Why create our own structured vocabulary when highly trained people have been doing it since 1851 and we can borrow theirs?

Not sure if you have heard of Project Bamboo, but it is a effort to find ways to utilize and incorporate technology into humanities research to advance the field(s).  Sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, the end goal is a proposal for an implementation strategy, including standards and the like.  My husband has been attending the most recent workshop on behalf of Blackboard (because they want a seat at the table as the standards are being set of course!!!) and it’s basically been a 202 extravaganza.  At the table?  Librarians, philosophers, artists, lit profs, computer scientists, even a few iSchool professors (Larson and Kansa), etc. This led to lengthy debates about the meaning of what they were actually trying to do, how explcitly they should define it, how to carve up their worlds, why the sky is blue, etc. One of the main things that they apparently kept coming back to was, of course, The Tradeoff.  Who does the work and who reaps the benefits.

Pretty cool stuff though, and hearing his recap (”classification”, “ontology”, “schemas”, “data interoperability”, “buzz”, “buzz”, “buzz”) was essentially like a mini-study session for the midterm.

If anyone is interested in contributing – especially those philosophers among us – there are links to join off of their site.

http://projectbamboo.uchicago.edu/join-us

Our discussions about authority and vocabulary authoring remind me of the recent attempt by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law of 2001 to standardize public educaton. For those that don’t know, the goals of NCLB were lofty:  to close the achievement gap between high performing and low performing school by implementing a system of accountability and high standards. This included giving annual academic assessments, having consequences for schools that fail to improve. NCLB was met with a great deal of hostility and resentment from many teachers. I had the chance to see observe this during my time teaching. And as 202 is reframing my worldview, I’m coming to see that some of the backlash against NCLB might be linked to the imposition of a new ontology upon a fragmented community of interest.

What happens when a new ontology is imposed upon a collection of thousands of communities of interest when each member of the community of interest is expected to be an expert in his or her own practice? 

NCLB could be seen as an ontology that defines the terms used to describe and represent the various processes surrounding public education. Few would argue with the intent of the law: NLCB seeks to reform public education and close the gap between high and low performing schools. In order to do this,  the federal government acts as an authority that imposes a certain redefinition of vocabulary and processes that carry with them a set of assumptions and values, not to mention  consequences. 

Fragmented Community of Interest (Teachers). 

For many teachers, NCLB came down to the five terms that defined the categories each of their students were placed into based upon their standardized tests scores: Well Below Basic, Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, Advanced. Students were tracked over school years, and schools were rewarded or punished based on the numbers students in each category (as well as numbers of different kinds of students in each category). At the time of its implementation, most teachers had already developed unique tracking and assessment systems over their many years of teaching. Suddenly they were asked to give up their own framework, and replace it with a new and unfamilair one. Soon, school communities were filled with angry cries directed toward NCLB: “They’re doing it all wrong. They’re making it worse”. They could have been saying, “They’re not speaking my language!”

I am suggesting that the national body of teachers is a fragmented community of interest. Rosenthal defines communities of interest (COI) as “a set of stakeholders who must exchange information in pursuit of their shared goals, interests, missions, or business processes and who therefore must have shared vocabulary for the information they exchange”(Rosenthal 47). As a small COI, it was difficult enough for the English department at my high school to define a shared vocabulary to exchange information. NCLB asked all teachers in all schools to use a system of standards, categorization and information exchange that they had no hand in developing. Oh, and teachers would be held accountable for it as well. 

The idea here is not that authoritative ontologies don’t work or can’t work. They are immensely useful. The point, I guess, is for us to be aware of the ontological inertia of a given domain. Any change in the structure of a system of categorization and accountability will be difficult to implement, and will probably be extremely painful to the existing users, especially if they have historically been free to create and implement their own systems. 

Rosenthal, Arnon (2004). From Semantic Integration to Semantics Management: Case Studies and a Way Forward.. SIGMOD Record.33, 44-50.

In Two Dogmas of Empiricism, Quine calls it the first dogma of empiricism that some questions can be answered by appeals to the meanings of the terms while other questions can only be answered by appeals to experience of the world.  He goes on to show in great length that there is no sharp difference here — the “meaning” of the term and its particular analytic properties are not special.  While at first it may seem that “All bachelors are unmarried” and “All swans are white” are verified in different ways (the first just by looking at the meaning of “bachelor”, the second by investigating the world’s swans), Quine shows that on careful consideration, this distinction is quite blurry and they are verified in the same way.

