<story><title>Solid aims to radically change the way web applications work</title><url>https://solid.mit.edu/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>newhere420</author><text>Although I agree with the aims of the project, trying to understand it leads you down a rabbit hole of complexity that ultimately never pays off. Ontology, vocabulary, RDFa, OWL, FOAF, etc.&lt;p&gt;I assume this is a continuation of - or somehow related to - the semantic web project that W3C spent a lot of time spinning its wheels on back in the early &amp;#x27;00s. Back in the day, I bought into the hype that this would be the next big thing, but it never gained traction. Nobody understood it. It was too meta.&lt;p&gt;Trying to do anything with semantic web specifications was like writing an academic treatise on the philosophy of meaning, and ultimately delivered no more value to users than a hacked up &amp;lt;table&amp;gt; layout.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sien</author><text>People should all reread the essay &amp;#x27;Metacrap&amp;#x27; once in a while about this.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;people.well.com&amp;#x2F;user&amp;#x2F;doctorow&amp;#x2F;metacrap.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;people.well.com&amp;#x2F;user&amp;#x2F;doctorow&amp;#x2F;metacrap.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;However, metadata is really useful in some contexts. Say you have a huge collection of scientific data from a particle accelerator, astronomy database, satellite imagery or sensors.&lt;p&gt;How do you set that up for search?&lt;p&gt;How do you make it worthwhile for academics to release data like this and get credit as they do for writing a paper?&lt;p&gt;How do you have provenance for derived data?&lt;p&gt;How do you set up a unique identifier so the data can be referenced and found as required?&lt;p&gt;You have data about the data. You have metadata. If you&amp;#x27;re smart you standardize it and bingo. You have a use for metadata.</text></comment>
<story><title>Solid aims to radically change the way web applications work</title><url>https://solid.mit.edu/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>newhere420</author><text>Although I agree with the aims of the project, trying to understand it leads you down a rabbit hole of complexity that ultimately never pays off. Ontology, vocabulary, RDFa, OWL, FOAF, etc.&lt;p&gt;I assume this is a continuation of - or somehow related to - the semantic web project that W3C spent a lot of time spinning its wheels on back in the early &amp;#x27;00s. Back in the day, I bought into the hype that this would be the next big thing, but it never gained traction. Nobody understood it. It was too meta.&lt;p&gt;Trying to do anything with semantic web specifications was like writing an academic treatise on the philosophy of meaning, and ultimately delivered no more value to users than a hacked up &amp;lt;table&amp;gt; layout.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sigsergv</author><text>Semantic web is not that hard to understand. But facebook&amp;#x2F;google&amp;#x2F;etc will NEVER adopt it. They are not interested in opening (meta)data in highly precise and machine readable form to 3rd parties. So the only adopters are geeks&amp;#x2F;scientists.</text></comment>