Freeemasons of the Future - the Semantic Web
hydrarchist writes:
Draft version 1.0
Please make comments here here
Introduction
At the n5m hacktivist conference, September 2003, collaborative and locational mappers met to organise themselves to work more closely by organising quarterly meetings over the next year and agreeing to share resources. As a contribution to this work the UO has published this text to address the implications posed by the use of Semantic Web as a part of the social projects of the Free Information movement.
Who Are The Freemasons of the Future?
The first and most salient fact about the Freemasons of the Future is that they do not exist. However they are sentient beings trying to struggle into existence. From their perspective they are involved in a life and death struggle to ensure their own past, some of which we perceive as the present. Located in the distant future after time travel has become commonplace they endeavour to sojourn into what they regard as history to create the conditions which they consider as necessary for their own existence. But this does not mean they are going to be successful.
They justify their existence upon their existence, which they consider self-evident. The current conditions of life are to be extrapolated into the future until every quanta of human activity has been commodified: from genetic engineering to nanotechnology, the search for profitability is projected in every conceivable way. A world where sentient scraps of human biology exists as islands of wetware within the framework of vast cathedrals of computerised electronics. The distinction between human, animal and machine is dissolved as these products of bio-engineering are installed to fulfil operative functions within a nauseous system developed to do nothing but to manifest continuously expanding value. Whether we can regard such creatures as our offspring, or whether they are simply genetically engineered mutant beings created out of this or that strand of DNA perhaps is beside the point. This is the nightmare world to which we are heading, and which would provide the sort of massive bio-computer needed by the Freemasons of the Future to realise their greatest desire: unequivocal existence.
Faced with this onslaught which we can see around us, as all barriers to genetic engineering are torn down one by one, how can we respond? The class struggle now manifests itself in dimensions which have recently been invaded by the process of industrialisation.
From the industrialisation of the imagination, through television, to the industrialisation of knowledge through the internet, the information age has taken over from the Age of Steam, the Age of Petrol and even the Atomic Age. The current episode we are living through is rattling asunder as the ripples of the QuantumTimeBomb penetrate the deepest recesses of human activity.
HarryPotter
extract from the announcement of the LimehouseTimeTravelRally
Free Association
The enclosure of a potential 'information commons' by an anarchistic elite of
corporate/state bodies is well underway. Alongside this enclosure, strong and
vibrant hobbyist movements are flourishing. Free Software activists, Free
Hardware geeks and Free Networkers, natives of the information commons are
continuing to fiddle, peeking under the bonnet of their technologies,
creating and manipulating their information environment as they see fit.
However, describing hundreds of disparate Free Network groups, thousands of
bits of Free Hardware, and tens of thousands of Free Software projects as a
'movement' seems very vague . How can an appropriately heroic
historical narrative be brought together from this constantly shifting mass of
web sites, mailing lists, irc channels, changelogs, and man(ual) pages? And given
that the politics of these projects are often equally unstable, or in the
process of being co-opted and enclosed, how can we distinguish between
between 'free as in beer', 'free as in speech', and 'free as in trade'?
Don't ask Jeeves, or Google, or any of the other proprietary info-associating
engines. There is a better way. Lets create and use a Free Semantic Web, the
binding element of the 'information commons'.
What's wrong with using google?
Google makes the best of a bad situation. The web is still mostly comprised of
chunks of HTML, although many sites, blogs especially, are publishing
structured data and Rich Site Summary (RSS) feeds. The problem is that Google is a very limiting
filter to apply to the web. Since people began to routinely abuse HTML <meta> tags,
google no longer even uses the keywords or descriptions in them. It does
limited keyword indexing on the contents of a web page, but mostly concentrates
on the number of links to the page, and the number of links from it. This can
be quite effective, but inevitably misses subtleties and distinctions between
context and contents. The phenomenon of 'googlewashing', where terms and
keywords can be effectively hijacked (for google users at any rate) by flooding
google's PageRank(TM) system with a new definition or spin on an existing
phrase, is a good example of this problem [1].
