{"id":20205,"date":"2015-07-20T09:32:02","date_gmt":"2015-07-20T13:32:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=20205"},"modified":"2015-07-20T10:26:38","modified_gmt":"2015-07-20T14:26:38","slug":"the-stickiness-of-difference-in-the-semantic-web","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2015\/07\/20\/the-stickiness-of-difference-in-the-semantic-web\/","title":{"rendered":"The Stickiness of Difference in the Semantic Web"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo<\/a>
Photo taken by Dheera Venkatraman<\/a> in Myanmar.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For a little over a decade, those researchers and visionaries originally involved in establishing the infrastructure for the World Wide Web have set their sights higher.\u00a0 While hyperlinking Web pages has been pivotal to creating a Web of documents, the more recent goals to establish a Semantic Web<\/em> involve hyperlinking data, or individual elements within a Web page.\u00a0 In attaching unique identifiers (in the form of Uniform Resource Identifiers or URIs) and metadata to data points (rather than to just the documents where those data points appear) machines are able to interpret, not just what the browser should display, but also what the page is about<\/em>. \u00a0The hope is that, in providing machines with the capacity to interpret what data is about<\/em>, it will be possible to drastically improve Web search and to allow researchers to perform automated reasoning on the massive amounts of data contributed to the Web.\u00a0 There are numerous examples where this infrastructure is already having impact (albeit largely behind-the-scenes).\u00a0 For instance, the New York Times has already \u201csemantified\u201d all of its data and created a Semantic API<\/a> where researchers can query its database.\u00a0 Facebook\u2019s Graph API<\/a>, which employs Semantic Web infrastructure to structure user profile data, has been the foundation for several studies attempting to make sense of human behavior and interactions through the platform\u2019s \u201cbig data.\u201d<\/p>\n

Inherent in the project of structuring meaning are philosophical questions about sameness and difference. How do we define and formalize identity \u2013 when one thing is exactly the same as the other?\u00a0 Semantic Web engineers are well-attuned to these questions; in fact, many have degrees in Philosophy.\u00a0 Yet, questions about sameness are difference are not just philosophical; they are also deeply political.\u00a0 There are social repercussions to formally marking two things as the same or two things as different. \u00a0We need to be attuned to how the digital infrastructure built for the Semantic Web reflects and projects political commitments \u2013 how it shapes a politics of representation. This has serious implications for how identity can be organized, and how we (and machines) understand what the world is about <\/em>as we access Web knowledge bases for information.<\/p>\n

It is notable that establishing the infrastructure needed to meet the vision of a Semantic Web involves engineering a shared language between a content creator and a machine. What happens when language is literally engineered \u2013 when digital infrastructure deliberately structures the meaning of content on the Web?<\/p>\n

There are several layers to the infrastructure of the Semantic Web; the most important layers are arguably schemas, semantics, and ontologies. \u201d\u00a0 Schemas provide a range of properties for describing data.\u00a0 For instance, a schema may provide properties such as \u2018restaurant telephone number\u2019, \u2018event start date\u2019, or \u2018gender\u2019, which can be referenced to describe a piece of data. Semantics establish the structure for how these properties and their values can be attached to data points. \u00a0Semantic data is most commonly structured in \u201ctriples\u201d of subject, predicate, object; the data point (subject) is linked to a schema property (predicate), and a value is attached to this property (object).<\/p>\n

\"hitchens_app2_Slide9\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Finally, ontologies formalize how researchers mark the relationships, hierarchies, and differences between pieces of data; they offer a formal way for representing knowledge. For example, an ontology may be applied to show that Miley Cyrus is a child of Billy Rae Cyrus, or a carnivore is a subcategory of an animal. \u00a0Schemas, semantics, and ontologies all become machine-readable through different coding languages and standards.<\/p>\n

As you can imagine, building these languages and establishing these standards is quite a contentious endeavor; it involves delineating the boundaries of meaning around just about anything in the world.\u00a0 Tedious discussions arise as Web engineers engaged in establishing this infrastructure, in collaboration with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), attempt to formalize the way data should be described<\/a> and ontologically represented<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Consider, for instance, \u201cOWL:sameas\u201d, a property in OWL (an ontology coding language) that was established to codify when two pieces of data on the Web (with two different URIs) refer to the same thing, or have the same identity.\u00a0 The W3C documentation<\/a> outlining this property offers the following example, showing how OWL:sameas would describe a reference to William Jefferson Clinton to be the same as a reference to Bill Clinton:<\/p>\n

