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Comment by kjhughes | Hacker News Reader

We keep hearing rumblings of the coming semantic web:

  2001: Tim Bernes-Lee publishes "The Semantic Web" in Scientific American Magazine
  2006: Microsoft acquires Powerset
  2009: Microsoft touts Bing as a "decision engine"
  2010: Google acquires Metaweb
  2012: Google introduces "Knowledge Graph"

Is this the big one?

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  2007+: work on machine operable Wikipedia (DBpedia, Semantic MediaWiki, Wikidata)
  2010: Apple acquires Siri
  2010: Facebook introduces Open Graph
  2011: Google, Bing, Yahoo (schema.org) agree to index embedded data

you realize that the semantic web is not about the semantics of the data, but instead about the semantics of the schema, right?

The semantic web allows computers to deal with the "content" of pages instead of just displaying them. http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/

Any linking provides context thus semantics. Linking to a schema makes this explicit. So it's both, right? Or are you making another point?

you realize that the semantic web is not about the semantics of the data, but instead about the semantics of the schema, right?

I'm having trouble getting your point here. A schema can be thought of as metadata about the data to which it is applied; so "semantics of the schema" are also implicitly "semantics of the data" in a sense. I guess I'm missing some nuance about the point you're trying to make... would you care to elaborate?

I'd give good odds that joshu already knows this, but I'd like to point out that a lot of work has gone into making freebase's schema machine readable. The schema is stored and constructed in the same way as all other data in freebase (as are metaschema, such as http://www.freebase.com/view/type/object/type and so on).

you realize that the semantic web is not about the semantics of the data, but instead about the semantics of the schema, right?

The meaning of semantics (semantics of semantics?) can get philosophical real quick. Here I'm just rolling with the OP's notion of things, not strings.

Slight correction: Microsoft acquired Powerset in 2008.

You're right. Thanks.

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