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rapnie • today at 5:22 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

Besides AI/LLM the linked data ecosystem struggles with a deep adversion to the technology by the general developer population, dating back from the time when the Semantic Web hype cycle fizzled out. You can see that for instance very clearly on the Fediverse, where the ActivityPub [0] protocol is a W3C linked data based open standard. But ActivityPub can also be plain JSON, and most Fediverse software does not follow real JSON-LD approach. There's a lot of resistance to going the linked data route, being perceived as overly complex. Which is probably a fair assessment too, as the whole set of standards around linked data are large and intricate. As a result of Semantic Web and Linked Data failing to find good adoption, there's a chicken/egg that there's no good tooling to work with the technology and little incentive to create it.

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/


Replies

bendriv • today at 9:34 PM

Good point. Here our gov organizations has been required to document their vocabularies, logical information models, data, services, etc and partly also processes, using linked data, so we are working with RDFLib and associated tooling. It has been an interesting ride so far.

Linked Data seems like a good fit for the some of the underlying components in teaching material and technical docs which feed into a knowledge layer for both humans and agents, but also very relevant in our archival/library-like processes. Due to the gov requirements, API surfaces will likely also be documented with Linked Data.