The term "Semantic Web" goes back to at least 1999 and the idea – enable machines to "understand" information they process and enable them to be more useful – is much older. But still we do not have universal expert systems, despite that they would be very advantageous, especially in the context of (interdisciplinary) research and teaching.
My impression is, that from the beginning semantic web technologies was dominated by Java-based tools and libraries and that the situation barely changed until today (2022): E.g. most of practical ontology development/usage seems to happen inside Protegé or by using OWLAPI.
However, in the same time span we have seen a tremendous success of numerical AI (often called "machine learning") technologies and here we see a much greater diversity of involved languages and frameworks. Also, the numerical AI community has grown significantly in the last decade.
I think, to a large part this is, because it is simple to getting started with those technologies and Python (-Interfaces) and Jupyter-Notebook contribute significantly to this. Also, Python greatly simplifies programming (calling a library function and piping results to the next) for people who are not programmers by training such as physicists, engineers etc.
On the other hand getting started with semantic technologies is (in comparison) much harder: E.g. a lot of (seemingly) outdated documentation and the lack of user-friendly tools to achieve quick motivating results must be overcome in this process.
Therefore, so my thesis, having an ecosystem of low-threshold Python-based tools available could help to unleash the vast potential of semantic technologies. It would help to grow the semantics community and to enable more people to contribute contents such as (patches to) domain-ontologies, sophiticated queries and innovative applications e.g. combining Wikidata and SymPy.
Over the past months I collected a number of semantic-related Python projects, see https://github.com/pysemtec/semantic-python-overview. So the good news is: There is something to use and grow. However, the amount of collaboration between those projects seems to be low and something like a semantic-python-community (i.e. people who are interested in both semantic technologies and python programming) is still missing.
Because complaining alone rarely leads to improvement of the situation, I try to spawn such a community, see https://pysemtec.org.
What do you think, can Python help to generate more useful applications of semantic technology, especially in science? What has to happen for this? What are possible counter-arguments?
@ J. Rafiee
Thanks for your reply. While "Python is just another language" it has from my experience some advantages which make it favorable in a scientific context:- possibility of interactive usage (e.g. via Jupyter-Notebooks)
- plenty of science-relevant libraries (numpy, sympy, pytorch, ...)
- comparatively low entrance barrier to getting started (e.g. for undergraduate-students from subjects other than computer science)
To prevent misunderstandings: I do not claim that Python is the perfect language. It definitely has weaknesses (such as execution speed).
My point is: If there were more (and better supported) python-tools for semantic-related tasks available and the existing ones were better known, this would significantly foster the development and the applicability of semantic technologies such as ontologies, reasoners and rule-processors.
I expect the scientific world would benefit from such a development because suitable management of available knowledge is one of its core-challenges and having more and easier tools available to tackle that challenge would consequently result in more and better research results.
Even if we discount for "hype-factor": Machine Learning (or numerical AI) techniques have had tremendous success (both in quality and quantity) in many research disciplines and Python-based libraries and interfaces take a large part of the credit for that. I think a similar development could happen with semantic technologies (aka symbolic AI).
Hi Carsten. Thanks for submitting a compilation of Python libraries related to the Semantic Web (SW). I believe SW Python-related projects will eventually surpass previous JAVA development.
Thankk you for sharing the semantic-related Python projects, great effort.
Hi Carlos F. Enguix
> I believe SW Python-related projects will eventually surpass previous JAVA development.
I think the same. But I rather would like to see this in 2 years then in 12.
@all What do you think is currently most lacking in the Semantic Python world (reasoner, performant query engines, graphical ontology-editor, ...)?
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