A fantasy world, in which social web, semantic web, agentic web and world wide web all co-exist, with competing factions for each web paradigm (Fedi Tribes - Decentral social networks, Inference Nomads - Semantic Web Technology/Declarative Programming, Fungi Nation - Machine Learning and Marble Kingdom - Incremental Programming/Web Technology).

Attempt of an allegory of our digital present. It is set in a world, in which algorithms and neuronal networks are not abstract ideas but physical entities. Hopefully, this can better explain the technology, their relationship to society and their historical context. The goal is that the underlying mechanics of the world function like a consistent framework of the digital, in which digital entities can be build; a literary sandbox like Minecraft or LEGO but for the digital.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/38336335

Four different factions live together in fantasy world that is awfully similar to other today's web ...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/38336277

What if in 1989, Tim Berners Lee invented the semantic web instead of the world wide web?

What if in 1989, Tim Berners Lee invented the semantic web instead of the world wide web?

Prequel and Sequel to "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", bridging first into a medieval setting in which the magic system works like incremental programming and then into the present day, in which it works like logical programming. Philosophically, the medieval setting is post-modernism and the present day is analytic philosophy, while HPATMOR is enlightenment rationalism. It's a bit like a digital Alice in wonderland.

Why do official clerks not have the equivalent of a calculator like engineers do but for inference? The fundamental idea of this paper is for ChatGPT-like apps to lose natural language for less energy consumption and more determinism in their answers based on controlled natural languages like ACE; and to capture this new paradigm in a new type of browser that has natural language as its primary interface, here called a semantic web-first browser. The idea is proposed in several design steps, beginning with a simple to use calculator-like program to do inference with natural language (pocket-inferer), for which, when a programmer-mode is turned on, transforms into an IDE-like ACE-editor. The idea is then further developed into a semantic web browser, which can also reference data and queries from the semantic web and later, it is philosphised how a web-paradigm agnostic SemanticWebBrowser could be realized.

This poses a fundamental anthesis to ChatGPT-like apps and LLM-centered visions for the WWW with the biggest merit being to tradeoff natural language for more precision and less energy-consumption through controlled natural language. The five main points this paper makes are:

• 1. AI browsers with their high energy consumption are not suitable for daily usage (not in the near future, if ever).
• 2. There has not yet been found a sufficient interface for the semantic web to be appealing to end-users and reach wider adoption
• 3. Controlled natural language like ACE could serve well as a main interface for semantic data, because they manage to capture the potential of semantic web data better than any visualization ever could
• 4. The best application for this approach would be a new kind of browser, which realizes “language as an interface” for the semantic web
• 5. Derived from language as the main interface, the browser needs to center around the interaction with language and therefore look like a text editor or IDE.
• 6. While showing the merits of the semantic web, the browser should also be “backwards compatible” with the traditional world wide web.

It is largely based on the following work: Kaarel Kaljurand. “Attempto Controlled English as a Semantic Web Language” (2007).