Semantic Web (The Technium Podcast S02 E10)

The Technium

The semantic web was an effort to mark up webpages with facts about their content. The dream was to enable computers, to understand the world by reading these webpages. We discuss why the effort failed, how it relates to symbolic AI/knowledge graphs, and how the vision could still be realized today.

Links/Resources:

• Introducing the Knowledge Graph
• https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html
• Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia
• Whatever happened to the Semantic Web? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16806657
• http://ai.stanford.edu/blog/introduction-to-knowledge-graphs/
• Aggregation Theory: https://stratechery.com/concept/aggregation-theory/

Chapters:

0:00 Intros

2:12 What is the Semantic Web?

3:59 The Early 2000's

8:32 The Idealism of the Semantic Web

11:30 How it worked

18:19 Roots in Symbolic AI

22:53 The OG Web 3.0

25:28 Why Did the Semantic Web Fail?

35:46 A Misalignment with the Medium

41:10 Crypto and Semantic Web Collide

43:25 Deep Learning and the Semantic Web Collide

47:09 Vestiges of the Semantic Web

49:44 Path to Intelligent Agents

55:03 Incentive structures

1:02:49 Token Curated Registries and the Semantic Web

===== About “The Technium” =====

The Technium is a weekly podcast discussing the edge of technology and what we can build with it. Each week, Sri and Wil introduce a big idea in the future of computing and extrapolate the effect it will have on the world.

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