Re:GraphQL Is a Trap?
by PaulHoule on Friday May 06, 2022 @11:26AM
(#31286287)
I'd say GraphQL and Schema.org were both "asymmetric technologies" in the sense of asymmetric warfare but maybe the other way around.
Both of them tackled some of the problem space the "semantic web" tackled (e.g. the linked data idea of do an http request and receive a graph) but in a way that privileged the large organizations that pushed them.
With no semantics Facebook can return whatever they want from a GraphQL query, whatever is in the commercial interests. (I'd add that they have ethical constraints on top of that involving privacy, spam control, etc.) They have no real concern that anybody else can publish GraphQL and they are big enough that they can go it alone and be a defacto standard to interact with Facebook no matter how GraphQL fares in the real world.
When schema.org came out my wheelhouse was information extraction from Wikipedia, Freebase, things like hat, and I was like... There is no 'reification of subjects' in schema.org, it's not really that much better from my perspective than extracting facts from text. In fact if anything it is more of a way for Google to get a training set for a real text extractor than a way to publish facts Google can use directly.
So I was bearish on it initially but the standard really improved and technology got better both in terms of natural language processing and my understanding of matching engines that can 'reify subjects' by matching graph patterns. I don't see schema.org as difficult to consume now.
Both of them tackled some of the problem space the "semantic web" tackled (e.g. the linked data idea of do an http request and receive a graph) but in a way that privileged the large organizations that pushed them.
With no semantics Facebook can return whatever they want from a GraphQL query, whatever is in the commercial interests. (I'd add that they have ethical constraints on top of that involving privacy, spam control, etc.) They have no real concern that anybody else can publish GraphQL and they are big enough that they can go it alone and be a defacto standard to interact with Facebook no matter how GraphQL fares in the real world.
When schema.org came out my wheelhouse was information extraction from Wikipedia, Freebase, things like hat, and I was like... There is no 'reification of subjects' in schema.org, it's not really that much better from my perspective than extracting facts from text. In fact if anything it is more of a way for Google to get a training set for a real text extractor than a way to publish facts Google can use directly.
So I was bearish on it initially but the standard really improved and technology got better both in terms of natural language processing and my understanding of matching engines that can 'reify subjects' by matching graph patterns. I don't see schema.org as difficult to consume now.