Aside from the obvious danger of such universal dependence on a single corporate
entity[2], a more subtle system of description and inference is needed to avoid
our continued reliance on Google's reductive system of association.
The Semantic Web
In the mid 90's Ramanathan V. Guha went to work for Apple, where he developed
a metadata format called Meta Content Framework which described websites, or
filesystems and relationships between them. The intention was that using
Apple's 'Hotsauce' browser, users could fly through a 3 dimensional
representation of that content. The project fell flat, and it was only when
Guha moved to Netscape in '97 and Extensible Markup Language (XML) became a common standard for the exchange
of structured data that his ideas about the representing semantic associations
between bits of data began to gain influence.
At that time the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) began a general-purpose metadata project, loosely termed
the 'Semantic Web', to develop ways of representing data on the web. Based on
the Resource Description Framework (RDF), the basic idea is that resources are
named with Uniform Resource Locators (URLs or web addresses) and links between them described using XML for syntax, so RDF documents are
machine readable. The framework is general enough that it is not limited to
describing data on the web, it can also be used to describe things in the
world.
If we can assign a URL to a physical object, person, or idea, we can link other
URLs to it, which in turn refer to people, objects, ideas or other links. Someone (or
something) looking at this association can then infer something about the
things being represented from the association, which can be further described and qualified by more
links. The 'name-spaces', or vocabularies used in these descriptions
can also be seen as nodes in this semantic network and linked to, extended, re-written and
re-defined, so these representations are always contingent and non-originary.
Total Information Awareness' & 'Consensual Reality'
The totalising invective of the Semantic Web project was very evident in one of
its main predecessors, the CYC corporations' proprietary 'common sense'
knowledgebase. This 'big AI' project was Guha's first job out of university,
and involved the collation of a huge database of so-called 'common sense'
statements. These statements were machine-readable so that software agents
would be able to search through and make inferences based on them.
A typical example is a CYC-based search engine that could respond
to the question 'what is bravery?' by looking through its knowledgebase,
finding an assertion that a property of 'brave' is 'danger', finding another
saying that rock climbing is dangerous, and then retrieving a picture of a rock
climber.
The notion of collating all 'common sense', (or 'consensual reality'
as Cycorp sometimes put it), as a basis for artificial intelligence is a
genuinely totalising and largely discredited idea. This problem, and the fact
that the format of the knowledgebase and the modes and methods used to describe
its contents were fixed, prescribed by Cyc's designers frustrated Guha, and gave him
and his collaborators the impetus to attempt to formulate a more malleable
framework, without this dubious premise.
Another problem is that the development of the Semantic Web; a machine-readable representation of
everything, and its relationship to everything else, does
sound like a step towards 'total information awareness'. It is true that the
enriched and extensible vocabularies that the Semantic Web uses to describe
relationships will expediate morally dubious activities such as surveillance,
unsolicited direct marketing and military operations. These technologies will
refine existing authoritarian systems for associating and describing
things and people (consumer profiling systems for example) which are usually
imposed without negotiation or consent, and by virtue of their limited interest
in the person as a 'consumer', these representations currently remain very unsophisticated.
However, the extensibility of the Semantic Web, the fact that the person
doing the describing can define the terms, the 'vocabulary' of that description
suggests a less totalising, more heterogeneous 'information awareness'. This is both
promising and potentially dangerous. Augmented by many more layers of information and
description, volunteered by the person being represented, the 'consumer profile' becomes
infinitely more insidious and detailed. At the same time, the greater sophistication
of the Semantic Web's descriptive language enables someone to consciously and
deliberately allow or deny access to specific data that they produce. Using cryptography,
and 'friend of a friend' testimonial systems (sometimes called 'trust' networks) at least
offers us some degree of control over and awareness of the data being exchanged about us.
On a more structural level, the development of many divergent, even antagonistic descriptions of
the world and the people in it moves away from the idea of any imposed 'consensual reality'
and suggests a mode of representation that can be multiply subjective.
Some technical examples
By using the RDF common framework it enables the data used in a map project to be fully distributed in terms of storage and authorship. Not only could groups collate and share their own data but also use publicly accessible data sources, such as: company profits, IMF trade data, regulatory board members etc.
