A derelict discourse with Mrs. Web

Dear Mrs. Web,

You’re growing old. And fat. But we love you.

At first, we brought you up with tenderness and could track your growth. We sat back and observed with awe and constraints what you offered us. Then, you exploited our innocence by bursting in 2001 and seriously hurting the feelings of some of us.

We still loved you, but we didn’t like you anymore.

We thereby tried a few behavioural and structural tweaks onto you. That is, to empathize with the fellow humans you hurt, we decided to indulge your complacency by proclaiming you a platform. Not undeservedly — we chose to engage every single human that could have Internet access to participate into shaping your body and mind. We invented new paradigms and shifted existing ones. We enriched our experience with you. We started liking you again. Alas, your body was exponentially being fed more and more so than your mind.

It seems you’re happy with this, so you haven’t burst a second time. We love you and like you again, but we don’t share your enthusiasm.

We want your mind to be really functional because we’re tired of having to bug other humans to wait to get some answers we could very well get from you. You have all our data, linked even, but you can’t yet use your head to engineer knowledge and reason for us. Also, I want you to be solely mine. And so does every other single human being. Thus, we’re coming to shape you a third time, hoping you won’t burst a second time.

***

That would be my unborn child’s letter to the Web, assuming, of course, that by then Web 3.0 would not even be at most semantic. (That is my expectation and definition of Web 3.0.)

In other words, including the properties of Web 2.0 — which Tim O’Reilly lists succinctly in his paper — and a massive interaction of humans and machines to engineer knowledge from this collaboratively intelligent interconnectedness of us, Web 3.0 shall be an exciting generation of software integrating all possible systemic entities with open data and hopefully complete freedom of collaboration.

We were the audience and mere observers in what we were being offered. Now we are participants in what we’re offered. Next we shall be collaborators in all such matters from an intelligent web, wherein personalization and integrated rich experience is a strong focus.

Sanguinely.

For there are conflicting definitions or perspectives of what Web 3.0 will be like. Here’s a perspective for the next “5000 days”:

Groupware. Then, CMC (with ontology). Then, CSCW

First a recap. In a previous post, I mention that the Internet is the ultimate CSCW artifact. I did that complying with what CSCW tackles as a discipline, succinctly exposed in Bannon & Schmidt’s paper. In their paper, Turoff et al. conclusively argue that the “web should be viewed as a massive group communication system” for Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) products to succeed in the sense of the principles they discuss in the chapter. In a strict scientific sense, CMC may be viewed as subsumed by CSCW. In another post, I argue that groupware is a subset, rather than a fork, of CSCW. In fact, if we view groupware as the set of artifacts (interfaces) that aid group communication, we may as well argue that groupware is a subtype of CMC. Hence, we’re still eddying within the realm of CSCW — nobody in the readings explicitly mentions it, however.

Yet, let it be. The pulp of CMC is its use of ontologies, even though this word (to my surprise) does not appear more than once in Turoff et al. The authors are dancing the ontological waltz by using synecdoches of the type: “problem-dependent discourse structure” to refer to “ad-hoc ontology” in their sense. But once again it proves the point that ontologies are vital to knowledge engineering and domain reasoning despite external skepticism. This writing thus rejects some of Shirky’s criticisms of, say, semantic hypertext over the web, which according to Shirky do not create knowledge, but confusion. (Apologies to Shirky if I sometimes unintentionally commit myself to straw-man conclusions…) Moreover, the criticism of subjective categorization in Sorting things out when it comes to social issues may very well be mitigated, at least in principle, through voting, as Turoff et al. argue.

Another important implication of CMC-related research is the base-rate question previously asked and subsequently answered. The question related to how often does face-to-face group collaboration yield collective intelligence versus collaboration between globally-distributed teams. Well, research shows that the latter brings about collective intelligence more often. Read, for instance, Bordia’s findings on the matter on top of what Turoff et al. have reported. I wonder whether collective intelligence shall now be excluded from the list of topical concerns discussed in Distance Matters: If what we really care about is collective intelligence to solve tough or rough problems, then how much would distance matter?

