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”:

It’s always been like that. But, what next?

The size of the web has always been exponential since public accessibility was enabled. After all, Raman’s binomial summation can be applied to all sizes of W. That is allegorical, I believe. The point is to show how fast the web has been growing. And it has been growing exponentially. It will remain an exponential growth, as far as we can see. That should be clear to all of us — no mystery.

My focus on what’s to come, however, is in the interactions between users and the web through the concept of linked data. Web 3.0 shall be semantic in the ontological sense of the word. That is, the linked data shall be queried and reasoned upon in order to provide users with inferred answers or allusions to answers.

Raman points out that the web is now a platform. True. But it is still a matter of “choosing combinations” of existing web elements, “combining” them to create new elements “exponentially”. It is not yet a matter of being provided with reasoning on such links. That’s all I expect from the next generation of the Web.

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…