I See No Forests But the Trees . . .

"So where is it?" is the question that most information professionals and scholars say when they approach the topic of the Semantic Web. Everyone's favourite Computer Scientist, Yihong Ding's Web Evolution Theory and The Next Stage: Part 2 makes an interesting observation, one which I agree wholeheartedly:

The transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 is not supervised. W3C had not launched a special group for a plot of Web 2.0; and neither did Tim O'Reilly though he was one of the most insightful observers who caught and named this transition and one of the most anxious advocates of Web 2.0. In comparison, W3C did have launched a special group about Semantic Web that was engaged by hundreds of brilliant web researchers all over the world. The progress of WWW in the past several years, however, shows that the one lack of supervision (Web 2.0) advanced faster than the one with lots of supervision (Semantic Web). This phenomenon suggests the existence of web evolution laws that is objective to individual willingness.

Even Tim O'Reilly pointed out that Web 2.0 largely came out of a conference when exhausted software engineers and computer programmers from the dot.com disaster saw common trends happening on the Web. Nothing is scripted in Web 2.0. Perhaps that's why there can never be a definitive agreement on what it constitutes. As I give instructional sessions and presentations of Web 2.0 tools, sometimes I wonder, how wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, and RSS feeds will look like two years from now. Will they be relevant? Or will they transmute into something entirely different? Or will we continue on as status quo?

Is Web 2.0 merely an interim to the next planned stage of the Web? Are we seeing trees, but missing the forest?

Digital Libraries in the Semantic Age

Brian Matthews of CCLRC Appleton Laboratory offers some interesting insights in Semantic Web Technologies. In particular, he argues that libraries are increasingly converting themselves to digital libraries. A key aspect for the Digital library is the provision of shared catalogues which can be published and browsed. This requires the use of common metadata to describe the fields of the catalogue (such as author, title, date, and publisher), and common controlled vocabularies to allow subject identifiers to be assigned to publications.

As Matthew proposes, by publishing controlled vocabularies in one place, which can then be accessed by all users across the Web, library catalogues can use the same Web-accessible vocabularies for cataloguing, marking up items with the most relevant terms for the domain of interest. Therefore, search engines can use the same vocabularies in their search to ensure that the most relevant items of information are returned.

The Semantic Web opens up the possibility to take such an approach. It offers open standards that can enable vendor-neutral solutions, with a useful flexibility (allowing structured and semi-structured data, formal and informal descriptions, and an open and extensible architecture) and it helps to support decentralized solutions where that is appropriate. In essence, RDF can be used as this common interchange for catalogue metadata and shared vocabulary, which can then be used by all libraries and search engines across the Web.

But in order to use the Semantic Web to its best effect, metadata needs to be published in RDF formats. There are several initiatives involved with defining metadata standards, and some of them are well known to librarians:

(1) Dublin Core Metadata Initiative

(2) MARC

(3) ONIX

(3) PRISM

Postmodern Librarian - Part Two

To continue where we had left off. True, Digital Libraries and the Future of the Library Profession intimates that libraries and perhaps librarianship has entered the postmodern age. But Joint hasn't been the first to author such an argument; many others have also argued likewise. In fact, I had written about it before, too. But I believe to stop at the modernist-postmodernist dichotomy misses the point.

In my opinion, perhaps this is where Web 2.0 comes in. Although the postmodern information order is not clear to us, it seems to be the dynamic behind Web 2.0, in which interactive tools such as blogs, wikis, RSS facilitate social networking and the anarchic storage of unrestrained distribution of content. According to Joint, much of our professional efforts to impose a realist-modernist model on our library will fail. The old LIS model needs to be re-theorized, just as Newtonian Physics had to evolve into Quantum Theory, in recognition of the fact that super-small particles simply were not physically located where Newtonian Physics said they should be. In this light, perhaps this is where we can start to understand what exactly is Web 2.0. And beyond.

Semantic Web: A McCool Way of Explaining It

Yahoo's Rob McCool argues in Rethinking the Semantic Web, Part 1 that the Semantic Web will never happen. Why? Because the Semantic Web has three fundamental parts, and they just don't fit together based on current technologies. Here is what we have. The foundation is the set of data models and formats that provide semantics to applications that use them (RDF, RDF Schema, OWL). The second layer is composed of services - purely machine-accessible programs that answer Web requests and perform actions in response. At the top are the intelligent agents, or applications.

Reason? Knowledge representation is a technique with mathematical roots in the work of Edgar Codd, widely known as the one whose original paper using set theory and predicate calculus led to the relational database revolution in the 1980's. Knowledge representation uses the fundamental mathematics of Codd's theory to translate information, which humans represent with natural language, into sets of tables that use well-defined schema to defined schema to define what can be entered in the rows and columns.

The problem is that this creates a fundamental barrier, in terms of richness of representation as well as creation and maintenance, compared to the written language that people use. Logic, which forms the basis of OWL, suffers from an inability to represent exceptions to rules and the contexts in which they're valid.

Databases are deployed only by corporations whose information-management needs require them or by hobbyists who believe they can make some money from creating and sharing their databases. Because information theory removes nearly all context from information, both knowledge representation and relational databases represent only facts. Complex relationships, exceptions to rules, and ideas that resist simplistic classifications pose significant design challenges to information bases. Adding semantics only increases the burden exponentially.

Because it's a complex format and requires users to sacrifice expressively and pay enormous costs in translation and maintenance, McCool believes Semantic Web will not achieve widespread support. Never? Not until another Edgar Codd comes along our way. So we wait.

The Postmodern Librarian?

Are we in the postmodern era? Nicholas Joint's Digital Libraries and the Future of the Library Profession seems to think so. In it, he argues that unique contemporary cultural shifts are leading to a new form of librarianship that can be characterized as "postmodern" in nature, and that this form of professional specialism will be increasingly influential in the decades to come.

According to Joint, the idea of the postmodern digital library is clearly very different from the interim digital library. In the summer of 2006, a workshop at the eLit conference in Loughborough on the cultural impact of mobile communication technologies, there emerged the Five Theses of Loughborough. Here they are:

(1) There are no traditional information objects on the internet with determinate formats or determinate formats or determinate qualities: the only information object and information forat on the internet is "ephemera"

(2) The only map of the internet is the internet itself, it cannot be described

(3) A hypertext collection cannot be selectively collected because each information object is infinite and infinity cannot be contained

(4) The problem of digital preservation is like climate change; it is man-made and irreversible, and means that much digital data is ephemeral; but unlike climate change, it is not necessarily catastrophic

(5) Thus, there is no such thing as a traditional library in a postmodern world. Postmodern information sets are just as accessible as traditional libraries;: there are no formats, no descriptions, no hope of collection management, no realistic possibility of preservation. And they work fine.