[pwdisswordfish9]

Obnoxiously bad take.

> Google info boxes[...] have nothing to do with the semantic web and everything to do with Google throwing a crapton of machine learning and humans at the problem of parsing distinctly non-semantic HTML until they cracked the problem

This is verging on /r/SelfAwarewolves material.

[jerf]

I'm pretty sure you're misinterpreting it. Google did not simply write a web scraper that pulls a <business_hours> or a <dc:business_hours> tag out of the web. They wrote a web scraper that super, super intelligently examines the HTML and looks for "anything that looks like business hours"; maybe it's in a table, maybe it's days of the week separated by &nbsp; and <br>, maybe it's in <div>s or <span>s with suggestive CSS class names, maybe it's just in a pile of other HTML. The exact promise of the Semantic Web was that we could just load up a page and get a <business_hours> out of it. Google had to extract the "semantics" with everything but the "semantic web", because the "semantic web" is a no-show. Throwing a crapton of machine learning and humans at extracting semantically useful information from a page is precisely what the Semantic Web isn't.

Which is why it is bizarrely unselfaware when Semantic Web advocates almost inevitably cite that as their biggest success. It isn't. It's their biggest failure.

[pwdisswordfish9]

> I'm pretty sure you're misinterpreting it

You should be more sure of the things you're pretty sure of before saying you're sure of them.

There was no misinterpretation—from this end, that is. Your comment wasn't particularly sophisticated. It didn't require explanation.

> Google did not simply write a web scraper that pulls a <business_hours> or a <dc:business_hours> tag out of the web. They wrote a web scraper that super, super intelligently examines the HTML and[...]

No shit. The value proposition of the semantic web follows from how the world would be much better off if that weren't necessary. It has always been the case that, without the "semantic" half of "semantic web", attaining Google-level mastery over the Web's messy inputs is really, really difficult and requires Google-level resources. This isn't news. Yet you presented it as if it were in insightful observation wrapped in sage wisdom.

In your attempt to "prove" by counterexample what's Wrong with the semantic web, you just end up undergirding its very premise.

> Which is why it is bizarrely unselfaware when Semantic Web advocates almost inevitably cite that as their biggest success.

You cited them. You are literally the only person who mentioned them here, at all. You brought them up.

Saddling someone who advocates for X with the burden of defending position Y that you yourself have pulled from thin air is a textbook example of a bad argument. If you defeat some easily take-downable opponent (a 6-year-old, let's say—and one who is made of straw, for good measure) and then plan to enter the ring in subsequent matches having only bothered yourself with the thought that you will face the threat of another strawchild, that's not wise. It's stupid.