As the article itself points out, this has been around for 25 years. It isn’t an accident that nobody does things this way, it wasn’t an oversight.
I worked on semantic web tech back in the day, the approach has major weaknesses and limitations that are being glossed over here. The same article touting RDF as the missing ingredient has been written for every tech trend since it was invented. We don’t need to re-litigate it for AI.
flanked-evergl · 16m ago
RDF is great but it's somewhat inadvertently captured by academia.
The tooling is not in a state where you can use it for any commercial or mission critical application. The tooling is mainly maintained by academics, and their concerns run almost exactly counter to normal engineering concerns.
An engineer would rather have tooling with limited functionality that is well designed and behaves correctly without bugs.
Academics would rather have tooling with lots of niche features, and they can tolerate poor design, incorrect behavior and bugs. They care more for features, even if they are incorrect, as they need to publish something "novel".
The end result is that almost all things you find for RDF is academia quality and lots of it is abandoned because it was just part of publication spam being pumped and dumped by academics that need to publish or perish.
Anyone who wants to use it commercially really has to start from scratch almost.
I'm completely out of time or energy for any side project at the moment, but if someone wants to steal my idea: please take an llm model and fine tune so that it can take any question and turn it into a SparQL query for Wikidata. Also, make a web crawler that reads the page and turns into a set of RDF triples or QuickStatements for any new facts that are presented. This would effectively be the "ultimate information organizer" and could potentially turn Wikidata into most people's entry page of the internet.
retube · 2m ago
What is "RDF" ? Not defined in the article
barrenko · 5m ago
Or a semantic layer it's called?
mdhb · 14m ago
Maybe worth also pointing out that a meaningful refresh of the RDF specification is getting rather close to completion.
Hopefully version 1.2 which addresses a lot of shortcomings should officially be a thing this year.
I worked on semantic web tech back in the day, the approach has major weaknesses and limitations that are being glossed over here. The same article touting RDF as the missing ingredient has been written for every tech trend since it was invented. We don’t need to re-litigate it for AI.
The tooling is not in a state where you can use it for any commercial or mission critical application. The tooling is mainly maintained by academics, and their concerns run almost exactly counter to normal engineering concerns.
An engineer would rather have tooling with limited functionality that is well designed and behaves correctly without bugs.
Academics would rather have tooling with lots of niche features, and they can tolerate poor design, incorrect behavior and bugs. They care more for features, even if they are incorrect, as they need to publish something "novel".
The end result is that almost all things you find for RDF is academia quality and lots of it is abandoned because it was just part of publication spam being pumped and dumped by academics that need to publish or perish.
Anyone who wants to use it commercially really has to start from scratch almost.
I'm completely out of time or energy for any side project at the moment, but if someone wants to steal my idea: please take an llm model and fine tune so that it can take any question and turn it into a SparQL query for Wikidata. Also, make a web crawler that reads the page and turns into a set of RDF triples or QuickStatements for any new facts that are presented. This would effectively be the "ultimate information organizer" and could potentially turn Wikidata into most people's entry page of the internet.
Hopefully version 1.2 which addresses a lot of shortcomings should officially be a thing this year.
In the meantime you can take a look at some of the specification docs here https://w3c.github.io/rdf-concepts/spec/