Re: "A Suggestion for Bob" (Moved to public list)

I forgot to mention: I also expect my browser to allow me to create an
"annotation," with or without embedded credibility signals, for any
addressable resource that can be displayed in my browser -- including other
annotations or credibility signals. Additionally, it should be possible for
me to publish such annotations in such a way that they are discoverable by
others (although I might limit the scope of those who can discover it.)
This ability to support an interface allowing me to "say things about"
addressable web resources is, I believe, most clearly dealt with in the
realm of discussions similar to those that motivated development of the W3C
Web Annotations specification.

bob wyman


On Sun, Sep 5, 2021 at 2:06 PM Bob Wyman <bob@wyman.us> wrote:

> While I argue that an extended variant of W3C Web Annotations is the
> appropriate way to support the publication and discovery of 2nd and 3rd
> party credibility signals (i.e. not 1st party signals embedded in the
> content itself), I recognize that just about any mechanism for stating a
> relationship between a web resource and some other retrievable resource
> containing a credibility signal would satisfy the technical requirement.
> This means, of course, that anything that supports RDF or an RDF-like
> mechanism would do the job. In fact, it is useful to observe that the
> ability to assess credibility would be enhanced if there is access not only
> to explicit credibility signals but also to the full range of data and
> relationships that are recorded in the Semantic Web. But, while the claim
> "All you need is RDF!" has a great deal of truth to it, I feel that claim
> is insufficient in that it addresses only one aspect of the problem set;
> data storage conventions. "Just use RDF," tells us something about how to
> store the relationship data, but it says nothing about the expected use
> cases, interfaces, dialog patterns, etc. whose understanding is essential
> to the development of a useful communication paradigm. (Credibility signals
> are communications...) "Just use RDF," does little to allow us to build up
> a common, shared understanding of how these systems might "look." On the
> other hand, speaking about W3C Web Annotations invokes a particular set of
> assumptions, understandings, etc. of one very useful means of establishing
> relationships between resources.
>
> When I pull up a web page in my browser (say: "
> https://example.com/post1.html") I would like my browser to present to
> me, in parallel with the page, a filtered/sorted list of annotations
> relevant to that page. Determinations of relevance should be based on the
> current state of my personal "Credibility Web" (see Sandro's earlier posts
> re Credibility Web). If there are no annotations in the curated set, or if
> I am curious to see what is not in the curated list, I should also be able
> to request either a full set of annotations, or a set filtered and sorted
> using something other than my default Credibility Web. Ideally, the browser
> would also be able to pull in and display, in some useful format, data
> concerning the page, its hosting site, author, etc. that is retrieved from
> the Semantic Web. Clearly, it would be useful if processes in my browser,
> or that work in cooperation with my browser, could evalature the same set
> of annotations or Semantic Web data and generate various summaries,
> "scores," etc. that could be presented to me in order to enrich my ability
> to assess the credibility or truth of claims made on the current page.
>
> Given that W3C Web Annotations are "just RDF or RDF-like stuff," I could
> say "Just use RDF," but I think it is more useful to view this from the
> users point of view, to see it as an application of the annotation use
> case, and leave the use of, or necessity for, RDF as a technical
> implementation detail.
>
> bob wyman
>
>
> On Sun, Sep 5, 2021 at 1:15 PM Bob Wyman <bob@wyman.us> wrote:
>
>> The message exchange reconstructed below occurred on the internal list,
>> but it has been observed that it belonged on the public list instead. I
>> hope the other contributors to this thread do not object to my repackaging
>> and reposting it on the public list.
>>
>> ----- Forwarded Messages follow -----
>>
>> From: Owen Ambur <Owen.Ambur@verizon.net>
>> Date: Sun, Sep 5, 2021 at 12:14 AM
>> Subject: A Suggestion for Bob
>> To: <internal-credibility@w3.org>
>>
>> Sandro, thank for sharing these audio/video recordings.
>>
>> Since Bob Wyman is troubled by the lack of capability to express to the
>> world that he is not a communist, the purpose of this message is to offer
>> him a potential means of relief:
>>
>> Publish his plan(s) on the Web in StratML Part 1, Strategic Plan (ISO
>> 17469-1) format.
