web ontology rant
the semantic web is such a fucking psyop, all i wanted to do was write a little fuckin forum and now i've on the wayback machine reading about an rdf schematizization of reuters news categories and abandoned foaf extensionspretty wild how much work was put into these web ontologies up until 2012 or so when they were all basically abandoned or absorbed into scheme.org, i guess this coincides with the general monopolization of the internet that happened, weird this is the moment the indieweb stuff picked up, as i guess kind of a holdover of the old xml way of thinking by people with money who didn't have to worry about chasing SEO trends
it does ulimately lead to a lot of wasted time because ontology is itself a philosophical problem right? the representation of things as information when the information is the thing, the ontology of computer science is idealist as there's no outside of the system, an owl:thing is not the thing-in-itself it is necessarily the phenomena, it's being-for-others and the other being is the machine, it is only it's representation, it is appearance without essence ( i suppose you could say it's essence material basis is the machine code, but that has so little relevance to how words "semantic* or ontology are used in this way, no more than you can deduce the meaning of writing or art from the physical medium -- pencils, paint, paper, canvas -- it's made from ) so however one defines the ontology, you are making the reality no? like you set up the rules of a game, that is the game, with web ontoogy, the semantic rules in places dictate the structure of any navigation or UI, or law the existential horror on the table, the being of this ontoogy does not exist prior to our definition of it, our definition and elaboration of web ontology is what brings it into being, so whatever vocabular you choose, it is always a stopping-short, of the unmet potentialities of further definition, which are potentially endless, or find their limits at the imaginative possibilities of human language, the only choice you have is to settle on a set of terms that are good enough --> tho it never will be --> you just have to settle on conventions.
So the corpo project os destroying the internet and all human knowledge, what use do they really have with these web ontoogies with their ever expanding horizons of meaning? all they want to do is spy on people so they can sell them things, exploit their labor or murder them if it's advantageous to do so... so schema.org via microdata, that suits their ends. I recommend people read thru the schema.org terms because it's such an arbitrary and incomplete assortment of things, it reminds me of the medieval systems of thought foucault describes in "The Order of Things" categories are not thoroughly explored or enumerated, while trivial things are given exessive attention, becuase that's all capitaism needs it to be, not a general web ontoogy capable of describing and categorizing the undless posibiities of human though, but a simplified language of capitalism.
Can't help but think that, had the semantic web not been abandoned, and these problems dealt with fully, had the various incomplete schemas been integrated in a comprehensive way by serious academics looking to create a universal human library or something, the current iteration of LMMs would be much smarter, like they'd be trained on human curated semantic data , instead of SEO slop. just a thought.