Justifying decentralization: Epistemology in the Cloud

My paper for Decentralizing the Semantic Web at ISWC 2018 has been accepted. Here is the abstract.

Abstract: The web is an open platform that allows anyone to publish anything, and so raises anew many epistemological questions: how can one distinguish what is true, what is fake or what is fictional on the web? Indeed how can one know anything at all? We start from an analysis of knowledge that makes space for radical skepticism and which allows us to locate the essential problem with the current web application architecture. This allows us to propose a set of criteria that explicate and justify the decentralised architecture of the internet and the web, and the need for that to be extended to the data and application layer. The proposed architecture is socio-technical, recognising the roles of individuals, institutions and nations in our epistemic makeup. We illustrate this by proposing an architecture of trust that ties these institutions into browsers in a decentralised and open way, allowing them to make the web a more trustworthy space. As a side effect we gain the tools to make some  serious inroads in helping combat Phishing.

The paper is up here with links to further blog posts that elaborate on different aspects of it.
https://medium.com/@bblfish/epistemology-in-the-cloud-472fad4c8282

One of the articles linked to there "Stopping (https) phishing", makes the point that everyone
has moved to https even the Phishers. So we should too. Here is an updated image for the WebID
spec.


[cid:C593ABF6-50D8-49FB-944C-F1E689AEABEE@lan]