- From: Paola Di Maio <paola.dimaio@gmail.com>
- Date: Sun, 27 Jun 2021 09:08:47 +0800
- To: W3C AIKR CG <public-aikr@w3.org>
- Message-ID: <CAMXe=SoTQRGcQhESnz=By58oAQSHGZm_zsC5=Dk1nWx3JUVKCA@mail.gmail.com>
This article reads like a prophecy, does anyone know Kieron? O'Hara, Kieron. "Ontologies and technologies: knowledge representation or misrepresentation." *ACM SIGIR Forum*. Vol. 38. No. 2. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2004. The development of the Semantic Web (SW) raises a number of difficult and interesting technical issues. Less often remarked, however, are the social and political debates that it will engender, if and when the technologies become widely accepted. As the SW is a technology for transferring information and knowledge efficiently and effectively, then many of these questions have an epistemological base. In this paper I want to focus especially on the epistemological underpinnings of these social issues, to think about the interaction between the epistemological and the political. How does technology affect the social networks in which it is embedded? How can technology be successfully transplanted into a new context? And, perhaps most importantly for us, how is technology affected by its context? In particular, I want to look at how our decisions about how we treat knowledge can impact quite dramatically on the technologies we produce. Let us begin with a familiar diagram, the layered view of the SW developed in the very early stages by Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues (Figure 1). Knowledge of different types is separated out (ontologies appearning in the middle). And by making this separation, we can see how the semanticity of the Semantic Web comes about. The technical machinery of Unicode and URIs appears at the bottom; XML can be used to tell the computer what objects this code is concerned with. RDF tells us that those objects are related in various ways. Ontologies give a context for the object types and relation types. We then need logic and inference engines to make contextsensitive inferences over our knowledge bases. Proof theory tells us the properties of our inference engines – soundness and completeness etc. And finally, there’s no point being proven innocent if no one trusts the method of proof. Figure 1: The layered view of the SW O’Hara Ontologies and Technologies 2 Hence, ontologies are central to the vision of information aggregation and manipulation underlying the Semantic Web. Ontology-mediation within services enables much to happen; they can steer the knowledge acquisition process, choreograph the integration of information from diverse sources and representational formats, assemble retrieved information into customised packages, and hence present information to the right people in the right form, bring intelligence to the search process, undercutting the direct human input to the drudge work. An example of an ontology-mediated system which exploits the new expressivity that the SW allows is the winner of the 2003 Semantic Web Challenge, CS AKTive Space (Shadbolt et al 2004), which gives an up-to-date snapshot of the state of the discipline of computer science in Britain. But the point of view of the snapshot is determined by the user. In a massive knowledge acquisition exercise, various different technologies assemble giant quantities of research-related information from the websites of computer science departments, the EPSRC and so on. This is all collected on a regular basis, and converted into RDF. The RDF store contains tens of millions of triples, and the space enables the user to query that store to ask specific questions about British computer science. Who is working on what? Who is working with whom? Where are the geographical concentrations of researchers? Which areas are receiving the funding? Who are the top people in different areas? Ontology mediation is central to this flexibility in the presentation and selection of information; how does this impinge on the social aspects of the SW? There are two ways in which the Semantic Web can be seen as social. The first is that, as we ascend Figure 1, the layers become increasingly socially rooted. In other words, even though all of these layers are amenable to technical solutions (even trust, a social phenomenon par excellence, can be addressed technically, as we see, of course, in the agents community, and increasingly in Semantic Web services), as we move up, each layer is more beholden to social phenomena. No matter how good the technical solutions provided, as we move along the direction of the arrow, those solutions must respect more, and more complex, social phenomena. They can be criticised by pointing out that, no matter how impressive the solution, it fails to capture some vital aspect of reality https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1041394.1041397?casa_token=V8xeXiRSUGUAAAAA%3AZ-nHUlU8AXV58LtRUqKYhN7uiX8iS0l5DDn94BmqTaEM4QlqcnZFfeEeVnOzAc1I21i9cmp-hduu5P4
Received on Sunday, 27 June 2021 01:09:39 UTC