RDF's more widely-known derivative is Rich Site Summary (RSS), a format often used to syndicate news stories and blog postings between websites. Both RDF and RSS are machine readable web standards for expressing metadata (data about data) but whereas RSS has a predetermined and fixed vocabulary specifically for reading news, RDF is an extensible common framework for namespaces (where the vocabularies are stored) and vocabularies.
RDF was developed as an open framework from philosophical inquiries by W3C about creating universal categorising systems, with the understanding that such a framework can never be comprehensive, hence the ability to add and modify namespaces.
Using the framework of RDF you can create an ordered list about a category of things (a namespace). For example Foaf Corp namespace which came about as a vocabulary to convert the 
http://theyrule.net project into a Semantic Web compatible format started with the original vocabulary below:
fc (foaf corp)
- fc: Company
- fc: Committee
- fc: Board
- fc: Member
- fc: Stock code
- fc: Filings (this looks like it needs rethought? where does it originate)
and then in June 2003 the MCC (Mapping Contemporary Capitalism) project proposed the following additions extensions:
- fc: Owns - internal, external
- fc: Shareholders - list of shareholders, number of shares on each market, percentage of shares
- fc: Company employs - (this is a crude category which will display multiple categories: business management, investment banking, marketing, personnel etc)
- fc: Company is funding - (this data may be unavailable but we can draw many inferences from its patchiness)
- fc: Company affiliation - company member affiliation (eg Gate Foundation)
- fc: Company's geographical locations
"An ontology defines the terms used to describe and represent an area of knowledge. Ontologies are used by people, databases, and applications that need to share domain information (a domain is just a specific subject area or area of knowledge, like medicine, tool manufacturing, real estate, automobile repair, financial management, etc.). Ontologies include computer-usable definitions of basic concepts in the domain and the relationships among them (note that here and throughout this document, definition is not used in the technical sense understood by logicians). They encode knowledge in a domain and also knowledge that spans domains. In this way, they make that knowledge reusable "
Quote: http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-webont-req-20030203/# onto-def
Once your web content has been formatted using an RDF vocabulary from a namespace, such as Foaf Corp (see the previous section), then you have a way to derive meaning about things. For someone to derive meaning about the relations between those things you need a ability to apply a set of questions and assertions, this is where the the logic part of RDF's language comes into play called Web Ontology Language (OWL).
A set of OWL ontology code could include a namespace, an initial set of URL's to visit and then call on a number of logical declarations. Because the semantic web deals with web content, it is inherently distributed, so expect OWL ontologies to also be distributed. One consequence of this is that OWL generally makes an open world assumption allowing it to move accross networks and add to the initial ontology.
Owl would be employed in the form of a 'bot, spider or scutter', a set of code sent out onto the web to gather and interpret RDF data, below is a link to an example of an a code set of a spider
FOAFBot is written by Edd Dumbill
http://usefulinc.com/foaf/foafbot/
Problems with the Semantic Web.
One potential problem with the Semantic Web as it is proposed is the reliance on the Internet Domain Name System (DNS). Each vocabulary is held in a 'name space'. This depends on a Uniform Resource Indicator (URI), an address that contains the dictionary that bots will need to 'understand' or translate between RDF formatted data sets. So the Semantic Web is only as 'free' as DNS until the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) becomes a global publicly accountable, democratic body, or is superseded by a distributively owned Free Network addressing system. This challenge will need to be met, and will require a great deal of co-operation between all Free Information groups - software, hardware, networks and semantics.
An 'Anti-systemic libary' is being created at the Action Resource Centre.
The principals of an anti-systemic library is that it does not have a catalogue, i.e. a heirarchical organisation of knowledge. Instead it needs bibliographies. These bibliographies could be attached to wikipedia pages providing a discrete place where those interested could see what books and websites related to the topic. Or some other system of categories may be used. The bibliography relates to wiki pages of the book and reviews of the book. By using what links here, it will thus be possible to see what bibliographies a given text appears.
