Don't Panic: Facebook is the Private Beta of the Semantic Web | Hacker News Reader

Don't Panic: Facebook is the Private Beta of the Semantic Web

intridea.com

67 pointsmbleigh26 comments

The Semantic Web when it arrives will be fully federated like the Web we have now.

No way will I or most people I know be happy with a significant resource (like a Semantic Web) being owned or subject to the whims of one or a few people or organizations. Open Access controversies gives a hint of how much unhappiness will result if Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or any one entity looks to have a lock on such a vital web resource.

I'm not happy by Google's dominance of search & email, and yet it is there.

Here the matter is even worse due to the network effect: if most of your friends are using facebook's social tagging service, you'd have to be connected to it one way or the other.

how does google dominate email?

yahoo has more email account than google.

The Semantic Web when it arrives will be fully federated like the Web we have now.

The web we have now is not 100% federated. Our access and ability to publish on the web is controlled by a few large companies with some regulation by the government. Even if the Semantic Web takes off, I can't imagine that most people will be consuming that data autonomously. On the contrary, there will likely only be a few significant players be they browser producers or otherwise converting that information to be relevant to users, thus it won't really be the federated utopia so often espoused by the Semantic Web pundits. But hey, maybe I'm a pessimist. It's not to say we shouldn't care about privacy and about how big conglomerates with their own agendas use the data we give them, it's just that it's naive to think that there is some purely free form of the web yet to be discovered.

So we shouldn't mind the internet becoming a corporate-totalitarian mining town because there's a bright future ahead to be built on the initial infrastructure brought in by the corporate rulers?

I would ask why companies lose or relinquish control of such company towns, and would the same factors work online?

To get the ball rolling, I would posit that the same factors won't work. Data can't be relinquished in the same way that land or mineral rights can. For example: once the graph of my college friends is out there, there's no way I can ever reliably take it back.

As a historical fact, corporate mining towns are a thing of the past in the United States, and the great-great-grandchildren of the miners enjoy a prosperity that was unimaginable even to the mine owners back then.

Thanks for another reiteration of the OP premise. No one disputes history here. The devil's advocate position and the question raised are about the reasons why and how well those factors would work online. If we can figure this out, then this might give us a clue as to how specifically this might play out.

If you are implying that the mining towns caused the current prosperity, it is a non sequitor.

It works because they can't put the genie back in the bottle. They've now committed to supporting this open protocol and for them to try to take it away would mean breaking thousands of websites. Therefore others are free to build on top of their work without fear of the carpet being pulled out from beneath them.

As to relinquishment, it's a non-issue because Facebook owns nothing to begin with. Users pay attention to whatever suits them best, and when something comes along that does it better than Facebook, well they'll just use that instead.

Companies change protocols, platforms, and legal agreements all the time. Facebook's word is easily changed.

My idea of a semantic web is when the data on the web has value added to it by being able to tie disparate pieces of data together. The thrust of what Facebook is doing seems to be tieing my identity to data on the web. That's a different value prop.

One makes the web more usable to me, the other makes me more usable to other people.

But with the Open Graph protocol you do get the ability to tie disparate pieces of data together. For instance, let's say that I examine someone's tweet stream for links. If I fetch the OG data for each of those I can tell you whether they tweet most often about people, or movies, or whatever. I can show you a thumbnail display of images representing the things they linked to.

Open Graph is most definitely semantic web. Liking is just one possible application of that semantic data.

Oh yeah - I definitely agree.

I guess my thought was just that the semantic lens is focused in a different direction that I imagined. The mental model I always had was that the semantic info would let users make connections between datasets that model our physical world rather than datasets that monitor users themselves and how they use the web.

This is just a different use case than I imagined.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YcZ3Zqk0a8

I just took a better look at Open Graph. Certainly marking up pages with RDFa tags using standard Ontology's for properties and classes could be a useful thing.

The problem as I see it is that the Facebook corporation strongly discourages spidering the Facebook web site. It is certainly their right to do so, but from a research point of view it is a shame that it is not allowed to spider a portion of Facebook to get the RDF graph. It is difficult to know if something is useful if you can't play/experiment with it.

I'd be careful with drawing positive analogs to "how the west was won", in light of the results it had on the indigenous people, cultures and the environment.

...unfortunately the analogy is perhaps apt.

The analogy was meant to be more drawn to the frontier colonization of space as written in numerous sci-fi novels, but point taken. Luckily, I'm not entirely sure who the indigenous citizens of the internet would be to be damaged by rapid territorial expansion.

Us.

I have a problem with tossing around the term Semantic Web when their take is so much different than mine. The SW is about standards (RDF, RDFS, OWL, SPARQL, HTTP, using URIs to represent things and concepts, etc.) and a very large number of linked data publishers who hopefully use at least some common Ontology's to define classes of businesses, information sources, people, organizations, places, events, etc., etc. and to define the properties that have ranges and domains that are these standard classes.

I take a bit of heat for being a SW proponent but I believe that long term this is a big thing. I could be wrong, though.

Open Graph is based on RDFa and is a "standard" by which website owners can use URIs to represent a number of people, places, things and concepts. I admit that I tossed the term semantic web out there without fastidiously studying the accepted definition, but by the one you proposed I think Open Graph meets it.

You are absolutely correct that RDFa is a SW technology. I must admit some prejudice here: I went from thinking that RDFa was very useful to being skeptical when HTML5 won the standards war against XHTML. When I get back from vacation I would like to dig into what MySpace is doing; I just bookmarked your article and will look at it next week.

If Facebook is at least a bit nice (and smart), they will use Freebase types to make it easier to link data.

Allowing people to free-handedly add entities will be such a mess--no different from what we have today.

It's not enough to link people to urls. It'd be better to link people to standardized, uniquely identifiable (unambiguous) concepts.

Considering how much of a mess HTML5 adoption is, I'd be extremely surprised if RDF or anything similar is "eventually" merged into the browser. Maybe for an extremely distant "eventually".

The great thing here is that the browser vendors don't even have to do it. It could be handled entirely by browser extension developers for now, and once it catches on enough to make some waves, the browser vendors will want to pick it up as a "cool new feature". Once one vendor does it, others will fall in line so as not to appear behind.

Will "like" data be just as available, or does Facebook get to own that data?

More like the oh so public beta.

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