Hacker News Reader

Comment by justindz | Hacker News Reader

The average Joe seems to be moving towards a web presence based on a blogging platform or a social network or a CMS. If app providers build semantically and enterprises or large data set publishers build semantically, you could conceivably end up with a reasonably semantic web for content of value.

I think the idealists are on to something, but as usual they are whacking off over the thought that one day everything will be semantic. That's the pipedream to which you rightly refer. What I said above will not take place for many home-spun sites or apps or businesses that can't justify the cost with added value or increased revenue.

View on HN

Only in the sense of "metadata you get for free."

It's perfectly reasonable for, say, a CMS to semantically mark up when an article was posted. That's free. The server knows the date, so why not? It's not hurting anyone. Similarly, a camera with a GPS chip could easily add LAT/LONG EXIF metadata to every photo, except for the power, that's free too. You could use that to answer queries like "give me all photos taken in Laos in the past year", for example. Nothing wrong with that.

Where it breaks down is that there isn't enough free metadata to make the semantic web worthwhile. It relies on people actually saying "This is an address I'm typing right now... this is the street component of the address... This is the City..." It's ridiculous. Certainly, there'll be special purpose applications making use of free metadata in the future, but the whole web being semantic will never happen.

Google Maps seems to do a pretty good job of parsing addresses. Given a database of say, US city names, state names and zip codes, could an API not be built that would recognize something like that and wrap it in a microformat either by a stupid simple API call or just as an auto-expanding template type feature?

I agree with you that the average user (which includes business, etc.) will not do it significantly unless it's effortless so I wonder if app platforms or frameworks can make it more effortless in this way. That combined with some level of justified business value in some sectors could be our best stab at a practically, usefully, partially semantic web.

Being pragmatic, I'm not one to say that unless the whole web is semantic then we give up. I'm also not one to believe the whole web will be semantic or that all of it really needs to be.

If you had a machine that could recognise addresses with reasonable accuracy and zero false positives, you wouldn't NEED microformats or the semantic web. That's the whole point, smart humans spending their time compensating for the stupidity of machines. It's a boil the ocean strategy that only makes any kind of economic sense of consider your users peons whose time has no value. Spending time making machines smarter is an investment in the future, the semantic web is an admission of defeat.

Also, Google doesn't parse addresses at all, it uses its index data the same way it does spell checking.

Not all websites are basically just documents with a management interface, however.

Remember, there are an awful lot of sites with database back ends that store structured data. The technical difficulty of emitting that structured data out into a web page using a microformat (or RDFa, or whatever) is going to be pretty low, so if it's useful (for SEO or anything else), I expect it will start happening.

What use is semantic metadata that is generated automatically? The whole point of "semantic" is that it's created by humans to describe the data; you can't get around the "extra work" requirement without defeating the uniqueness of the semantic tags. And if the extra work still stands, the average Joe will not bother with it. Hell, I wouldn't bother with it, in any form.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com