Last week I listened to a talk by Shane Hipps, a Porsche “consumer anthropologist” turned Mennonite minister. The speaker, clearly aware of the contradictory nature of his background, made a very interesting observation about the digital age. He essentially said that we are, as a society, experiencing a shift of great magnitude in history which reflects one of the greatest changes humanity has ever experienced: literacy.

Moving from an oral tradition to a literate society—in which letters allow people to commit their thoughts to memory—fundamentally changed the way society and individuals thought. It freed individuals to think on their own without having to commit their ideas to the collective memory of their tribe. It also changed the ability of the social groups to sense the emotional state of its individuals, because they could now exist in an abstract, individual mindset.

So, agrarian societies relied on the community to remember and structure their ideas. The result of this community conceptual framework was an empathic connection between members of the community. Writing, on the other hand, allows individuals to remove themselves from the older framework and commit their thoughts to paper resulting in a loss or shift in the empathy of the culture or society. In a digital age, however, there is a new shift: one of removal to connection at a distance.

This concept: empathy at a distance or a digitally-connected community, made me consider the connections in the Semantic Web. The in’s and out’s of the SemWeb have been argued, discussed, debated, and explored technologically. Many blogs and sites have huge amounts of content devoted to the definitions of SPARQL and RDF. Abstractions have been published discussing the applications of this new technology. Sir Tim Berners-Lee refers to the Semantic Web as ‘The Web done right.’

But, what is being done right? Is the Semantic Web the Web done technologically right? Is it an upgrade to the existing framework or a patch to fix what was wrong? Maybe. But it makes me wonder about looking at this from a sociological or communicative perspective. The Semantic Web, technologically, is important to humanity only so far as it’s a medium for our connections.

So, when we make new semantic connections, and the software is increasingly able to associate us with concepts, people, items and communities (like academic institutions or or organisations); what is actually happening? People are making connections, and committing them not only to their own memories but to a community.

Publishing, you might argue, has been around since not that long after the first scribblings of meaning. But, publishing is one-way and narrow. A message or idea is only committed to the memories and added to the mental repertories of those who actually read the message. The same is true in a digital age (with multi-channels for ‘reading’ such as podcasts and video also) but the distinct difference is the access to concepts and the ease of utilising or ‘consuming’ the material. Firstly, digital goods are infinitely (in practice if not in absolute purist terms) copyable. There is no limit to the number of times you can copy and distribute an electronic text or a podcast so society does not have to wait for an idea to filter through because your dad hasn’t finished their Times crossword. Secondly, the connections made digitally (and more semantically-enriched) are increasingly collaborative. With software doing the heavy lifting in terms of data mining and content distribution, more ideas get to more people in more accessible ways.

Finally, although the Semantic Web is far from complete in application, the glimmers it allows us to see could have huge sociological implications. It’s the human element of the Semantic Web which makes it so exciting and so potentially disruptive. It’s possible that people, finding and synthesising ideas before feeding back their individual perspectives into the community, are increasingly able to connect with people and concepts in a more empathic way; without losing the abstract and logical abilities of the literate age.

Is this a new age? Undoubtedly. What will it look like? I’d say: like you and me—people.

Image: “karstadt connection” by rastafabi from Flickr—Creative Commons

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Looking at the world through a closed metaphor, like a walled garden, actually stops you from expanding the scope of possibilities available to the software you develop. This is because closed-world perspectives on data and meaning preclude the ability for further questioning. The answer to the question: “What don’t we know yet?” is not possible to answer. It’s capped at what you already know. The cause of this limit is the assumption that everything you don’t know is false, and it’s common to most software development.

This is a concept fundamentally at conflict with a ‘web’ metaphor or perspective. The idea of networked information (connected, accessible, linkable) could not get very far if the software logic balked at any new data, or any data which didn’t fit its pre-existing definitions.

A well-used example of this is asking a question about a person’s details which the system cannot know. So, if it is known that John is a citizen of the US; and you ask the system: “Is it true that John is a UK citizen?” a closed-world software solution will answer: “No.” However, an open-world perspective cannot definitively answer “no”, because it doesn’t know the answer–John might, for example, have dual-nationality.

Asking: “What else is there? Where can I find it? What can I do with it?” are fundamental to the Semantic Web, and to the way in which we go about creating it. Applications written for a limited data set can only ever answer questions asked about their data. In this sense, the current software development model exists within self-created walled gardens whose perimeters are set by the limit of software’s inquisitiveness.

Opening-up the limits could lead to a fundamental shift in metaphor for software. At the moment, all software agents are called ‘applications’. They ‘apply’ a logic to a set of data and spit out an answer. We think of them as automated beings like robots. They live in a world of data and work with what you feed them.

Perhaps if we move more toward a metaphor of a ‘perspective’, the open data web will begin to make more sense. Instead of designing robots to do tasks with your data, engineers can begin creating views on the data. Essentially, instead of designing, using and selling a robot to do something, they’d be creating, utilizing, and selling their perspective. Software would create a contextualized view on the data. It can manipulate the results by re-focusing the context and by including other aspects from other datasets into its calculations, but it doesn’t forget that the data it is using exists outside it’s computations.

