>[Marianne van den Boomen wrote:]
> Interesting analogy, but doesn't the semantic web pretend
> more than just such a 'syntactic web' of grammar and
> vocabulary? It aims at providing rules and entities as a
> framework for (the search for) meaning. That's another level,
> I suppose. It aims at universally identifiable and extensible
> semantics. In fact, it aims to overcome the babylonian
> confusion of tongues between for example the two books
> mentioned above.
> These books can be seen as emblematic instantiations of two kinds of
> ontology: an ontology of being and an ontology of becoming.
> The semantic web aims in that sense at a meta-ontology in
> which these books not just get a classified location in a
> taxonomic system (indicating their relative location on the
> shelves in a physical library) but in which they also become
> virtually locatable, i.e. addressable, understandable and
> harnessable on the web, even when they function in completely
> different semantic or knowledge domains or are culturally
> incompatible.
> In fact, hyperbolically reformulated, the aim is to let these
> books 'talk to one another', and understand/interprete each
> other. Seamlessly.
I think we come to the core of the problem here. Either one believes that
the connective web of relations minimally expressed by the Semantic Web has
meaning ("meaning lite," we might call it), or one doesn't.
In terms of media theory, this issue goes back at least as far as Claude
Shannon's stunning dismissal of semantics in his mathematical theory of
communication: "The fundamental problem of communication is that of
reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected
at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer
to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or
conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant
to the engineering problem." (And, of course, there was McLuhan's parallel
concept that "the medium is the message," which has since been echoed in the
anti-hermeneutic, "materialities of communication" school of media theory
[which Friedrich Kittler's work is often taken to represent].)
Classical philosophy, of course, spoke not in terms of media but of "being"
itself. (Their mediation of physics was metaphysics.) So, in classical
terms, the question is whether being (the original referent of "ontology")
has meaning. (Straddling the line between classical humanist sensibility
and posthumanist media theory, we academic cultural critics ask equivalent
questions about something that seems both to have the substance of being and
the lightness of media: culture. E.g., "does pop culture have meaning?")
However, I suspect that the Semantic Web--at least at its present state of
development--is an offshoot mainly of the "web services" world view, itself
a manifestation of a functionalist, engineering world view. (This is not a
put-down of engineers, whose functionalism has its own way of expressing
human aspiration. I am myself the son of an engineer whose buildings,
including the World Trade Center, once reached for the clouds. Such more
recent engineers' dreams as Christophe Bisciglia's/Google's "cloud"-concept
reach for the same clouds, whatever suspicions we mere builders of academic
books might have [to cross this thread with the other ongoing Nettime thread
at the momemt]. [See Steven Baker, "Google and the Wisdom of Clouds,"
_Business Week_, 24 December 2007: 48-55,
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_52/b4064048925836.htm?chan=m
agazine+channel_top+stories)]
That is, the Semantic Web isn't really being engineered to "mean,"
semantically or culturally. It is being engineered to "do." In the manner
of the web-services or information-agent concept, it is being raised as a
very smart swarm of animals that can follow data scents through thickets of
data silos (confusing to humans because each uses different
terms/fields/tags in different database management structures) and then come
back with the exact predicated-nominative (i.e., functional thing in active
relation with other tings) we requested: Subject:Person | Predicate:is
Author of | Object:Book. Does the person, book, or "author of" in the
example above (not code, only an abstraction) have "meaning"? The animals
don't know. (Shannon: "These semantic aspects of communication are
irrelevant. . . .") And, insofar as most humans don't care to know either
at the moment of the relevant information action (e.g., a search),
then--from an engineering viewpoint--humans as such can be factored out of
the equation. To put a functionalist spin on Deleuze and Guattari: we all
become animal.
So the aim is _not_ necessarily "to let these books 'talk to one another'"
(citing Marianne's phrase in her response above). The aim is merely to let
something "do" something to/with something.
Of course, the functionalist viewpoint I am here hypothesizing as the world
view of the Semantic Web is phrased a bit extremely. (But I am not being
too extreme. Witness the title of the recent article in _Scientific
American_ 297.6 [2007]: 90-97 intended to be a follow-up to the original Tim
Berners-Lee article on the Semantic Web in the same journal. The title is
"The Semantic Web in Action,"
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-semantic-web-in-action) I push the
point, though, because extreme functionalism can have a culturally purgative
effect--just as extreme formalism had in the avant-garde era of modernism
("form equals function"). (More recently, Johanna Drucker has argued for a
purely functionalist, programmatic understanding of even the codex book: we
should ask, she says, "'how' a book 'does' its particular actions, rather
than 'what' a book 'is'." See her "The Virtual Codex from Page Space to
E-space," http://www.philobiblon.com/drucker/)
If we purge away residual, old-humanist guilt-feelings about universalism so
as to surmise that universal inter-functionality or interoperability is not
the same as universal meaning or being, then it may be possible for cultural
criticism of the Semantic Web to end up confessing a utopianism of its own
that is curiously similar to that being criticized in Berners-Lee et al.
Today's cultural-critical dream is of a world in which there can be local
cultures not enslaved by, indebted to, or otherwise under the shadow of the
so-called "universal" culture of any dominating force, imperialist or
Googlist. I don't see why the notion of an extensible ontology--where there
is an overall framework for human interaction but not necessarily an overall
meaning of humanity--is foreign to that dream. It is an extension of that
dream. Of course, vigilance of the sort Florian recommends is still needed,
since the mold has not set and the great imperialists today, whose native
institutional form is not the nation but the corporation, are waiting to
bend the dreams to other purposes.
--Alan Liu
> Berners-Lee (see
> http://www.w3.org/2006/Talks/0718-aaai-tbl/#(17) ) denies
> that "the Semantic Web is about making one big ontology"
> Instead he claims: "The semantic web is about a fractal mess
> of interconnected ontologies...." This may be true, but then
> we have this already - it's called culture. Even Web 1.0 and
> 2.0 are part of it. Only it is not formalized in a
> meta-ontology interconnecting and extending all these
> micro-ontologies. That will remain a megalomanic dream.
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