Clay,
Just want to thank you for your great work.
I used to work on a lot of US Department of Defense projects, mostly stuff I can't talk about. One very notable project I CAN talk about was an initiative (pushed by utterly clueless, insular, and frankly corrupt academics) to spend billions of dollars in 2008-2010 timeframe on implementing Semantic Web technologies in various military business systems across the DoD.
As an actual technologist who knew how to build things, I was perpetually in the awful position of having to explain to leadership that these highly credentialed academics were selling garbage. I had tried to implement systems according to their design. The graph databases they pushed (they hated Neo4J, for reasons of purity because it didn't actually use RDF/OWL in the database...... i get a headache just talking about this...) were slow piles of dogshit that couldn't scale. No amount of reality could dissuade the academics. They had their theories, and any collision with reality was merely an implementation detail that I and my team were simply too incompetent to overcome in their eyes. Almost none of them had actual technical experience. A smattering of Comp Sci folks, and a ton of "Library Science" idiots.
Your essays on why the SemWeb was utter bullshit were a potent weapon I used with the generals the academics were pushing, and I eventually got the generals funding the project to see the light. Got them cancelled, and sent the idiot egg-heads packing. I still see them on LinkedIn to this day. They desperately continue trying to push that rock up the hill, and only recently warmed to more practical graph database solutions.
They HATED YOU. It was hilarious, watching them try to refute your obvious points and clear writing with jargon and hand-waving. Utterly unconvincing to the generals.
Thanks for your essays saving my ass back then!
Just want to thank you for your great work.
I used to work on a lot of US Department of Defense projects, mostly stuff I can't talk about. One very notable project I CAN talk about was an initiative (pushed by utterly clueless, insular, and frankly corrupt academics) to spend billions of dollars in 2008-2010 timeframe on implementing Semantic Web technologies in various military business systems across the DoD.
As an actual technologist who knew how to build things, I was perpetually in the awful position of having to explain to leadership that these highly credentialed academics were selling garbage. I had tried to implement systems according to their design. The graph databases they pushed (they hated Neo4J, for reasons of purity because it didn't actually use RDF/OWL in the database...... i get a headache just talking about this...) were slow piles of dogshit that couldn't scale. No amount of reality could dissuade the academics. They had their theories, and any collision with reality was merely an implementation detail that I and my team were simply too incompetent to overcome in their eyes. Almost none of them had actual technical experience. A smattering of Comp Sci folks, and a ton of "Library Science" idiots.
Your essays on why the SemWeb was utter bullshit were a potent weapon I used with the generals the academics were pushing, and I eventually got the generals funding the project to see the light. Got them cancelled, and sent the idiot egg-heads packing. I still see them on LinkedIn to this day. They desperately continue trying to push that rock up the hill, and only recently warmed to more practical graph database solutions.
They HATED YOU. It was hilarious, watching them try to refute your obvious points and clear writing with jargon and hand-waving. Utterly unconvincing to the generals.
Thanks for your essays saving my ass back then!