It will then be possible for libraries with a particular text to add their name to a list of locations so that interested readers can find the most convenient copy if they want to read it. These anti-systemic libraries considered as a whole can be called 'The Anti-systemic Library'.
Glossary
- Semantic Web - The Web of data with meaning in the sense that a computer program can learn enough about what the data means to process it.
- RDF - Resource Description Framework
- Designed for expressing metadata about things in the form of 'triples'', using vocabularies that are published on the web. see Mute Map Vocabularies (above).
- Introductory (business-oriented) slideshow by Tim Berners-Lee has some interesting visualisations and talks about using an 'RDF Integration Bus' like the Mute Map Infomesh for applications. http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/03-pcforum-tbl/slide
1 5-4.html
- W3C RDF primer: http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/
- History of RDF by Tim Brey: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/05/21
/ RDFNet
- RSS - Rich Site Summary
- An RDF vocabulary and RDF/XML format for distributing news, increasingly popular with websites, many newsreaders available for example: http://amphetadesk.com for windows, http://www.netnewswire.com for mac. There are also many RSS aggregation services like http://syndic8.com. Easy to write 'crawlers' and 'scrapers' can convert HTML, email, irc, nttp etc... to RSS format.
- FOAF - FriendOfAFriend
- A vocaulary for describing people and networks of people in RDF. http://rdfweb.org/foaf.
- Friends of Corporate Friends (FOAFCorp) : http://rdfweb.org/foaf/corp.
- ?FoafNaut, a visual tool for navigating the foaf network done in SVG : http://foafnaut.org.
- A bug in FOAF, explaining the difficulties of modelling groups of people: http://rdfweb.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=8.
- OWL - Web Ontology Language
- A language (expressed in RDF) that allows us to apply logical and taxonomic contraints to RDF data and the things expressed in RDF vocabularies. Still in development.
- http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-owl-guide-20021104/
- SVG - Scalable Vector Graphics
- An XML format for describing vector graphics. with SMIL and javascript it can do Flash-like things; it also does lovely scalable static images.
- An SVG orgchart demo : http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/discovery/2003/03/6de
g .svg
- Carto.net, cartography and SVG : http://www.carto.net
- ?FoafNaut, a visual tool for navigating the foaf network done in SVG : http://foafnaut.org.
- SVG London tube map : http://space.frot.org/rdf/tubemap.svg
- XML (Extensible Markup Language) - A simplified successor to SGML. W3C's generic language for creating new markup languages. Markup languages (such as HTML) are used to represent documents with a nested, treelike structure. XML is a product of W3C and a trademark of MIT.
- Scutter, spider, bot : in the Semantic Web context this would be a set of code containing logical instructions, that is then sent to a number of URI's to apply the code to RDF data it finds at these addresses.
- Namespace - repository for Semantic Web vocabulary
- URI - Uniform Resource Identifier. The generic set of all names/addresses that are short strings that refer to resources.
- URL - Uniform Resource Locator. An informal term (no longer used in technical specifications) associated with popular URI schemes: http, ftp, mailto, etc.
- W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) - A neutral meeting of those to whom the Web is important, with the mission of leading the Web to its full potential.
Links
If your interested in taking part in Sematic Web projects you can visit the following addresses to find out more information.
University of Openness - Department of Cartography
Web: http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/index.php/FacultyC artography
Geowanking - An important mapping list
http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
?TheMuteMap - Sematic Web/ SVG development space
http://themutemap.3d.openmute.org
Included from TfOtFfootnotes
Footnotes
[1] See Andrew Orlowski's column in The Register: 'Anti-war slogan coined,
repurposed and Googlewashed... in 42 days'
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30087.html
[2] A thorough breakdown of reasons to be suspicious of Google are available on the Google Watch site: http://www.google-watch.org/bigbro.html
[3] The Voodoo Science Club and the London Psychogeographicl Society Historification Committee, Friday 22nd August 2003, Announced overnight cycle trip from Limehouse, London, to the Cave of the Illuminati, Royston, Herts.
http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/index.php/Limehous eTimeTravelRally
"
hydrarchist writes:
Draft version 1.0
Please make comments here here
Introduction
At the n5m hacktivist conference, September 2003, collaborative and locational mappers met to organise themselves to work more closely by organising quarterly meetings over the next year and agreeing to share resources. As a contribution to this work the UO has published this text to address the implications posed by the use of Semantic Web as a part of the social projects of the Free Information movement.
