Courtesy of the University of Mary Washington Computer Science Department, I and an SRO crowd of students, faculty, and staff got to hear a fascinating talk today by Dr. Eric Miller (CSAIL, MIT). There’s no questioning the depth, intelligence, or intensity of his commitment to a data web; he made the best and most inclusive case for the semantic web I’ve yet heard. Inclusive, because his vision is not just about normalizing descriptive vocabularies or getting everyone firmly in the RDF camp. As I understand it, his vision is more about taking the data already implicit on the web and making it explicit, reusable, mashup-able. It’s a persuasive vision, one strongly reminiscent of Vannevar Bush’s and Douglas Engelbart’s desire to find a way to get ahead of our own information-generation and make good, timely use of the knowledge we have already discovered, knowledge that often languishes unread and unremarked because there’s no machine-readable associative trail to lead us there or to answer our queries comprehensively.<\/p>\n
That said, and coming from a non-CS point of view, I do continue to have questions about the idea of the “semantic web,” particularly as it seems to me to downplay the semantic energies of the document<\/em> in favor of the clearer and more specifiable semantic energies of data<\/em>. My training in the humanities locates meaning in documents<\/em>, at least in the sense that documents are the things that make the case for meaning, and invite a response to meaning. Data, by contrast, is measurement and observation. Crucial activities, to be sure–I want my physician’s decisions to be data-driven, make no mistake about it. And unlike many contemporary humanists, I do believe in fact, in empirical reality, and in our abilities to be in touch with it (though those abilities are problematic). And yet, I do believe that our documents, particularly our discursive and creative documents, are the things that make the data meaningful. Once I’m cured and hale and hearty, no set of data can ascribe meaning<\/em> to that condition.<\/p>\n There’s a lot more to my questions, and a lot more to the argument, on both sides. I asked Dr. Miller to specify the distinction between “document” and “data,” and he replied “in the eye of the beholder.” He was being witty, of course, and later on we talked a bit and he admitted that the matter became “philosophical” when one looked into it closely. He invited me to email him with my question, and promised to respond with some links to resources discussing this distinction and its difficulties. He also insisted that his vision of the semantic web was not trying to isolate one vocabulary, but provide a framework for specifying identity, equivalence, and similarity in digital, physical, and conceptual resources. (He also said that the idea should never have been called “the semantic web.”)<\/p>\n The good news is that he very much supports the idea of document\/data symbiosis as the web moves forward. The even better news was his advice to us all: don’t try to figure out what all this will be used for, he insisted, because doing so cripples innovation. Trying to specify all the outcomes and uses would have prevented the Web’s emerging at all, much less its fantastic proliferation. There’s a lesson there for the way we think about education as well.<\/p>\n Postscript: I was pleased that several of my Introduction to New Media Studies students were in the room for Dr. Miller’s talk. Their blogging is well underway and has already begun some wonderful exploration. You’ll find the aggregation blog (in its first iteration) at intronewmediastudies08.umwblogs.org<\/a>. We’ll be building out this site during the term, but at least I’ve got a one-stop for the class’s blogging activity to date. Stop by and enjoy–and if you leave a comment, be sure to leave it on the student’s original post. You can get there by clicking on the author’s name at the bottom of the post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Courtesy of the University of Mary Washington Computer Science Department, I and an SRO crowd of students, faculty, and staff got to hear a fascinating talk today by Dr. Eric Miller (CSAIL, MIT). There’s no questioning the depth, intelligence, or … Continue reading