<rdf:Description rdf:about=”#William_Jefferson_Clinton”><\/p>\n

<owl:sameAs rdf:resource=”#BillClinton”\/><\/p>\n

<\/rdf:Description><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As more and more webmasters take advantage of Semantic Web infrastructure to describe their data, many Web researchers and engineers have lamented how OWL:sameas is being used and (ab)used<\/a>.\u00a0 What happens when \u2018morning star\u2019 and \u2018evening star\u2019 are both described as being the \u201csame as\u201d \u2018Venus\u2019?\u00a0 Should the automated reasoners that attempt to make inferences from this data then assume that they are the \u201csame as\u201d each other?\u00a0 Is the time of day that Venus is seen (or \u201csensed\u201d in the words of Gottlub Frege, a logician and philosopher inspiring much work in Web ontologies) a difference that makes a difference?\u00a0\"ref-sent\"<\/a> Notably, formalized logic breaks down when OWL:sameas is applied more loosely; automated reasoners produce tangled results.\u00a0 The stickiness of difference keeps getting in the way of clean ontological depictions of the world.<\/p>\n

The controversial politics of representation becomes apparent as soon as OWL:sameas is applied to contested data points.\u00a0 Take, for example, DBpedia<\/a>, a crowd-sourced project aiming to semantify data that has been contributed to Wikipedia. As of July 2015, DBpedia still has no entry for Caitlyn Jenner.\u00a0 But it does have an entry for Bruce Jenner<\/a>.\u00a0 Scroll through the metadata at this URI to the OWL:sameas property, and you will find several URIs \u2013 all of which link to Web pages on Caitlyn Jenner. \u00a0Other examples illustrate international naming politics.\u00a0 DBpedia has no entry for Myanmar, but it does have an entry for Burma<\/a>.\u00a0 Scroll to the OWL:sameas property, and you will find that the US-based and UK-based URIs marked as being the \u201csame as\u201d this entry all refer to Burma, while those based elsewhere in the world refer to Myanmar \u2013 the name change the US and UK refused to recognize<\/a> due to the reported human rights abuses that led to 1989 regime change.<\/p>\n

\"map_burma\"Should automated reasoners assume that a reference to Bruce Jenner is the \u201csame as\u201d a reference to Caitlyn Jenner, or that a reference to Burma is the \u201csame as\u201d a reference to Myanmar \u2013 that the two have the same \u201cidentity\u201d?\u00a0 And more importantly, who gets to decide?\u00a0 What happens when this sameness organizes how we see data on the Web?\u00a0 Or when it becomes the basis of research conducted on the Web?<\/p>\n

Attempts to iron out these differences, or even to nail down when and how differences make a difference, discount the importance of permitting difference to remain sticky \u2013 of allowing data to sit comfortably and uncomfortably in a conflicting ontological space of sameness and difference.\u00a0\u00a0 In this sense, there are not just technical and philosophical difficulties to semantifying the Web; there are also political difficulties \u2013 considerations that are often ignored as Web researchers attempt to engineer vocabularies and ontologies that capture a consistent depiction of the world.\u00a0 \u00a0This can be thought of in terms of what postcolonial and feminist theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak refers to as \u201cworlding the world.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cWorlding\u201d refers to the way colonizers inscribe new worlds \u2013 worlds they assume were previously uninscribed. It is with this \u201cworlding\u201d that certain forms of meaning become salient \u2013 that the \u201cThird World\u201d comes to be recognized as the \u201cThird World\u201d and that the countries that constitute it are homogenized to sameness.\u00a0 We need heightened awareness of how the worlding of the Web \u2013 the engineering of semantic infrastructure \u2013 shapes what we know and can know \u2013 what can be made meaningful in a world full of sticky differences.<\/p>\n

Lindsay Poirier is a PhD Student in Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.\u00a0 She occasionally Tweets at @lindsaypoirier<\/a>. <\/em>http:\/\/lindsaypoirier.com\/<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For a little over a decade, those researchers and visionaries originally involved in establishing the infrastructure for the World Wide Web have set their sights higher.\u00a0 While hyperlinking Web pages has been pivotal to creating a Web of documents, the more recent goals to establish a Semantic Web involve hyperlinking data, or individual elements within […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1512,"featured_media":20206,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[14262,4446,8497,7580,19990,431,4243,9986],"class_list":["post-20205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","tag-difference","tag-documentation","tag-information","tag-infrastructure","tag-metadata","tag-research","tag-semantic-web","tag-the-web"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/files\/2015\/07\/9352821795_a4404a6453_z.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1512"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20205"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20218,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20205\/revisions\/20218"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}