>>
>> If he were to do so, it would be fairly easy for myriad AI-enabled
>> intermediary services to pretty well establish whether he is a communist or
>> not, assuming of course that he honestly documents his vision, mission,
>> values, goals, objectives, and stakeholders -- as best he understands them.
>>
>> With reference to Leonard Rosenthol's comment about verification, that
>> depends upon whether performance indicators of actual results are reliably
>> documented and shared -- preferably in records published in an open,
>> standard, machine-readable format like StratML Part 2, Performance Plans &
>> Reports (formerly ANSI/AIIM 22:2017).
>>
>> Lacking such indicators anyone's guesses and "assertions" are as good as
>> anyone else's.  Even if Bob does openly represent himself as a
>> card-carrying communist, that alone doesn't truly make him one  For
>> example, he could be working as an undercover agent for the FBI ... or a
>> spy for fascists ... or a college professor with tenure in an ivory tower
>> insulated from reality.  Or perhaps he may *mistakenly* believe that he
>> is a communist.
>>
>> What matters is the degree to which he actually participates in
>> commandeering other people's property, discouraging personal initiative,
>> denying personal responsibility, destroying economic incentives, and making
>> everyone poorer, i.e., what real communists do.
>>
>> With respect to your concluding comment, I look forward to learning
>> whether we can do more together than merely "attend a few meetings and
>> exchange E-mail messages".  Perhaps I'll have a better sense of that when
>> I've had a chance to listen to recording of the meet-the-candidates
>> meeting.  If so, I'll "scribe" my understanding the the group's plan in
>> StratML format.
>>
>> Owen
>> ---------------------------------
>> From: Bob Wyman <bob@wyman.us>
>> Date: Sun, Sep 5, 2021 at 1:33 AM
>> Subject: Re: A Suggestion for Bob
>> To: Owen Ambur <Owen.Ambur@verizon.net>
>> Cc: <internal-credibility@w3.org>
>>
>>
>> Owen,
>> It would be nice if your "myriad AI-enabled intermediaries" could support
>> Bob's denial of Alice's claim. However, one must wonder if the output of
>> those intermediaries would actually be useful. The problem is that unless
>> Alice is willing to allow claims of the intermediaries to be posted
>> alongside her own claim, very few, if any, of the people who read Alice's
>> claim will see any claims, rebuttals, or proofs that challenge Alice's
>> credibility. I think this is a major problem with what appears to be the
>> current thinking about these credibility signals. For credibility signals
>> to be more than just a means for authors and their hosts to publish
>> self-serving claims that support, but do not challenge, their own
>> credibility, we need to describe how credibility signals, both positive and
>> negative, can be associated with authors, statements, etc. without the
>> consent of their subjects and potentially even without their knowledge
>> (although such signals need not be hidden). This is why I've pointed to
>> annotation protocols on several occasions. Credibility signals, published
>> as Web Annotations, would have the needed characteristics.
>>
>> Of course, the existing W3C Web Annotation protocol is incomplete, for
>> the desired purpose, since it doesn't define the "search" function needed
>> to discover annotations that are related to a specific URL. Personally, I
>> think it would make sense for this group to define Credibility Signals as
>> annotations and to define the additional protocol needed to allow discovery
>> of such annotations. If we were to do this, then your "myriad AI-enabled
>> intermediaries" would be able to publish their assessment of Alice's claim
>> in a manner that is more likely to be discovered by readers of Alice's
>> claim -- if only people were to use annotation clients... Your AI-bots
>> might even be enhanced to search out other posts with similar claims and
>> annotate them as well.
>>
>> bob wyman
>>
>> ---------------------------------
>> From: Georg Rehm <georg.rehm@dfki.de>
>> Date: Sun, Sep 5, 2021 at 2:07 AM
>> Subject: Re: A Suggestion for Bob
>> To: Bob Wyman <bob@wyman.us>
>> Cc: Owen Ambur <Owen.Ambur@verizon.net>, <internal-credibility@w3.org>
>>
>> Dear Bob,
>>
>> On 5. Sep 2021, at 07:33, Bob Wyman <bob@wyman.us> wrote:
>>
>> Owen,
>> […]
>>
>> Of course, the existing W3C Web Annotation protocol is incomplete, for
>> the desired purpose, since it doesn't define the "search" function needed
>> to discover annotations that are related to a specific URL. Personally, I
>> think it would make sense for this group to define Credibility Signals as
>> annotations and to define the additional protocol needed to allow discovery
>> of such annotations. If we were to do this, then your "myriad AI-enabled
>> intermediaries" would be able to publish their assessment of Alice's claim
>> in a manner that is more likely to be discovered by readers of Alice's
>> claim -- if only people were to use annotation clients... Your AI-bots
>> might even be enhanced to search out other posts with similar claims and
>> annotate them as well.
