON is the de facto industry standard for data exchange. No need to parse and extract data from semantic tags.

</comment><comment><USER86> We're getting there with CSS grid. First, we have to deal with the usual "You actually have to put div A inside div B in order to do X. Now which one gets the semantic tag? And what happens when we also need div C as a container to fix Y problem? "</comment>


Yes, it is worse than the flu: busting the coronavirus myths - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/29/worse-than-flu-busting-coronavirus-myths <comment><USER2> Ok I'll weigh in on the masks:

Everything I have read that says "don't wear a mask" are predicated on the following arguments:

1\. Most people don't wear it right so it's not worth it

2\. Most people buy the wrong kind of mask

3\. Most people won't charge the mask often enough

4\. You have to take the mask off to eat/ eventually anyway so it doesn't matter.

5\. Hospitals need the masks not you

...therefore don't buy masks.

Ok...

But what if I wear it right, change it often, use the right kind and only wear it in a "high risk" situation, like riding a train or other enclosed space?

Every article that says "don't buy masks because this expert said so" is basically admitting that they DO work. Ok, maybe not "on average" and maybe it's not effective at "protecting an entire country". Sure. But that doesn't mean it won't work to protect ME.

So bacially it boils down to no one wanting to recommend masks for the above reasons, and to prevent a run on masks. But that doesn't mean they aren't effective if you do it right. Anyway, that's my two cents on all this mask/no mask malarkey. Would love to be proven wrong.

<comment><USER3> An expert in the field discusses how to stay safe when a dangerous virus is spreading. [1]

[1] [https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/25/wuhan-coronavirus- safet...](https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/25/wuhan-coronavirus-safety- china/)

<comment><USER2> This is helpful, thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> one interesting note from the article:

——————————

Claim: 'Face masks don't work'

Wearing a face mask is not an iron clad guarantee that you won't get sick – viruses can also transmit through the eyes and tiny viral particles, known as aerosols, can still penetrate masks. However, masks are effective at capturing droplets, which is the main transmission route of coronavirus, and some studies have estimated a roughly five-fold protection versus no barrier. If you are likely to be in close contact with someone infected, a mask cuts the chance of the disease being passed on. If you're just walking around town and not in close contact with others, wearing a mask is unlikely to make any difference.

<comment><USER5> The droplets will also hit your eyes. Masks work in conjunction with other PPE and primarily by capturing outbound droplets

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Asymmetry. Convex decision. So long as there is no risk of harm from masks & disinfectants, the decision is wise, in spite of the "absence of evidence"." @nntaleb[1]

[1] [https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1233374759271923712](https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1233374759271923712)

<comment><USER5> Except that a mask worn by you may be a mask not worn by a sick person, nurse or doctor in a close range situation.

<comment><USER7> Wearing masks is a zero sum game? What?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't even buy a bloody mask in the US at the moment, nowhere available, so effective or not doesn't really matter...

<comment><USER9> Do you know how to make a mask? Perhaps then those who can make the mask by themself can have a mask even if the store doesn't sell it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why do I keep reading the advice that it's important not to touch your face? How is the skin of the hands different from the skin of the face?

<comment><USER11> The face is where all the mucous membranes are located (tear ducts, nasal passages, etc.). These are weak spots through which pathogens are more likely to successfully infect the body.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> mask != respirator:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4868605/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4868605/)</comment>


7 Tools to Stay Ahead of the Curve - <AUTHOR> http://bjoernw.com/bjoerns-blog/2008/10/13/7-tools-to-stay-ahead-of-the-curve.html

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I use Google Reader and although sometimes I don't always keep up, it's a great way to keep everything in one place... and Twitter- I can't believe how many young people still don't have a twitter!</comment>


OCaml, Batteries Included presentation [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://forge.ocamlcore.org/docman/view.php/77/36/batteries-included.pdf

<comment><USER2> The presentation isn't as long as the slide count makes it out to be; each transition (such as adding a bullet point to a list) gets its own slide. So even though it's 127 pages, you can read through it in 10 minutes.

The meat of it doesn't start until slide 35. Everything before that is motivation for the project, which is improving the library and syntax of OCaml.

Did anyone else find the proposed syntax Python-y? I actually think that's a good thing, as it's expressive. But even the name ("Batteries Included") makes me think of Python, as Guido famously considers Python a language with the batteries included.

