RE: Comment on "Meaning and the Semantic Web"

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dan Brickley [mailto:danbri@w3.org]
> Sent: Friday, June 04, 2004 3:00 PM
> To: John Black
> Cc: Bijan Parsia; public-sw-meaning@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Comment on "Meaning and the Semantic Web"
> 
> 
> > > > These are shock-jock type of arguments
> > >
> > > Huh?
> > >
>                                                               
>                                                
> > Shock jocks make their ideas feel profoundly important by
> > attaching other highly emotionally charged (shocking) ideas to
> > them. 
> 
> Our ideas are, doubtless, profoundly pedestrian. But the issue we're
> dealing with (communication using next-generation Web technology) 
> is a profoundly important one. That importance is sometimes 
> illustrated by connecting it with things that matter to people's 
> every day lives. Like being happy, sad, rich, poor, oppressed, 
> misrepresented, misunderstood. 

Understood and agreed.

> >	The examples in Dan's and Jeremy's emails have that feel to
> > me - anti-homosexual bias, racism, but so does totalitarianism.
> 
> I chose emotive examples on purpose: it was the point of the 
> exercise, even. All the while that everyone agrees about everything, 
> we can be utterly naive about RDF. All the while we agree to disagree
> by disputing the facts but completely sharing the vocabularies within 
> which those facts are expressed, we have it pretty easy too. The
> problems come when the terms used to express claims about the 
> world are 
> disputed terms. It shouldn't be suprising that terms are more 
> contested 
> when they describe areas of disagreement and emotive debate. 
 
Of course, I agree with this, too.

> I could have picked less emotive terms (eg. relating to 
> definitions of 
> employment, unemployment) which are nevertheless politically 
> charged and
> contested. I could also have picked more emotionally charged 
> topics and 
> terms, eg. notions of alive/living/etc in the context of 
> debates around
> abortion policy. Or the naive definitions of 'terrorist' we 
> see floating around 
> in DAML+OIL or OWL, as if encoding in a formal language 
> automatically brought with it credibility and intellectual rigour.

No, I think its fine to use emotive terms.

> Or perhaps we could be discussing the definition of "torture" as 
> "an act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental,
> is intentionally inflicted on a person"[1], investigating whether 
> organisations which don't buy into a common definition are 
> nevertheless capable of communicating using RDF/OWL technology. One 
> person's torture is another's "rough handling", I'm told. I
> preferred to stick with the all-time classic topic of Sex. There are 
> vastly more topical and controversial themes, very relevant 
> to our work,
> that we could have focussed on instead.

No, again, lets stick with controversial themes. 

> We may be discussing emotive issues, but it is the corner 
> cases that test the
> technology; I don't think we can stick to areas where things are
> controversy-free without missing the point. For areas of 
> discussion where 
> terminology isn't politicised, RDF/OWL pretty much works out 
> of the box. 
> For the rest, we still have some work to do. Considering such 
> cases doesn't make us 
> 'shock jocks', though given the emotional baggage that comes with the 
> territory, it is probably worth reminding folks to be extra 
> careful with
> their examples.

I apologize if I offended you with the "shock-jock type of 
arguments" comment. I do not think you are shock-jocks. Nor 
did I mean to say that your ideas were pedestrian, please forgive 
me if it came out that way.

I too like emotive examples, believe in the importance of these
ideas, and understand how corner cases can make or break a 
technology.

My objection is that if you're not very careful, in certain 
arguments, the emotive imagery can end up trumping the technical 
arguments or even preventing people from pursuing potential 
solutions for fear, for example, of being accused of bringing on 
1984. And by the way, this whole discussion makes me want to 
proclaim, defensively, that I am a firmly in support of the first 
amendment, bill-of-rights, ACLU, amnesty-international, ethic 
diversity, and lifestyles choices - AND I think it can work for 
URI 'owners' to have extra authority over the meaning of the terms 
they author.

Technically though, I think something more like 
'speaker-meaning' is what we're after. Then 'ownership' could 
be relegated to a less semantic role.
 
> The Web is the world's most important system for publishing 
> and sharing 
> documents and data, and it needs to work for everyone, 
> including parties
> who are mutually antagonistic. RDF/OWL needs to be deployable 
> in a world
> where language and terminology is politicised, because that's the kind
> of world we live in.
 
> Incidentally, the RDF design inherits from PICS, W3C's earlier 
> "Platform for Internet Content Selection". The 1996 note on 
> "Using PICS Well"[2] is worth bearing in mind when we think of the
> social impact of our technical work. The PICS design decentralised the
> creation of content rating vocabularies in part through a recognition 
> that rating and classification schemes can embody contested,
> controversial worldviews. RDF's design differs from PICS' in that a
> single instance document can now draw upon terms defined in several 
> independently created vocabularies. By making this possible, we don't 
> necessarily make it wise. (I argued a variant on this in [3], 
> dunno if 
> slides are any use on their own though). My understanding of what 
> we're trying to do here (public-sw-meaning) is that we're 
> probing at the 
> different social and technical notions of 'shared meaning' that get 
> tangled up when such systems are deployed in the wild.

And 'speaker meaning' also. I think we should carefully distinguish 
between shared or literal meaning and speaker meaning. I believe not 
making that distinction has led to a number of problems and senseless 
disagreements.
 
> cheers,
> 
> Dan
> 
> 
> 
> [1] http://www.amnesty.org.uk/torture/definition.shtml citing 
> the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or 
> Degrading
> Treatment or Punishment, http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/h_cat39.htm
> 
> [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-PICS-Statement
> 
> [3] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/talks/20040309-danbri/
>

Received on Friday, 4 June 2004 17:32:21 UTC