Who Are The Freemasons of the Future?
The first and most salient fact about the Freemasons of the Future is that they do not exist. However they are sentient beings trying to struggle into existence. From their perspective they are involved in a life and death struggle to ensure their own past, some of which we perceive as the present. Located in the distant future after time travel has become commonplace they endeavour to sojourn into what they regard as history to create the conditions which they consider as necessary for their own existence. But this does not mean they are going to be successful.
They justify their existence upon their existence, which they consider self-evident. The current conditions of life are to be extrapolated into the future until every quanta of human activity has been commodified: from genetic engineering to nanotechnology, the search for profitability is projected in every conceivable way. A world where sentient scraps of human biology exists as islands of wetware within the framework of vast cathedrals of computerised electronics. The distinction between human, animal and machine is dissolved as these products of bio-engineering are installed to fulfil operative functions within a nauseous system developed to do nothing but to manifest continuously expanding value. Whether we can regard such creatures as our offspring, or whether they are simply genetically engineered mutant beings created out of this or that strand of DNA perhaps is beside the point. This is the nightmare world to which we are heading, and which would provide the sort of massive bio-computer needed by the Freemasons of the Future to realise their greatest desire: unequivocal existence.
Faced with this onslaught which we can see around us, as all barriers to genetic engineering are torn down one by one, how can we respond? The class struggle now manifests itself in dimensions which have recently been invaded by the process of industrialisation.
From the industrialisation of the imagination, through television, to the industrialisation of knowledge through the internet, the information age has taken over from the Age of Steam, the Age of Petrol and even the Atomic Age. The current episode we are living through is rattling asunder as the ripples of the QuantumTimeBomb penetrate the deepest recesses of human activity.
HarryPotter
extract from the announcement of the LimehouseTimeTravelRally
Free Association
The enclosure of a potential 'information commons' by an anarchistic elite of
corporate/state bodies is well underway. Alongside this enclosure, strong and
vibrant hobbyist movements are flourishing. Free Software activists, Free
Hardware geeks and Free Networkers, natives of the information commons are
continuing to fiddle, peeking under the bonnet of their technologies,
creating and manipulating their information environment as they see fit.
However, describing hundreds of disparate Free Network groups, thousands of
bits of Free Hardware, and tens of thousands of Free Software projects as a
'movement' seems very vague . How can an appropriately heroic
historical narrative be brought together from this constantly shifting mass of
web sites, mailing lists, irc channels, changelogs, and man(ual) pages? And given
that the politics of these projects are often equally unstable, or in the
process of being co-opted and enclosed, how can we distinguish between
between 'free as in beer', 'free as in speech', and 'free as in trade'?
Don't ask Jeeves, or Google, or any of the other proprietary info-associating
engines. There is a better way. Lets create and use a Free Semantic Web, the
binding element of the 'information commons'.
What's wrong with using google?
Google makes the best of a bad situation. The web is still mostly comprised of
chunks of HTML, although many sites, blogs especially, are publishing
structured data and Rich Site Summary (RSS) feeds. The problem is that Google is a very limiting
filter to apply to the web. Since people began to routinely abuse HTML <meta> tags,
google no longer even uses the keywords or descriptions in them. It does
limited keyword indexing on the contents of a web page, but mostly concentrates
on the number of links to the page, and the number of links from it. This can
be quite effective, but inevitably misses subtleties and distinctions between
context and contents. The phenomenon of 'googlewashing', where terms and
keywords can be effectively hijacked (for google users at any rate) by flooding
google's PageRank(TM) system with a new definition or spin on an existing
phrase, is a good example of this problem [1].
Aside from the obvious danger of such universal dependence on a single corporate
entity[2], a more subtle system of description and inference is needed to avoid
our continued reliance on Google's reductive system of association.
