Pavlov Scope

I am very happy to see the growth of more innovative applications on the Internet, particular those that involve truly coming together and building knowledge that will bring us forward whether it is artistically, intellectually, politically, or productively. The advent of what is being called the read/write Internet is a great step toward collaborative cultures coming together. I love sites like Wikipedia (although it has its critics), based on the great Wiki technology, the Rosetta Project which is documenting human languages, and ibiblio (a content aggregator of free information) – these use community submission to build content. By developing these kinds of huge scale bodies-of-work, we approach the ideal that Vannevar Bush envisioned with his ideas of memex.

The Semantic Web is a term, coined by Tim Berners-Lee (W3C founder), to describe how information can be made more useful on the Web. Specifically – “The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.” – Tim Berners-Lee (from the article The Semantic Web, Scientific American-May 2001).

For several years Dr. Ted Nelson has been working in related areas while working toward Xanadu. He, Tim Berners-Lee, and a host of others have been working to realize the vision of Dr. Vannevar Bush (a brilliant researcher and scientist) who pioneered the idea of contextualizing and linking knowledge – making it much more accessible than traditional methods of presentation. In a July 1945 article published in the Atlantic Monthly, Dr. Bush wrote a paper describing this idea in a broad and philosophical sense entitled “As We May Think.”

Conspiracy theorists and UFO believers have even speculated that Dr. Bush’s efforts in this area came about through his contact with the aliens that allegedly crash-landed in the desert of Roswell ;-). I don’t buy into that explanation (the man was a brilliant visionary, before and after the Roswell incident), but there is no doubt that he brought this idea, as old as epistemology itself, new life in the 20th century.

These are truly big thinkers and they can be considered practical technicians in this modern-day epistemological effort to bring meaning
and newfound usefulness to the creation of knowledge brought about by the explosion of science in the late 19th and 20th centuries. In the days of our Founding Fathers, between Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, given enough time and intellect, one could know pretty much all there was to know at that point in modern history. But, just 100-150 years later, science has changed the world irreversibly not only with its advancements but in the amount of knowledge that has been created – to the point that it has grown to the level where no single person has the capacity to understand and know all that is knowable.

The current Web has the ability to catalog and make available the enormous amounts of information available today, but it is very bad at giving meaning to that information – or perhaps better stated, it was simply not designed to give content meaning. The Web was designed to make information available only. This is why search engines have become a major driver of research in information science – they allow users to sift through this massive information store more easily. But, it is still us, the users, who are giving context and meaning to the information we retrieve from the search engines. When we are returned a list of Google results, it is us that analyzes and categorizes the information presented. The search engine simply cross-references the words and phrases we provide it as input.

The Semantic Web effort would evolve the existing tagging mechanisms used on the Web today. Using technologies like XML, data would be given predefined meaning and context so that it tells the user what it is about upfront. This has the potential to transform the information available into knowledge – relevant, empirical, and continuously adapting to new contexts and developments.

This tool would also unify the language used to describe information on the Web. Take Yahoo! for example – The categorization used by Yahoo! to give context (using the directory model) to other websites form what Jerry Yang calls its “ontology” (or, its unified specification to represent information), as described in the May 1996 issue of Wired. Others have seen this categorization as the reverse: As a mechanism to describe documents individually to create a kind of pseudo-semantic web.

The Yahoo method requires the use of human-based interpretation, analysis, and manually categorization. Albeit sophisticated, this is still an effort that will be inherently flawed and difficult to maintain over time. The promise of the Semantic Web is that it will bring context to the information presented inherent to the document itself. This will modify the way that the document is created from the beginning to automatically have definition built-into the document so that it can be automatically correlated and given better relevance in the larger Web system.

Each document will define what it is, to some degree, so that we can better find, understand, and use the knowledge that would be inevitably created by such contextualization.

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