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Re:A Review of the Semantic Web Field by breck on Tuesday January 26, 2021 @09:46AM (#25916279)
I agree, the research is overly complicated.

So it's a lot of extra work to sift through, but I've found a lot of gold in there.

If you're looking for a simple, noise-free way to do the semantic web, I'm very confident that Tree Notation will enable it (https://treenotation.org/).

I've played around a bit with turning Schema.org into a Tree Language, and think that would be a fruitful exercise, but plenty more on the plate first.

FWIW I've pitched this concept to W3C for 4 or 5 years to no avail yet. I think though if someone can put together a decent prototype the idea might start clicking.

Imagine a noise free way to encode the semantic web with natural 3-d positional semantics. Could be cool!

Re:A Review of the Semantic Web Field by ta988 on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @09:09AM (#25928425)
It is unclear to me what it would achieve compared to a spog (subject, predicate, object, graph) based representation like it exists in RDF based triplestores.
Re:A Review of the Semantic Web Field by breck on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @09:40AM (#25928780)
Yes you are right. Semantic triplets are great. I think the semantics are largely the same. Here's my work in progress argument for why this is relevant.

My take with ontologies is building consensus is hard.

Tree Notation offers a solution to the problem of: what should we agree on for the encoding? I assume that simpler is better, all else being equal. Then Tree Notation is the simplest, in terms of the thing with the fewest pieces(tokens).

To get to Tree Notation, nothing was added, only stripped. I started with an existing notation and stripped away each visible syntax token that wasn't needed. Surprisingly, not one is needed. Not one quote, parens, bracket, colon, etc.

So now if we can get consensus around going with the simplest thing, we have got a way to agree on an whether we should use XML, JSON-LD, turtle, etc. The simplest thing works (which would be Tree Notation, or a close relative—someone can rebrand the notation but the idea is largely the same). This does not suffer from the 927 problem, as there are a few classes of things where we do have 1 new language that is mathematically superior and of a different kind than others (binary notation, for example).

So after you have agreement on that encoding, versioning and forking and merging schemas is dead simple (just use Git—in Tree Notation all changes are semantic and noise free).

So now we've solved what encoding to use for our ontologies, and we have a very fast and efficient way to collaborate on them (it's just plain text and git).

That brings us to a third advantage which is more theoretical. Tree Notation maps words/nodes to a 3-D representation. This means that there would be an X-Y-Z isomorphism with an ontology and the real world. I don't really know where we go from there, but at least by this point we've moved the semantic web idea a lot further and can start looking at the next realm of possibilities.