The Semantic Web
In the mid 90's Ramanathan V. Guha went to work for Apple, where he developed
a metadata format called Meta Content Framework which described websites, or
filesystems and relationships between them. The intention was that using
Apple's 'Hotsauce' browser, users could fly through a 3 dimensional
representation of that content. The project fell flat, and it was only when
Guha moved to Netscape in '97 and Extensible Markup Language (XML) became a common standard for the exchange
of structured data that his ideas about the representing semantic associations
between bits of data began to gain influence.
At that time the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) began a general-purpose metadata project, loosely termed
the 'Semantic Web', to develop ways of representing data on the web. Based on
the Resource Description Framework (RDF), the basic idea is that resources are
named with Uniform Resource Locators (URLs or web addresses) and links between them described using XML for syntax, so RDF documents are
machine readable. The framework is general enough that it is not limited to
describing data on the web, it can also be used to describe things in the
world.
If we can assign a URL to a physical object, person, or idea, we can link other
URLs to it, which in turn refer to people, objects, ideas or other links. Someone (or
something) looking at this association can then infer something about the
things being represented from the association, which can be further described and qualified by more
links. The 'name-spaces', or vocabularies used in these descriptions
can also be seen as nodes in this semantic network and linked to, extended, re-written and
re-defined, so these representations are always contingent and non-originary.
Total Information Awareness' & 'Consensual Reality'
The totalising invective of the Semantic Web project was very evident in one of
its main predecessors, the CYC corporations' proprietary 'common sense'
knowledgebase. This 'big AI' project was Guha's first job out of university,
and involved the collation of a huge database of so-called 'common sense'
statements. These statements were machine-readable so that software agents
would be able to search through and make inferences based on them.
A typical example is a CYC-based search engine that could respond
to the question 'what is bravery?' by looking through its knowledgebase,
finding an assertion that a property of 'brave' is 'danger', finding another
saying that rock climbing is dangerous, and then retrieving a picture of a rock
climber.
The notion of collating all 'common sense', (or 'consensual reality'
as Cycorp sometimes put it), as a basis for artificial intelligence is a
genuinely totalising and largely discredited idea. This problem, and the fact
that the format of the knowledgebase and the modes and methods used to describe
its contents were fixed, prescribed by Cyc's designers frustrated Guha, and gave him
and his collaborators the impetus to attempt to formulate a more malleable
framework, without this dubious premise.
Another problem is that the development of the Semantic Web; a machine-readable representation of
everything, and its relationship to everything else, does
sound like a step towards 'total information awareness'. It is true that the
enriched and extensible vocabularies that the Semantic Web uses to describe
relationships will expediate morally dubious activities such as surveillance,
unsolicited direct marketing and military operations. These technologies will
refine existing authoritarian systems for associating and describing
things and people (consumer profiling systems for example) which are usually
imposed without negotiation or consent, and by virtue of their limited interest
in the person as a 'consumer', these representations currently remain very unsophisticated.
However, the extensibility of the Semantic Web, the fact that the person
doing the describing can define the terms, the 'vocabulary' of that description
suggests a less totalising, more heterogeneous 'information awareness'. This is both
promising and potentially dangerous. Augmented by many more layers of information and
description, volunteered by the person being represented, the 'consumer profile' becomes
infinitely more insidious and detailed. At the same time, the greater sophistication
of the Semantic Web's descriptive language enables someone to consciously and
deliberately allow or deny access to specific data that they produce. Using cryptography,
and 'friend of a friend' testimonial systems (sometimes called 'trust' networks) at least
offers us some degree of control over and awareness of the data being exchanged about us.
On a more structural level, the development of many divergent, even antagonistic descriptions of
the world and the people in it moves away from the idea of any imposed 'consensual reality'
and suggests a mode of representation that can be multiply subjective.
Some technical examples
By using the RDF common framework it enables the data used in a map project to be fully distributed in terms of storage and authorship. Not only could groups collate and share their own data but also use publicly accessible data sources, such as: company profits, IMF trade data, regulatory board members etc.