(Disclaimer: I'm making my way through the OCaml tutorial (<http://www.ocaml- tutorial.org/>), so I don't even qualify as a OCaml newbie since I've never written a line of OCaml code. But I will seriously consider it for my next systems programming project, since it seems to occupy the intersection of functional, expressive and low-overhead.)

<comment><USER3> Yes, it's clear that this project was inspired by Python. In the presentation's language comparison, Python is the overall winner. If they can combine the best aspects of Python with C-like performance, more power to them.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can money still be made in online courses? - <AUTHOR> I'm thinking of trying to make money via online courses.
Is there still money to be made or has the ship sailed?
Which is the best marketplace to develop for? Udemy? <comment><USER2> Dislclaimer: I run a product in Ed Tech space.

Depends on the domain and market. If you are looking to create and sell yet another "Learn how to code" course, you are going to have a hard time even though you can still get a piece of the pie.

However, if you create quality online courses in domains that are still doing paper or in person but students are hungry to consume more online content, there are plenty of opportunities but it depends on your knowledge and experience in those domains.

</comment><comment><USER3> Online courses is "the business model" for influencers. It's a heavily content driven business model. If you already have a vibrant and following community that's the best way to earn money on top of ads and product placements. It's also repeatable and you already of ton of content you can recycle. Apart from that, sure! Search for a niche.

</comment><comment><USER4> Udemy is the worst of the worst : you often find courses that have been stolen, they just add a 2 minutes introductory video on top of the stolen content.

I wouldn't use Udemy even if it was free.

</comment><comment><USER5> I created an online course this year, which was based on a somewhat popular blog post of mine which I now use to send people to the course. So mainly yet another "learn how to code" class.

Moneywise, it has not been worth it, I have so far earned < $500 in 5 months (I publish on Udemy and using the free tier of teachable). I took me 3-4 months to create the course (almost fulltime).

However, I see this as a learning experience. I wanted to figure if I like creating a course. And I can say that it requires much more work than it seemed to be but I enjoy teaching and the overall satisfaction I get from creating a course.

My next course I want to research much deeper upfront (building a mailing list) and also self-publish only. It would not recommend publishing on Udemy. _All_ of my sales on Udemy have been a 10-15$ promotion, which means I earn very little on each sale. I didn't know that before, but I don't think anyone sells the course for the official price. The pricing seems to be just a marketing trick.

I think making serious money online is something for the long haul and requires to have several products. You need to have your substantial list of followers that you can sell products to on your own platform OR find a lucrative niche which is getting harder to do. Also, you have to enjoy this because it is a lot of work to create quality courses.</comment>


Drucker on Apple - <AUTHOR> http://krmmalik.posterous.com/drucker-on-apple

<comment><USER2> I don't understand it. I only know companies that started small and eventually bought their suppliers. For example I read about Matsushita who started with bicycle lights and eventually bought the battery manufacturer.

How does this even apply to Google? They didn't own the internet infrastructure (still don't).

Apple is hardly a newcomer, and only now have they bought a chip manufacturer.

<comment><USER3> I think it applies to Apple as a way to model their advantages when entering a new market; they tightly control the hardware, and run their own OS and applications.

They where newcomers to MP3 players, to cell phones, and now (I guess) to tablet computers.

EDIT: That's "I think" as in "I think that is the perceived relevance of this quote", not as endorsement.

<comment><USER2> But they never controlled the whole economic chain? Also, doesn't every hardware manufacturer control their hardware? I just don't see what I am supposed to learn from that snippet.

<comment><USER4> Not controlled the whole economic chain, but knows and manages the costs of said chain. Switching over to Intel after Motorola proved itself unmanageable. Keeping OS development inhouse instead of buying from MS. These are managed costs.

Dell gets basically blackmailed by Wintel, Apple has an alternative for everything they buy.

<comment><USER2> I have troubles understanding that. What does know and manage the costs mean? Surely every manufacturer knows how much their supplies cost? Of course if you have more options (inhouse dev, other suppliers), you have more leverage and control. But there is a limit. I still don't see what is to learn from the snippet - that if you control the whole production chain, you can make it big? Hardly?

Switching to Intel was a huge success for Apple, if I remember correctly.

