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Comment by nickbauman | Hacker News Reader

The semantic web is only useful if you believe syllogisms are the way to understand the world.

http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/semantic_s...

Clay Shirky unfortunately has no idea what he's talking about. You can interpret a CSV file as a set of syllogisms, too, if you want. RDF is data, just like CSV, except the shape is different. CSV is good for some things. RDF is good for other things.

RDF is a fantastic way to aggregate data from many different sources, for example. CSV sucks at that.

The problem is that RDF has been marketed so poorly, which has totally confused people like Shirky.

Can you point to an example or two where RDF is a "fantastic way to aggregate data..."? My sense is that things like microformats, which are more flexible and narrowly defined than RDF, are useful for this, too, but it hardly constitutes a "semantic web". It's just obvious connections between things. Something like a custom type of hyperlink is all. Not that this "all" is bad, it's just not going to revolutionize the world or anything more than the existing web already has.

The semantic web can be used for much more, you can for example put an item for sale, and crawlers would list it on aggregate sites. Same for events, you post a party invitation, which can automatically be insert into your friends calendar, and automatically added to list of participants when they accept the invitation.

Yes exactly.

It reminds me of the difference between Machine Learning in the earlier days, which was based on hard-coded features, compared to things like vector embeddings that derive semantics and semantic connections in a bottom-up manner.

Thanks for that link. Where would one find follow up, or similar, arguments of equal quality? I’m hoping the debate has continued these last 15 years since that was published.

I suppose that means that at least the category theorists might get some use out of it.

What do you mean? Categorical logic is hardly restricted to syllogistic reasoning.

Category theory is the study of the one single syllogism, the mighty arrow.

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