RDF's more widely-known derivative is Rich Site Summary (RSS), a format often used to syndicate news stories and blog postings between websites. Both RDF and RSS are machine readable web standards for expressing metadata (data about data) but whereas RSS has a predetermined and fixed vocabulary specifically for reading news, RDF is an extensible common framework for namespaces (where the vocabularies are stored) and vocabularies.
RDF was developed as an open framework from philosophical inquiries by W3C about creating universal categorising systems, with the understanding that such a framework can never be comprehensive, hence the ability to add and modify namespaces.
Using the framework of RDF you can create an ordered list about a category of things (a namespace). For example Foaf Corp namespace which came about as a vocabulary to convert the http://theyrule.net project into a Semantic Web compatible format started with the original vocabulary below:
fc (foaf corp)
- fc: Company
- fc: Committee
- fc: Board
- fc: Member
- fc: Stock code
- fc: Filings (this looks like it needs rethought? where does it originate)
and then in June 2003 the MCC (Mapping Contemporary Capitalism) project proposed the following additions extensions:
- fc: Owns - internal, external
- fc: Shareholders - list of shareholders, number of shares on each market, percentage of shares
- fc: Company employs - (this is a crude category which will display multiple categories: business management, investment banking, marketing, personnel etc)
- fc: Company is funding - (this data may be unavailable but we can draw many inferences from its patchiness)
- fc: Company affiliation - company member affiliation (eg Gate Foundation)
- fc: Company's geographical locations
"An ontology defines the terms used to describe and represent an area of knowledge. Ontologies are used by people, databases, and applications that need to share domain information (a domain is just a specific subject area or area of knowledge, like medicine, tool manufacturing, real estate, automobile repair, financial management, etc.). Ontologies include computer-usable definitions of basic concepts in the domain and the relationships among them (note that here and throughout this document, definition is not used in the technical sense understood by logicians). They encode knowledge in a domain and also knowledge that spans domains. In this way, they make that knowledge reusable "
Quote: http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-webont-req-20030203/
Once your web content has been formatted using an RDF vocabulary from a namespace, such as Foaf Corp (see the previous section), then you have a way to derive meaning about things. For someone to derive meaning about the relations between those things you need a ability to apply a set of questions and assertions, this is where the the logic part of RDF's language comes into play called Web Ontology Language (OWL).
A set of OWL ontology code could include a namespace, an initial set of URL's to visit and then call on a number of logical declarations. Because the semantic web deals with web content, it is inherently distributed, so expect OWL ontologies to also be distributed. One consequence of this is that OWL generally makes an open world assumption allowing it to move accross networks and add to the initial ontology.
Owl would be employed in the form of a 'bot, spider or scutter', a set of code sent out onto the web to gather and interpret RDF data, below is a link to an example of an a code set of a spider
FOAFBot is written by Edd Dumbill
http://usefulinc.com/foaf/foafbot/
Problems with the Semantic Web.
One potential problem with the Semantic Web as it is proposed is the reliance on the Internet Domain Name System (DNS). Each vocabulary is held in a 'name space'. This depends on a Uniform Resource Indicator (URI), an address that contains the dictionary that bots will need to 'understand' or translate between RDF formatted data sets. So the Semantic Web is only as 'free' as DNS until the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) becomes a global publicly accountable, democratic body, or is superseded by a distributively owned Free Network addressing system. This challenge will need to be met, and will require a great deal of co-operation between all Free Information groups - software, hardware, networks and semantics.
An 'Anti-systemic libary' is being created at the Action Resource Centre.
The principals of an anti-systemic library is that it does not have a catalogue, i.e. a heirarchical organisation of knowledge. Instead it needs bibliographies. These bibliographies could be attached to wikipedia pages providing a discrete place where those interested could see what books and websites related to the topic. Or some other system of categories may be used. The bibliography relates to wiki pages of the book and reviews of the book. By using what links here, it will thus be possible to see what bibliographies a given text appears.
It will then be possible for libraries with a particular text to add their name to a list of locations so that interested readers can find the most convenient copy if they want to read it. These anti-systemic libraries considered as a whole can be called 'The Anti-systemic Library'.
