“Good grief!”
The printed version of the New York Times had a front page story on Web 3.0, a.k.a., the Sematic Web, a.k.a., the World Wide Database, this past Sunday. First of all, the trend of versioning the Web needs to stop. It is silly and non-sensical.
As far as the story is concerned, this says it all:
…the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.â€
The thing about Holy Grails is that they tend to be the stuff of legend. A computer that could perform such a task is only going to be found in the legends about the future: science fiction literature. I am not quite sure why people think that a computer could do a better job than a person at being a travel agent. Perhaps too many people have been ripped off by the human versions and have some strange faith that a computer would dutifully book their dream vacation. I suspect the same people trust electronic voting machines, too.
I think the author of the piece would have done well to look at the seminal refutation to the notion of such a smart and well designed Internet: Metacrap, by Cory Doctorow. Here is the side of the story that was missing:
If everyone would subscribe to such a system and create good metadata for the purposes of describing their goods, services and information, it would be a trivial matter to search the Internet for highly qualified, context-sensitive results: a fan could find all the downloadable music in a given genre, a manufacturer could efficiently discover suppliers, travelers could easily choose a hotel room for an upcoming trip.
A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It’s also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities.
Human knowledge can be described by machines but you ultimately need to look at what that description boils down to: a string of 1’s and 0’s. It is only after you assemble the binary patterns into the complex patterns that through a series of transformations designed and developed by people that you end up with a form of information that truly answers the question you are looking to answer, is this a good place to vacation with a kid? Human knowledge is entangled with the experiences that a machine will never be able to emulate. I am afraid that until a computer knows what it is like to have a child and sip a pina colada (but not too much pina colada, because you have a child after all…) it will always make a terrible travel agent.
4 Comments for Charlie Brown said it best…
Author comment by Dave | November 20, 2006 at 1:27 pm
Author comment by Steve | November 20, 2006 at 5:10 pm
On the topic of laziness, Lorcan Dempsey points to a study of web traffic and Wikipedia. When school is in session, especially during finals time, its traffic increases.
Author comment by Dave | November 22, 2006 at 11:47 am
In a BI session I did last week, I told students that I know of at least two kinds of falsehoods that are symptoms of the wiki contagion:
1) Factual falsehoods. This means blatantly wrong information, or subtly wrong information.
2) Conceptual falsehoods. See this entry in Wikipedia. Two of the figures categorized here were teaching the BI session, and neither of us agreed with the concept laid out by a rather eccentric member of the local community. In fact, I don’t know of anyone on the roster who agrees with the concept, and I know them all.
Wikis not only support the laziness of the users, but also the writers of the wiki’s information. Wikis are almost never supported with citations and so the factuality is nearly impossible to prove or disprove without serious research.
Do you guys know of other kinds of falsehood I could add to my list?
Author comment by Steve | November 22, 2006 at 12:16 pm
In defense of Wikis, I believe they do have their place in the information universe. I have used them as a jumping point for a lot of technology information, which I have found to be extremely informative and typically loaded with references to further reading.
Take, for example, this entry on the Factory
method pattern in programming. At the time of writing, it uses good illustrations and code examples, it is well organized, and makes reference to many other Wikipedia entries. Importantly, it also provides external references to other authoritative sites and books (by ISBN).
This is a crass generalization, of course, but for discussion purposes, I wonder to what extent non-technical types in the humanities are simply bad at wiki-ing. For people who don’t see structure in websites in terms of links and references, it may not be obvious that links are the currency of the web and the foundation of good web writing.
I think that wikis also tend to serve an important socio-political function in that Wikipedia provides a source of information for things deemed not profitable by the publishing industry. They are, in a sense, a more efficient and contemporary version of the ‘zine culture that grew around photocopy machine technology in an earlier time.
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“Versioning the web” is way for commentaries to insert themselves into a process that has proven non-linear. What I mean is, when something occurs that isn’t really a progression over time, writers have to make it appear like it is a progression over time, i.e. “Web 3.0 is just now happening in the history of the web, and here’s what I have to say about it.”
I think that a lot of our culture’s hopes and dreams for technology have a lot to do with our own laziness, and a lot to do with our willingness to accept the advice and recommendations of logarithms. We take recommendations for movies from NetFlix, we take recommendations for music from iTunes, we take Amazon’s recommended everything. We basically want our machines to develop our tastes and interests, and this is a little disturbing.
When I use an extreme word like “laziness”, I do so with resignation. I don’t want people to be lazy about their choices! But to return the discussion to a library basis, I’ve done a lot of BI sessions in the past month, and I’m shocked at what I’ve seen. Students – and I mean everyone from undergraduate to PhD – don’t have the will, interest, or even ability to learn the most basic tools of their discipline. One student, an ABD (all but dissertation)in English wrote to me after I taught her section of undergraduates, “I embarrassingly have never used Project Muse before.” Wha?!
It seems to me that people want their software to do their research for them. They do a single search, and are satisfied with whatever results they get. I spend a lot of my time in these sessions saying, “Try different searches, try different databases, drag your butt to the paper journals and get that article!” But – because of heady concepts like Web 3.0 – why should our students even pursue their questions themselves?
Won’t their browser anticipate their needs?