Dave Weinberger has started something in here; actually, a little feedback is all it took to give me permission to dump a lot of stuff that has been sitting around for a while now. Here goes.
The semantic web breaks the internet model, it demands too high a level of precision and it tries to wrest control from the user and place it in the hands of the model maker. Wont work.
It presumes that whoever builds the taxonomy in the first place, knows and can define to everyone’s satisfaction, what they mean by the taxonomy. Before we can come close to Tim Berners-Lee’s idea, we have to have a taxonomy of taxonomies that defines how taxonomies work and what their common terms mean and how they develop, define and disseminate their uncommon terms. Sounds to me rather like TMBW (too much bloody work) for no effective return, and don’t get me started on ontologies.
THEN they have to define the content not only in terms that make current sense, but that leave open the certainty that uses will be found for the information at some future date, that have not even been thought of yet.
THEN we have the problem that creators of information can only vaguely tell us what that information is about. Here’s a conundrum; my wife delivered her PhD this year and one of the biggest problems is finding people to evaluate it. At that level, it is reasonable to expect that the candidate is working on something about which most of the world hasn’t a clue and which will require even highly informed people to learn significantly new material tangential to the speciality that qualifies them to evaluate the paper in the first place. No doubt we all feel that our work is seminal and suitably impressive to anyone who matters, but we are to say the least biased about its quality and totally ignorant about how others will view it or use it in the future.
This is a problem because metadata is a container. The more perfectly you define it, the narrower the container with the fewest holes. That makes it wonderful right now and a closed book in a year. The value, even the purpose of the information is defined by other people’s use of it and their opinion of it, not by the writer. Metadata cannot deal with that, nor can it anticipate its importance in the future. The Gettysburg Address includes this, “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here” – wrong, what if Lincoln had been responsible for the metadata?
THEN we have the very human problem that people lie. Metadata depends for its validity on the owner being both accurate and honest about the content and anyone who relies on that shops on the TV Shopping channel. Plenty of them, but would you depend on them?
From my bit at QuestNet:
Give Us the Tools
When Doc Searls & David Weinberger launched worldofends.com they used a telling phrase. “Take the value out of the centre and you enable an insane flowering of value among the connected end points.” Yes please, can we have that?
The watchwords are annotation, reputation and collaboration. We have to create educational value at the ends; more learning focused, useful tools that take advantage of the characteristics of connectivity and networking, and let the bandwidth demands follow.
Give us tools that manage information, not documents, they need to be reputation-aware annotation systems, with flexible tools for teachers and learners to assemble arguments and interact with each other. And I want the control of them in my hands as easily as I control a piece of chalk and a blackboard.
Annotation is more important than metadata. There’s a lot of talk about metadata, ontologies and the semantic web. I don’t listen to much of it because it hardly matters what you think your document or resource is about, or how you think it can be used, or how good it is. What matters is what I think about it and how I use it, then what the people I respect, and the people they respect, think of it and how they used it. That’s why annotation is crucial, I need to be able to be able to make my own annotations on, link them to the annotations of others and understand how the work enhances or diminishes your reputation in my chosen field.
Tools like that, attached to everything would be good, and ways for them to draw horizons defined as I require and then to maintain those horizons in the way that Kazaa and other file sharing P2P system work is mandatory.
Google gets it. Google doesn’t understand particle physics, rare plant physiology or the life of Van Gogh, but if you ask it a question on that subject, it returns very good results. That is because Google understands the internet economy of links and opinions. That is why Google has bought Blogger, because the Blogosphere is a snake pit of densely linked opinions and it is from that very dense web that Google draws for its services. It doesn’t matter what the content of a document is, beyond some basic keywords, Google doesn’t even read the meta tags. What it does is read its relationship with other documents on the same subject and, using the economy of the net, figure out how respected that information or informant is. Then it publishes the ranking.
As Blogs experiment with Trackback and other linking concepts, the possibility is that the web will turn into an isometric network with ranking and rating built into the links themselves. At that stage the emergent intelligence of the internet will take off and Google will be there to use it.
Ontologies and taxonomies are observations that arise from thinking about language, they are so difficult because language is an abominably complex process that lugs around information, manages relationships, encodes emotions, reveals, conceals, confounds and transmits secret messages in plain text. BUT, it is so simple that a child can learn it, in fact, any language that can’t be picked up in all its complexity by a child will die. Now, if you believe like Noam Chomsky, that we are born with an innate language module or set of processes that guides our acquisition of language, maybe the idea of extracting these into some formal structure and then trying to shove them back in makes sense. Not to this pixie.
On the other hand, if you go with Terrence Deacon in The Symbolic Species, language and the brain have co-evolved, then formal structures are useful for figuring out what happened, but they are no use for making something happen.
Emergence, keep the eye on emergence, and give us tools to help make it easier.
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