Glossary
- Semantic Web - The Web of data with meaning in the sense that a computer program can learn enough about what the data means to process it.
- RDF - Resource Description Framework
- Designed for expressing metadata about things in the form of 'triples'', using vocabularies that are published on the web. see Mute Map Vocabularies (above).
- Introductory (business-oriented) slideshow by Tim Berners-Lee has some interesting visualisations and talks about using an 'RDF Integration Bus' like the Mute Map Infomesh for applications. http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/03-pcforum-tbl/slide
1 5-4.html - W3C RDF primer: http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/
- History of RDF by Tim Brey: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/05/21
/ RDFNet
- RSS - Rich Site Summary
- An RDF vocabulary and RDF/XML format for distributing news, increasingly popular with websites, many newsreaders available for example: http://amphetadesk.com for windows, http://www.netnewswire.com for mac. There are also many RSS aggregation services like http://syndic8.com. Easy to write 'crawlers' and 'scrapers' can convert HTML, email, irc, nttp etc... to RSS format.
- An RDF vocabulary and RDF/XML format for distributing news, increasingly popular with websites, many newsreaders available for example:
- FOAF - FriendOfAFriend
- A vocaulary for describing people and networks of people in RDF. http://rdfweb.org/foaf.
- Friends of Corporate Friends (FOAFCorp) : http://rdfweb.org/foaf/corp.
- ?FoafNaut, a visual tool for navigating the foaf network done in SVG : http://foafnaut.org.
- A bug in FOAF, explaining the difficulties of modelling groups of people: http://rdfweb.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=8.
- A vocaulary for describing people and networks of people in RDF.
- OWL - Web Ontology Language
- A language (expressed in RDF) that allows us to apply logical and taxonomic contraints to RDF data and the things expressed in RDF vocabularies. Still in development.
- http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-owl-guide-20021104/
- SVG - Scalable Vector Graphics
- An XML format for describing vector graphics. with SMIL and javascript it can do Flash-like things; it also does lovely scalable static images.
- An SVG orgchart demo : http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/discovery/2003/03/6de
g .svg - Carto.net, cartography and SVG : http://www.carto.net
- ?FoafNaut, a visual tool for navigating the foaf network done in SVG : http://foafnaut.org.
- SVG London tube map : http://space.frot.org/rdf/tubemap.svg
- XML (Extensible Markup Language) - A simplified successor to SGML. W3C's generic language for creating new markup languages. Markup languages (such as HTML) are used to represent documents with a nested, treelike structure. XML is a product of W3C and a trademark of MIT.
- Scutter, spider, bot : in the Semantic Web context this would be a set of code containing logical instructions, that is then sent to a number of URI's to apply the code to RDF data it finds at these addresses.
- Namespace - repository for Semantic Web vocabulary
- URI - Uniform Resource Identifier. The generic set of all names/addresses that are short strings that refer to resources.
- URL - Uniform Resource Locator. An informal term (no longer used in technical specifications) associated with popular URI schemes: http, ftp, mailto, etc.
- W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) - A neutral meeting of those to whom the Web is important, with the mission of leading the Web to its full potential.
http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/discovery/2003/03/6de
http://space.frot.org/rdf/tubemap.svgLinks
If your interested in taking part in Sematic Web projects you can visit the following addresses to find out more information.
University of Openness - Department of Cartography
Web: http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/index.php/Faculty
Geowanking - An important mapping list
http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
?TheMuteMap - Sematic Web/ SVG development space
http://themutemap.3d.openmute.org
Included from TfOtFfootnotes
[1] See Andrew Orlowski's column in The Register: 'Anti-war slogan coined,
repurposed and Googlewashed... in 42 days'
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30087.html
[2] A thorough breakdown of reasons to be suspicious of Google are available on the Google Watch site: http://www.google-watch.org/bigbro.html
[3] The Voodoo Science Club and the London Psychogeographicl Society Historification Committee, Friday 22nd August 2003, Announced overnight cycle trip from Limehouse, London, to the Cave of the Illuminati, Royston, Herts.
http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/index.php/Limehou
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