Python Tools for the Semantic Web, an Overview
I&#x27;ve posted a lot on HN about the semantic web in the past [1, 2, 3, 4, etc]. I&#x27;m extremely happy to see it experience a resurgence of renewed attention.<p>Semantic Web was going to be a mechanism to distribute information in a reusable way, but its rise was poorly timed with the emergence of the platforms. If it had come into full swing five to ten years earlier - basically the start of the web - we&#x27;d be using the tech right now. It&#x27;s still the right mindset to get away from Facebook, Google, Reddit, Twitter, etc. It has the potential to give us disproportionate power against centralization.<p>HTML is an unstructured soup, and extracting information from it requires human scraping or sophisticated models. It&#x27;s also a sort of shifting sands subject to change. Semantic web presented a methodology for sharing data and distributing it in a variety of serializations that you could also embed into anything. It was an <i>API for data</i>. Not just loosely structured bespoke JSON, either.<p>There&#x27;s no reason <i>this comment</i> should live on HN or Reddit or whatever. It could be shared over a form of HTTP federated aggregation or directly via P2P with lots of semantic metadata (title, author, subject, date, contents, etc.) and interest graph markup. It could also be further enriched with algorithms that summarize, extract sentiment, keywords, and so forth - but used directly for our own time saving purposes instead of fueling an algorithmic news feed that optimizes for advertisers.<p>People you like would have signed profiles that tell you where they publish so that you can subscribe. You can follow their interest graph but use your own algorithm to filter and rank content.<p>Articles, photos, calendars, recipes -- everything would be semantic, sharable, and interoperable. You could even save the content you like to your personal knowledge base since it&#x27;s right at your fingertips, richly annotated with no cruft.<p>Facebook just took the wind out of the sails for a decade and a half. It looks like a lot of people are starting to think about this problem again.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29898810" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29898810</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24584488" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24584488</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21840670" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21840670</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29552828" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29552828</a>