Also, for the iPad it is only the chip that Apple creates themselves. Or are they also creating their own IPS panels and SSD disks now? I wouldn't be surprised if the panel cost more than the chip.

<comment><USER5> > Surely every manufacturer knows how much their supplies cost?

They know the price today, but not the price next year. Think about Apples predicament with PowerPC not that long ago. It probably cost them quite a lot to make the change to Intel. I think A4 is a hedge against that same situation happening again - where they face a technical challenge altering their platform to avoid a critical performance disadvantage.

> Also, for the iPad it is only the chip that Apple creates themselves.

From a performance (battery and speed) standpoint the chip is probably more important than the display panels. Disks and RAM are debatable. AFAIK they manufacture the controllers for those though. That allows them tight integration with their OS. That is definitely an advantage since they can write their code with a much more limited architecture in mind.

All this being said, I doubt this is an advantage that will last. Companies that specialize generally outpace companies that generalize. I wouldn't be surprised if in 5 years, once Intel or whoever catches up with a chip specialized for this type of hardware, then Apple switches back.

This is really more a first mover advantage. They get to come out of the gate with a better overall package because they rolled their own practically everything (and can you think of anyone else who could ... from chip to OS and most of the inbetween). Remember this is a new category of product - the types of internal components well-suited to this type of technology are not in wide spread production at the moment. By the time they are turned into commodities Apple hopes to have a market lead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "But in every single case, the newcomer also enjoys a tremendous cost advantage, usually about 30 percent."

This doesn't seem to fit Apple. Their products are more expensive than the competitors, e.g. iPlayer vs Zen, Mac vs PC. They market their products as being more stylist, easier to use, trendy...

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't be surprised if Apple in fact _is_ enjoying these cost savings. They just don't happen to be passing them onto the consumer, rightly or wrongly.

<comment><USER7> It's well known that Apple regularly tries to corner manufacturing on key components for a spell. If I recall Samsung had an agreement with Apple for a number of years for nearly all of their flash memory of a certain type.

[http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/20/apple-once-again- squeezin...](http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/20/apple-once-again-squeezing- samsungs-flash-memory-supplies/)</comment></comment></comment>


Want a Better America? Stop Requiring Algebra - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/story/algebra-its-why-americans-are-jerks-598a11eb2c56 <comment><USER2> I disagree. I say stop requiring calculus! Algebra I've found useful and helpful as a software engineer, but I've never once used calculus. Algebra is a good logical framework to put train everyone for tech careers, but calculus is just torture.</comment>


Online-go – Source code for the Online-Go.com web interface - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/online-go/online-go.com <comment><USER2> To be clear, it's just the frontend for now. Frontend as in the client-side stuff and the backend stuff required to directly support it. The core backend code that manages the games and what-not is not currently available, though it looks like that might happen eventually.[1]

All that said, I'm glad to see this happen!

[1] [https://forums.online-go.com/t/the-online-go-com-user- interf...](https://forums.online-go.com/t/the-online-go-com-user-interface-is- now-open-source/10987)

</comment><comment><USER3> OGS (online-go.com) is great. I am impressed that it hasn't taken over KGS by now, which is to my knowledge the largest western server.

I have tried Pandanet IGS, KGS, Tygem, WBaduk and even obscure ones such as Fly or Die and Go Chat (Facebook messenger bot).

I think OGS offers by far the most frictionless way to start and a more modern UI. It even offers really nice features such as the ability to draw on a board during a review.

<comment><USER4> KGS keeps my interest because of automatch. Getting a game is fire and forget.

I also believe people on KGS play more conventional go, which I enjoy more.

<comment><USER5> automatch is definitely on the near-time shortlist of features we'll be implementing.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's awesome to hear

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Absolutely amazing webiste. Incredibly well done, has a great community, and Ive had tons of fun playing on it.

If you want to play go - I highly recommend it!

</comment><comment><USER5> One of the developers of OGS here! We're pretty excited to make this happen and continue development of the site and hopefully bring Go (the game) to a larger audience.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's strange that the Go community calls all the online Go servers letter-GS (GS stands for "Go Server").

"online-go.com", for example, has never called itself OGS (and that's rather a stupid name).

IGS (Internet Go Server) calls itself "Pandanet", which is a better name, but the community insists on IGS.

