Hacker News Reader

Comment by bct | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the worst articles I've read on the subject, and that's a pretty strong statement.

> “Let’s say you’re searching for Renaissance Painters”…. Really? Who searches for that?"

It's an example that happens to be easy to demonstrate. It's pretty easy to think of other cross-dataset queries that you might be more interested in.

View on HN

It's a horrific example, but the point being made is true, in that in areas such as music enough information is generated regularly in a non-structured way with no tie in to the semantic web that, the Facebook silo aside, practically no one has up to date information about bands etc., certainly not Freebase or similar. It's also a lost cause hoping for such things to be comprehensive.

Facebook have also become a serious problem, in that a lot of places publish there without realising or caring that their information essentially is locked in. This gives their graph search a simply enormous advantage over anyone else.

practically no one has up to date information about bands etc., certainly not Freebase or similar.

Hmm.. that leads to a couple of random thoughts:

1. How up-to-date and comprehensive does it need to be? What kinds of queries will people need to access (either directly or indirectly) about music, to serve their purposes?

2. DBPedia, through Wikpedia, actually does have a lot of information about bands and musicians and music. For example, see:

http://dbpedia.org/snorql/?query=PREFIX+dbo%3A+%3Chttp%3A%2F...

3. But Wikipedia will never be comprehensive exactly because of their notability guidelines. All the latest new super-underground Norwegian Black Metal bands that are recording in a wood shack in somebody's backyard, are not going to have Wikipedia entries.

4. On the other hand, musicbrainz.com seems to have an awfully comprehensive set of listings. And their data is part of the semantic web / linked data cloud, as well.

By way of example, Verminous are something of an underground act, and are not on Wikipedia, but their info is in Musicbrainz.

Anyway... just thinking out loud here.

I think the complaint is more from a perspective that there has been relatively little activity in the information space for Renaissance Painters. I do not necessarily know if that is a true statement, but I do think it is fair to say that the majority of the information out there has already been heavily vetted in that area.

Also, it falls into the category of searches that you'd likely just as soon hit up wikipedia directly. :)

I did a PhD in art history, and I can assure you my ex-colleagues still do a lot of vetting of Renaissance painters. Their books and papers might make it to the Google Books or Google Scholar silos, one day: the findings in there, are still unretrieved by semantic web technologies. Present day’s search tech serves social chatter and pulp much better.

I have no doubt that they do. How do you think they compare, numbers wise, to other topics?

I'm not so sure I think it is the semantic web that is at fault. Seems that it is as much consumption as anything else. The web, search, and related technologies are all keyed around what people are actively consuming today. If you have trouble finding something, that is mainly because not many other folks are also looking for the same thing.

How many people, numbers wise, do you think were discussing particle physics? Yet, there we are: the Web was devised to foster such niche discussion and make the information in there easily findable and sharable amongst researchers. It just turned out that what Bernes-Lee & Cailliau came up with, could be applied to what the general public likes to talk about, too.

So I don’t believe that innovation in web and search technologies is keyed around what consumers want. Rather, it’s the other way around: more demanding use cases drive innovation, some of it can be repurposed and then gets fine-tuned thanks to the bigger R&D budgets that come with mass market application.

But the seed of innovation lays in the niches.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com