If ontologies help organize shared conceptualizations so that individuals/teams distributed globally can reason from them, then CSCW should get the most out of it. The overall point of this blogpost is to reiterate the fact that CSCW is nurtured by various disciplines (social, exact, natural) to nurture in return, as if reciprocating dal vivo, those disciplines.

Sorting things out. Not necessarily ideally

The introduction chapter “Sorting Things Out” by Bowker and Star revivifies two essential points in the sociological context when it comes to humans categorizing and standardizing. First, we are reminded that no ontology can ever be ideal, in the sense of completeness, consistency, and mutual exclusivity. For instance, if we are assigned to collaborate on ontologizing social issues, there shall be conflicting views that might impede further categorization: abortion, same-sex marriage, drug use, etc. Second, there shall exist cases that may never fit in a particular ontological process. This probably depends on the sort of categorization under way.

That being stated, I personally believe that we do not need ideal ontologies, in a pragmatic stance. Ad-hoc ontologies should be sufficient to provide a venerable knowledge base for a particular domain as well as to reason about the knowledge of that domain. For example, geographically-distributed teams of biologists could collaborate (in the sense of CSCW) to construct an ontology for insect ethology. In this strict scientific sense, which complies with Gruber’s generally accepted definition of ontology, there should not be any conflicting situations arising from this collaboration. True, there could be a couple of biologists that might disagree on a couple of points during the construction process. But that is no more crucial to the whole environment of collaboration than the effects of an individual smoker are on global warming. That is to say, I view the collaborative ontology development process as a distributed, self-organizing system in the modern sense of collaboration. (Could my view constitute some dark form of ignoratio elenchi?)

All in all, I would almost never expect to see an idealized ontology; partly because of Gödel’s propositions, partly because in a scientific and social sense I don’t see the practical need of attaining one for as long as we are able engineer knowledge and help digital agents reason with a realistic, iteratively developed ontology.

Clay is confused

Clay Shirky made his point by providing certain observable facts in a critical-theoretic approach in his speech on ontology, but he is conceptually confused.

First, Clay is confusing three very important branches of philosophy in their practical considerations: epistemology, metaphysics, and semantics. If one assumes an epistemological approach, one is probably trying to understand (gain knowledge) from the world. That is, to make sense of the world you look up to epistemology. On the other hand, ontology (which may be viewed as a subtype of metaphysics — the branch dealing with the nature of being) is concerned with how the world is regardless of how we attempt to understand it (Easterbrook et al.). Moreover, semantics is the branch that deals with the meaning of concepts or entities. That’s not the objective of ontology. In fact, a subtle distinction between the two is evinced once one apprehends Berners-Lee’s Semantic Web paradigm. Thus, I do not see why Clay is confused about the implications of ontology when it comes to human context. After all, an ontology is domain-dependent and could, at least in principle, extend to conceptualizing the largest of the domains (e.g. the WWW).

Second, Clay is confusing the inherent benefit of the existence or development of an ontology with the way an ontology is employed by some application for some predetermined goal. Both Yahoo and Google, for instance, designed ontologies with specific applications in mind. Yahoo intended to digitize physical conceptualizations of taxonomical hierarchies, whereas Google used its search algorithms in conjunction with its ontology(ies) to mine relevant knowledge. Clay needs to recall that ontology development is an iterative process, such as when adding new class instances on, say, the Periodic Table.

Third, Clay is confusing broad, general-purpose ontologies (such as those modelling web knowledge) with domain-specific ontologies (such as those related to, say, wine in this nicely written ontology development guide: Noy and McGuinness’s guide to creating your first ontology).

Fourth, no matter how you view categorization (discrete or stochastic), there cannot be such a property as ontological completeness because the ontological dictionary shall almost always remain incomplete, as Tom Gruber wittingly points out in his concise definition of ontological commitment, which “guarantees consistency, but not completeness with respect to queries or assertions” included in the ontological dictionary.

True, human context is essential. In that sense, when we assume the task of building an ontology where the domain of discourse is to reflect human knowledge, then the developers shall be the humans, who shall be developing an ontology for some specific application in mind (say, searching in, say, Google).

So, Clay, be more accepting of our endeavours to expand the philosophical circle of knowledge while simultaneously humanizing such philosophies…