Manu Sporny

I'm working on language ressources and graphs and in my opinion, RDF is so flawed you shouldn't even bother with it. I will address the topic during a conference in June (email me -- info in my profile -- for follow up or to get my articles if you're interested by the topic). JSON-LD is trying to make RDF sexier (more exactly said, RDF try to pimp itself by using JSON-LD) but as it is just RDF with a new serialization syntax, it share every of its issues.

Main issues are:

- a literal node (strings which carry the useful information for an human) cannot be the source of an edge, so you end up creating "resources" nodes and pushing content as leaf of the graph. Access to its is thus done with a lot of indirections.

- no annotations, which mean you cannot represent simple graph construct such as a weighted edge.

- blank nodes, needed to join more than two piece of data which, are anonymous so they are difficult to reuse. That's sad because a graph is supposed to make data link each other. Coupled with issue 1, it mean most linguistic resources graphs are actually closer to trees than real graphs.

- reliance on the web infrastructure (IRI, DNS, web servers, ...) which is a big dependency with a lot of gotchas and not fitted for every uses cases (self contained data for example)

- performances is abyssal. I tried one of the dictionary build on RDF, and some query took up to 40 seconds (!) to return no result. Even bloated web dictionaries perform under 2 seconds.

Also, the…

The author completely falls short to describe the evolution of the SemWeb over the past 10 years. Tons of specs, several declarative languages and technologies have been grown to not just get beyond the verbosity of a serialization format such as XML, but also move away from the classic relational data model.

Turtle, JSON-LD, SPARQL, Neo4J, Linked Data Fragments,... come to mind. And then there are the emerging applications of linked data. If anything, the Federated Web is exactly about URLs and semantic web technologies based on linking and contextualizing data.

I think that the author addressed this very well:

There is a popular perception that the internet standards bodies didn’t do much from the finalization of HTTP 1.1 and HTML 4.01 in 2002 to when HTML 5 really got on track. This period is also known (only by me) as the Dark Age of XHTML. The truth is though, the standardization folks were fantastically busy. They were just doing things which ultimately didn’t prove all that valuable.

One such effort was the Semantic Web.

Most of the things you listed were developed in that period. I'll make a partial exception for JSON-LD because - as the author of that standard himself says:

So screw it, we thought, let’s create a graph data model that looks and feels like JSON, RDF and the Semantic Web be damned.

and

I hate the narrative of the Semantic Web because the focus has been on the wrong set of things for a long time.

[1]…

First off, this is a community group "specification," which is to say, it's part of a W3C process that's supposed to be easier for lay community members to be involved--and easier for people who have no clue about implementation issues to hijack the process [1]. So I decided to do some digging to see how involved actual browser vendors were in the process...

The backstory seems to involve a very, very acrimonious community split. See http://manu.sporny.org/2016/browser-api-incubation-antipattern/ (it's a biased view, and I haven't researched alternative viewpoints).

As far as I can untangle, the community group here decided they wanted to dictate to browser vendors what they should implement, complete with philosophical viewpoints. The working group that actually has traction with browser vendors and is likely to implement doesn't appear to be paying too much attention to this, and the community group seems unwilling to engage with the browser vendors meaningfully.

In short, this is unlikely to go anywhere.

[1] It should be noted that regular WGs are also amenable to this capture (e.g., the XHTML work that ended up with all the browser vendors quitting).

Most technologies that were specific to the "Semantic Web", such as OWL and SPARQL, failed to scale and failed to solve realistic problems, and therefore died. (I always maintained that running a SPARQL endpoint amounted to running a DDoS on yourself.)

However, we got something kind of cool out of the RDF model that underlies it, especially when some sufficiently opinionated developers identified the bad parts of RDF and dumped them. We got JSON-LD [1], a way for making APIs describe themselves in a way that's compatible with RDF's data model. For what I mean about sufficiently opinionated developers, I recommend reading Manu Sporny's "JSON-LD and Why I Hate the Semantic Web" [2], a wonderful title for the article behind the main reason the Semantic Web is still relevant.

Google makes use of JSON-LD in real situations: for example, an airline that uses JSON-LD can send you an e-mail that Google Assistant can use to update you on the status of your flight, and Gmail can use to give you a simple button for checking in.

[1] https://json-ld.org/

[2] http://manu.sporny.org/2014/json-ld-origins-2/

Ashton Tate made a tree editor called [Framework](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashton-Tate#Framework) which I used to write my thesis in the late 80s on a DOS machine. I loved it. It had intuitive keystrokes, using the numeric keypad to zoom in (+) and out (-) of the tree with an easy way to collapse the tree branches (enter).

Each frame held other frames, or could hold text, a spreadsheet or a database.

It wasn’t a DAG (directed acyclic graph) which was frustrating sometimes.

I think you could program leaves to link to other leaves, but I wasn’t any good at programming. It had its own programming language FRED.

The people who grokked it loved it.

I think there is still a [closed source](http://www.framework.com/) community supporting it, last time I looked.

I hope you will use markup with something like YAML or [JSON-LD](http://manu.sporny.org/2014/json-ld-origins-2/) to store your links.

The semantic web is now integrated into the web and for the most part it's invisible. Take a look at the timeline given in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3983179

Some of those startups exited for hundreds of millions, providing, for example, the metadata in the right hand pane of Google search.

The new action buttons in Gmail, adopted by Github, are based on JSON-LD: https://github.com/blog/1891-view-issue-pull-request-buttons-for-gmail

JSON-LD, which is a profound improvement on and compatible with the original RDF, is the only web metadata standard with a viable future. Read the reflections of Manu Sporny, who overwhelmed competing proposals and bad standards with sheer technical power: http://manu.sporny.org/2014/json-ld-origins-2/

There's really no debate any more. We use the the technology borne by the "Semantic Web" every day.