>>
>>
>> just as a follow-up to what you sketched in your email, this is an idea
>> that I described in the following paper a number of years ago:
>>
>> Georg Rehm. “An Infrastructure for Empowering Internet Users to handle
>> Fake News and other Online Media Phenomena”. In Georg Rehm and Thierry
>> Declerck, editors, *Language Technologies for the Challenges of the
>> Digital Age: 27th International Conference, GSCL 2017, Berlin, Germany,
>> September 13-14, 2017*, Proceedings, number 10713 in Lecture Notes in
>> Artificial Intelligence (LNAI), pages 216-231, Cham, Switzerland, 2018.
>> Gesellschaft für Sprachtechnologie und Computerlinguistik e.V., Springer.
>> 13/14 September 2017.
>>
>> https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-319-73706-5_19.pdf
>> <https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-319-73706-5_19.pdf>
>>
>> The article proposes an infrastructure to address phenomena of modern
>> online media production, circulation and manipula- tion by establishing a
>> distributed architecture for automatic processing and human feedback. The
>> main building blocks of the proposed infrastructure are: natively embedded
>> into the World Wide Web, Web Annotations, Metadata Standards, Tools and
>> Services, Decentralised Repositories and Tools, Aggregation of Annotations.
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Georg
>>
>> ---------------------------------
>> From: Bob Wyman <bob@wyman.us>
>> Date: Sun, Sep 5, 2021 at 2:55 AM
>> Subject: Re: A Suggestion for Bob
>> To: Georg Rehm <georg.rehm@dfki.de>
>> Cc: Owen Ambur <Owen.Ambur@verizon.net>, <internal-credibility@w3.org>
>>
>> Georg,
>> Nice paper. I think you and I have a common vision of the solution space
>> that needs to be explored. The question, of course, is whether or not the
>> Credibility group is the correct context for these discussions. I am hoping
>> that it is as I am unaware of other good candidates.
>>
>> Given the importance of having annotations supported in the browser, we
>> might be encouraged by the fact that there is an existing effort to get
>> Chrome and Chromium to provide support for annotations. (See:
>> https://github.com/bokand/web-annotations ) However, I am concerned that
>> if that effort moves ahead without substantive input on what must be done
>> to ensure that annotations are useful for credibility signalling, it is
>> entirely possible that we may find broad deployment of an annotation
>> interface that makes it difficult to add in the later support at a later
>> time. Also, there is some risk that a browser built-in annotation system
>> might make assumptions about the storage of annotations that make it
>> difficult to provide them via a federated system. We may get locked into
>> monolithic annotation systems which would not address the needs we both
>> appear to recognize.
>>
>> bob wyman
>> (Resident of Zehlendorf and Dahlem during the 1960's... Berlin bleibt
>> doch frei!)
>>
>> ---------------------------------
>> From: Georg Rehm <georg.rehm@dfki.de>
>> Date: Sun, Sep 5, 2021 at 4:36 AM
>> Subject: Re: A Suggestion for Bob
>> To: Bob Wyman <bob@wyman.us>
>> Cc: Owen Ambur <Owen.Ambur@verizon.net>, <internal-credibility@w3.org>
>>
>> Bob,
>>
>> yes, the idea and vision I described in the paper relies on the massive
>> adoption of web annotations (and their full implementation and availability
>> in all browsers), on decentralised annotation repositories, on a
>> decentralised set and toolbox of text mining and natural language
>> processing tools that operate on the decentralised annotations and on
>> shared vocabularies, i.e., annotation formats.
>>
>> Georg
>>
>> P.S. I live in Prenzlauer Berg, close to Mitte. Not immediately
>> accessible to residents of Zehlendorf or Dahlem in the 1960s.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>