KGS is probably the one to blame on this strange state of things, because it's official name is "KGS Go Server", a mutually recursive acronym.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually really like it. It's a fun aspect of the ecosystem. It's also not explicitly explained anywhere - you just sort of have to figure it out.

I occasionally go to a Go meetup in NYC and hear this a lot:

"Do you play online?"

"Yeah, KGS."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why oh why did someone name a programming language "Go"?

For some reason when I read the headline I thought I was going (sic) to see the Go Game coded in the Go Language.

But this is JS.

</comment><comment><USER9> This seems to be a frontend ui for a go (the board game) site for those looking for golang or somthing else.</comment>


NYC Startups to Watch - <AUTHOR> http://www.timeinc.com/pressroom/10nycstartups.php

<comment><USER2> Looks like it is time for me to make a data driven index of NYC startups. This is such fluff.

<comment><USER3> Your indices of FB follows and twitter followers and Alexa rankings aren't "data driven." They take some numbers as inputs, sure, but that doesn't mean they're data-driven.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find it interesting that one of them is _literally_ "like facebook, but for dogs".

<comment><USER5> Klooff, if the pet lovers on HN want to check it out: <http://www.klooff.com/>

<comment><USER6> Interestingly, they are a Chilean company, incubated at Startup Chile ( <http://startupchile.org/startups/klooff/> )

<comment><USER7> Not a Chilean company, although they did participate in Startup Chile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Loosecubes is now closed: <https://www.loosecubes.com/> Anyone knows what happend to them?

<comment><USER9> Yup. Was a big head scratcher around here. They raised $7.8M and shutdown 6 mos later. Rumors are they ever actually closed it, which would make a lot more sense than they burned over $1M/mo.

[http://betabeat.com/2012/11/what-happened-to-loosecubes- new-...](http://betabeat.com/2012/11/what-happened-to-loosecubes-new- enterprise-associates-closure-venture-coworking-dumbo/)

<comment><USER10> The CEO gave an interview this February

[http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/report/loosecubes-pioneer- ri...](http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/report/loosecubes-pioneer-rides-the- ups-and-downs-of-startup-life/1328)

> _A large part of that reported $7.8 million never actually came through. > McKellar says that the investor syndicate, led by New Enterprise Associates, > stopped funding the company. Faced with the decision of whether to operate > on a severely amputated budget or to close down, she opted for the latter_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What would Time know about this?

<comment><USER12> Use Time's previous "Most Promising Startups" for their success rate:

2012 - <http://www.timeinc.com/pressroom/10nycstartups2012.php>

2011 - <http://www.timeinc.com/pressroom/events/10nycstartups/>

But then, how do you rate a startup as successful? Number of users, revenue, is being acquired a good or bad thing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> These articles are really just signalling devices for which shops overspend on PR and/or have good looking founders.</comment>


April proves to be the cruellest month again as Fujitsu staff down tools - a-smith https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/10/april_2017_will_forever_be_known_as_fujitsu_strike_month/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is a run-of-the-mill "union vs management" story. Only the fact that Fujitsu = management makes this vaguely on-point for Hacker News.

Flagged.

</comment><comment><USER2> It would appear that Mr A Smith reads nothing but The Register, or at least only posts The Register stories to HackerNews</comment>


Ridejoy for iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://ridejoy.com/mobile

<comment><USER2> Would love any comments/suggestions you have-- this was our first iPhone app for those involved (mainly one designer and one engineer), so it was quite the learning experience. We're expecting a lot of, um, good feedback :) Thanks!

<comment><USER3> Did you build it on something like Parse?

<comment><USER2> Nope, we already had a full backend for our web service so introducing a new dependency for only part of their value prop didn't seem worthwhile

(Though we love the people at Parse, and the product looks pretty great!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ridejoy looks great, but Canadians out there should really take a look at LiveRides (<http://liverides.com>)

Their app does what Ridejoy does and more - it even lets you securely communicate and track where a driver is when he/she is on his/her way to pick you up.

I'm really glad to see people in this space. I'm fed up of big oil and driving my car alone. Driving should be a social experience with friendly people that doesn't hurt the planet needlessly.