Imagine opening up your laptop and clicking on the ‘perspectives’ folder to open up a PIM (Personal Information Manager like thunderbird or outlook). This PIM Perspective can look at the data about you, and apply a context to it. Allows you to view the data from a particular perspective. Finding the answer to ‘Am I free on Tuesday?” becomes a matter of ‘viewing’ the available information about your schedule on Tuesday within the context of events you have accepted to attend. This ‘view’ could then be further contextualized by adding further aspects to the Perspective: location/travel time, likelihood of proceeding events running over etc… Each aspect determines the ultimate view you have on the data for ‘Tuesday’. Instead of applying one bit of data (an event) on another bit of data (a date) and seeing if the data conflict, you get to ‘see’ the answer to your questions using existing data. The openness in this metaphor could include the fact that the data for an event lies outside the application’s resources. Say the event is a meeting organized by a company. If the company has published the event data, your PIM Application needs to import this information (you can either enter it, or accept an invitation) before adding it to its calculations. What then happens if the company cancels or moves the event location or meeting time? They have to re-send the information to all the attendees, who then have to modify their PIMs’ data. In an open-world, the data exists outside the PIM, so if the published information changes, the PIM’s Perspective changes accordingly.

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The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing on kind of thing in terms of another. -Lakoff and Johnson (1980)

Would you join me for a party?

It’s a black-tie, invite-only affair at the family estate. If you can make it, I’ll send you some directions and an invitation and a photo name-badge. Please don’t forget to bring it with you; there was an unfortunate incident last summer with a guest and the guards at the gate. Don’t worry, we don’t have those dogs any more: poor things had to be put down.

Sound inviting?

I’d like to explore the idea of Semantic Web metaphors. For a bit of background, I’m coming at this from the perspective that metaphor plays a key role in the way we think as well as the way we communicate. The idea of a ‘conceptual metaphor’ comes from Lakoff and Johnson and their collaborative Metaphors we Live By. The idea is that, because we’re all people, and all people are similar in many ways (we all have bodies, our bodies face in one direction, we perceive a huge amount of information by site) that we actually share common metaphorical constructions which allow our minds to deal with abstract concepts like time and numbers. Given the importance of these frameworks, it might be an idea to look at some common or easily-accessed technological metaphors and see how the Semantic Web fits in with these. This could help to explore the way we think and access the concepts behind the Semantic Web, and could inform the way we communicate about it.

The Semantic Web is not a Walled Garden.

The first metaphor I’d like to look at is actually a contrasting system: understanding the Semantic Web in terms of something it’s not: a walled garden.

In information technology, a ‘Walled Garden’ is a system which doesn’t link or accept links from an outside network. All the information inside is only available to members of that system and the content found within the system has to be admitted or imported. If we play around this walled garden metaphor, we can imagine seeing nice specimen plants with well-spaced labels and possibly some glass in between us and the more expensive displays. There might even be a gazebo with some exceedingly rare plants on display. To get in, you need to buy a ticket, and pay an extra fiver for a guide book. A lot of work went into the building of the garden and the arrangement and upkeep of the displays, so they’re charging for entry and keeping the best stuff for premium ticket holders.

This is exactly what happened at the beginning of the internet. Various internet service providers provided access to selected content, and graded it so they could charge for premium stuff. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this scenario, it’s a very standard arrangement and works well with people’s perceptions of how to access a service (like buying a ticket, or ordering a service like digital TV). The web, however, changed this perception as more and more people began to experience the freedom of accessing any information at any time. The WWW experienced a huge network effect as the walled-garden business model faded from the game-board.

The Walled Garden metaphor, however, could also be extended to include data systems, silos, basically anywhere data is kept in proprietary systems. The Web 2.0 ecosystem is filled with various walled gardens. Think of your favorite web app, and consider its characteristics. Which features only work within that system? What data can you access through the service?

Social networking sites and applications are particularly easy to categorize this way. How many networks are you registered with? LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace… Did any of these networks know who you were before you signed up? Did they know your friends until you told them? Can you point to a profile of a friend who’s not part of the system?

The basic business model of these walled gardens is to get as many people inside the walls as possible. So, if you’re friends with someone in one network, say Facebook, you can’t link your Facebook profile to a mate’s on Bebo or MySpace. These are separate gardens, each holding their own parties… and the owners can only cater for the invited guests. They’re happy for you to invite others (provided you give them their information); but they’re not out to through an open buffet to anyone who hasn’t signed the guest list!

“Wait!” I can hear you say: “What about when an application asks for my email address so it can find my friends?” Well, that’s exactly what it’s asking: for you to invite your friends to their party. There are even applications which have been built to link the walled gardens: but you have to be on their platform. Plaxo is an example of this. The idea is that you sign up to Plaxo (you join their garden party) and you tell them all the networks you’ve already joined (you give them your invitations to all the other parties). In a sense, you’re joining another party, which is essentially tracking all your invitations for you—they map the parties for you. The catch is that you have to join Plaxo for it to work, essentially seeing all the other gardens from the vantage of a slightly higher garden. The effect is that you get a map of all the other parties, but you still don’t get lunch!

The Semantic Web works from a different perspective. By being an open-world system, the Semantic Web works across the entire network (which, in this case, is the internet) using the entire web (the links created among content on the network: in this case: the WorldWideWeb!) The idea is that all the information you make available, and all that you have a link to is open to the entire network. The result is a removal of the ‘walls’ around content.

I would be very interested to hear what you think about how the Semantic Web relates to Walled Gardens, and in what ways you think it breaks down walls (or otherwise). Please feel not only free but invited to leave comments to join the discussion.

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