essays

With the official announcement that RDF is in Drupal core and the Semantic Web conference in DC, I wanted to take time to respond to "tales of a semantic web skeptic". Healthy criticism, and a good read.

This piece is to defend the vision, if not the execution.

I helped get RDF into Drupal and spoke on the topic at two DrupalCons (one in Brussels and the other in Barcelona). No credit beyond that belongs to me, I've done no development on it since.

Arguments are mostly semantic about the semantic web. The computer science is done, the technology is used in real world applications in genetics, law, and military applications.

What is perhaps a PR shift is to differentiate the upper-case and lower-case semantic web.

The semantic web:

• a data exchange standard for graph based meta data and logical meta data
• a webservice with a standardized API
• a graph database, or other specialized store
• consumers or Agents

The Semantic Web (a la W3C)

• RDF(S), RDFa, OWL(S), etc
• REST/ SPARQL
• Sesame, Jena, YARS, Redland, etc
• Semantic Agents

Microformats and popularizations are all good. Folksonomy instead of Taxonomy - Clay Shirky, or rather, the mob (you and I) he describes, is hard to argue with. To mash up verified, trusted content in federated queries from heterogeneous data sources is cool to me, but not everyone.

Tim Berners-Less talk at Ted changes the term to "Linked Data". That makes sense. I think there's a struggle to create a revolution and an industry again - something with as big an impact as the web. Linked data is the web Sir Web wants/wanted. But the first web didn't happen because a few folks wanted it. We needed it. As the YCombinator mantra goes "make something people want". Making Semantic Web software has, in the past, made Semantic Web people happy... but not too many others (I have first hand experience in this).

A final two points:

Maybe it's fair to say the community may be too top-down. Luckily, freedom of speech extends to computer code.

Not everyone is going to be inspired and "believe" in grand visions. Artificial intelligence is perfect analogy. Our culture has adopted the term - for better or worse - to mean lots of things.

I voted today, just an hour ago. The outcome of the election is unknown. There no reason for me to be cynical at the moment. In this moment, I'm happy.

Voting is one part of a participatory democracy - a clear path to being involved, belonging to something larger. However, Democracy, for me, is to be independent, educated, creative and unify around specific causes. These causes change depending on the world around us. This perspective on the purpose and meaning of democracy leads me to question voting as the best answer we have to creating democracy. Follows is a brief outline on how the internet and related technology offers new options for what government is, and does.

1. Open Source voting machines:
   Paying private companies to write bad software on unsecured hardware is obviously crazy when we are talking about one of the most basic components to the infrastructure of democracy.
2. Semantic Web and Open Government:
   If I am honest with myself, I have to admit that no matter how much research I do, I doubt I really know what is going on in our government. I'm pretty sure there is waste, but the waste is likely systemic as much as it is caused by corruption. There are complex organizations spending most of their energy just being complex. Institutional complexity can be reduced when there is insight into on what that organization is even up to - ie "transparent government".
   Putting all government documents online isn't enough to make Government transparent. When single laws are 800 pages, being able to search through the mountain of data is critical. But, even more difficult than finding what you want is summarizing and co-relating data. I won't elaborate on specifics here, but if the the whole of our public government is open, searchable, and easy to collect and reorganize into digestible pieces of knowledge, then we're all better off.
3. Game Theory:
   

This is an open letter to China - if it is possible to write such a letter.

When I traveled to China (Beijing, Xi'an, Shanghai, Hong Kong) in 2001, I found the towering density of the country breath taking. One country, but another world, filled with cultural diversity, coordinated for production.

In Beijing, the Chinese New Year celebration had just finished, and the coal which fueled the city had created a layer of lingering smoke over the city which I could see from the plane, along with a section of the Great Wall, on approach to landing.

This is from May of 2001. The speed of the economy, the omni-presence of corporate media, and the complexity of our personal lives, has made many existing institutions of change (like education, our government, and even cultural norms) increasingly ineffective. Morality, the frame of reference for living, our paradigms, are being outpaced by technological changes.