<comment><USER2> Ridejoy has hundreds of active rides in Canada (especially around Vancouver, but also Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Ottawa) and three Canadian cities are in the Popular Destinations section of our iPhone app.

We also launched our iPhone app in Canada: [http://mobilesyrup.com/2012/08/14/ridejoy-ride-sharing- app-m...](http://mobilesyrup.com/2012/08/14/ridejoy-ride-sharing-app-moves- into-canada-tries-to-make-carpooling-a-bit-friendlier/)

So definitely check out Ridejoy in Canada as well :)

(Good luck to gozman/LiveRides, more people trying rideshare helps everyone)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I tested it out for the Chicagoland area to see how much saturation they have here, and did a search for a trip from the city to a NW suburb for tomorrow.

1 result came up, so I clicked, and it brought up a Craigslist page within an iFrame. Is Ridejoy just scraping Craigslist? Genuinely curious.

<comment><USER2> We do show matching rides from Craigslist as a service to our users. Using an iframe means we don't need to scrape/copy the content to show it, but it still looks good/works well. CL seems fine with it, we haven't had issues with them. And we send lots of our traffic to them, not that they need it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _"Share rides with friendly people to (...) Every week, Ridejoy helps thousands of friendly drivers and passengers share rides and save on gas."_

That's very nice, but nowhere in the FAQ is explained how Ridejoy guarantees that only friendly people get a ride. Who's to say I'm not picking up an axe murderer?

<http://www.snopes.com/horrors/madmen/hairyarm.asp>

<comment><USER7> Great question and thanks for linking to the snopes article de-bunking this myth.

Most Americans have shared rides in some form, whether as a carpool or a campus ride board. We incorporate a number of identity & safety features and are bringing far more transparency and accountability to ridesharing.

Like any form of public transit, there is some risk involved, but ultimately we empower our users to make informed decisions. In line with the success of Couchsurfing, Meetup and other services, we see more and more people interested in rideshare as a fun and affordable form of transportation and every week thousands of people are making the decision to share rides on Ridejoy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh and if you're curious about how we built the app - here's an article on our design process:

[http://pandodaily.com/2012/08/16/ridejoy-for-ios-behind- the-...](http://pandodaily.com/2012/08/16/ridejoy-for-ios-behind-the-making- of-a-ride-sharing-mobile-app/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Ridejoy levels-up. Awesome jobs guys! It looks fantastic.

<comment><USER7> Thanks so much! Hope we're able to match you with some awesome people to rideshare with!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I used ridejoy to find a ride to a trail race a few weeks ago-- it works fantastically. It was a bit annoying having to check online day-of though; it's gonna be nice having it on my phone next time.

</comment><comment><USER10> Any plans to make it available for international customers?

</comment><comment><USER11> Congrats!

Any particularly interesting lessons learned?

<comment><USER7> Thanks! Longer may come down the road but some off the top of my head:

Mobile is totally different from web - small screen, on the go, harder to easily iterate after launch

Get a feel for the apps you like/aspire to be - check out cool apps and get ideas from the ones you like

Figure out what you're optimizing for - limited real estate means you need to focus on the flows that matter to you

Do multiple rounds of user testing - you are going to be surprised by what people try to do

Polish comes at the very end - easy to get ahead of yourself and you might have to throw it out</comment></comment>


Why Gandhi hated iodine - <AUTHOR> http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/08/16/sam-kean-why-gandhi-hated-iodine/

<comment><USER2> There seems to be a bit of myopia in the political/medical establishment here. Common salt is a cultural icon that is not likely to be replaced or altered. Why not be creative and add Iodine to something else? Ghee would be my first suggestion. It is prevalent in Indian cooking, and almost always used in strongly flavored dishes.</comment>


Did You Know That Women Are Still Paid Less Than Men? - <AUTHOR> http://www.whitehouse.gov/equal-pay

<comment><USER2> _the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which made it illegal for employers to pay unequal wages to men and women who perform substantially equal work._

How does this work? Do you go to every woman in the company and tell them "Hey the new guy is a better negotiator than you were, so we're bumping up your salary in order to hire him?" Do you have to offer men similar pay to other men? What about industries where women are paid more then men on average?

</comment><comment><USER3> Apparently the White House has something of a glass house situation on its hands: <http://freebeacon.com/hostile-workplace/></comment>