Representing web applications as knowledge graphs

But this isn't about a new way of presenting information to rival sparql or something.

This is a technical report about a guy who wrote a slightly advanced crawler bot that discovers the behaviour of a modern Web application and can maybe be used to generate automated tests.

It has a lot in common with that post about a new yc company using llms to generate integrations for existing undocumented Web applications.

> Knowledge graph-based systems, such as Squirrel [8], have been proposed to crawl the semantic web and represent data in structured formats. However, these approaches are typically limited to RDF-based web data and do not capture the dynamic, user-driven interactions seen in modern web applications.

On the other hand, we've exported high enough complexity and code payload sizes to the front-end and seen bandwidth rise enough that it's possible for some full page reloads to beat responsiveness/interactivity of many front ends at this point. But if one doesn't want to do that, there's techniques to let JS act primarily in the controller role while letting the back end take care of model/view concerns that, exchanging HTML as an adequate data serialization and display/UI description format.

And, just as importantly, as a hypertext and serialization format, it provides opportunity for machine discovery and description of available resources. The ones we're most used to are search engines, but we're obviously in an era where we're discovering what else is possible.

Possible ML models can also work with JS messes, but since they're less legible for people, there's less likely a good corpus correlating accurate descriptions with code in the wild. Legibility of what you feed the client has benefits beyond executablity, something that people who grew up with the early web were apparently prepared to understand.

I don't!

EDIT: to be earnest, I sincerely wish the web as it stands had chosen some serious distinction between "documents", "documents-with-scripting-but-no-web-requests", and "interactive applications with remote state". As it stands the last option trivially passes for the first two options.