Similarly, there are not two classes of properties — the essential and the non-essential* — from which we can decide upon the best facets for categorizing a group of objects.  (The same argument applies to the ontologies that we created last week — there are not objects or words that are essential to a particular domain, any vocabulary choices you made were not inherently right or wrong.)  In fact, there are infinitely** many ways we can categorize “tools” and many very simple ones can achieve the goal set forth to categorize both the original 10 objects and any set of 5 objects the TAs might throw at you.  (For example, consider the single, boolean facet “Existence” which has the headings “Exists” and “Doesn’t Exist”.)

What should we do then, if there is no inherent advantage/disadvantage to any one facet or vocabulary?  Quine’s blunt conclusion is that his arguments will cause “a shift toward pragmatism.”  Carnap is a little more explicit (he’s discussing the question of whether abstract entities exist, but it’s applicable to any ontological questions about language frameworks):

For those who want to develop or use semantical methods, the decisive question is not the alleged ontological question of the existence of abstract entities but rather the question whether the use of abstract lingusitic forms [or a particular set facets or vocabulary we create] is expedient and fruitful for the purposes for which semantical analyses are made, viz. the analysis, interpretation, clarification, or construction of languages of communication, especially languages of science.

Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology by Rudolf Carnap***

This seems just right — we created vocabularies that were handy in their naming and granularity for whoever was using our vocabulary and we should choose facets that are useful for whatever our particular purpose is.  I think Professor Glushko agrees when he states that the critical piece is “to choose an appropriate scope (and hence, an intended user community)” (emphasis mine).  To repeat, the decisive question is just whether a particular ontology is fruitful, not whether it’s somehow ontologically better or worse.  We must be pragmatic and results-focused in evaluating our ontological decisions, if for no other reason than there is no clear alternative.

This will also, I hope, cast doubt on such projects as the Colon Classification system which rely on fundamental categories and semantic universals in order to organize and describe all information for all purposes.

Notes:

* It might be said here that my real complaint is with Aristotle and essentialism rather than with empiricists and meaning.  But I contend that the same arguments will have the same implications.  As Quine says (in the same paper), “the Aristotelian notion of essence was the forerunner, no doubt, of the modern notion of intension or meaning.”

** Infinite?  This may be bounded, depending on how you define it, but at least as large as the number of possible groupings of N distinct objects where N is the number of tools.

*** There was a question in class last week about how ontology differed in philosophy vs. in our creation of vocabularies.  I believe the key difference is that the ontology in philosophy is at a meta-level.  Rather than investigating what the things are in a particular domain (which we did as vocabulary-creators), philosophers investigate what it means for something to be a thing and question, for example, whether abstract things exist.  This piece by Carnap is an example of philosophical ontology since it’s discussing whether these abstract entities actually exist and whether we should accept them.

The buzzword-laden paper continues to argue for creation of a working Semantic Web by harnessing the large quantity of structured, “Deep Web” data. The, “Deep Web” (unindexed by conventional search engines) contains ~over 4 orders of magnitude of data than the, “Surface Web” and some data is structured in databases.  The Semantic web, they claim, has been hampered by difficulty in manually creating large OWL and RDF ontologies, and harvesting the richer potential of the Deep Web points to a possible solution:
Semantic Web + Deep Web-Ontology-aware browser.

Ironically, the paper, itself, is buried in the deep web:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/2/4623205/04623231.pdf?tp=&arnumber=4623231&isnumber=4623205

For myself, this sounds interesting. I recall while reading Weinberger that I liked book stores and as long as the subject areas are clearly labeled I had little trouble finding the specific book I was seeking. At the very least it was no more difficult than in a library, and usually easier. Of course, this is a small library (24,000 books/dvds, etc). If you are dealing with a larger set of works this may become too difficult to manage.  And it seems more “natural” to me to search for a subject over a number.

However, one of the comments on the article is key (in my opinion) to the bookstore/Dewey decision. “That’s OK for leisure reading, but if you need to do research on a specific topic, you are going to have a hard time finding the particular information that you need.” The additional structure in the Dewey system makes it easier (once you know how to use the system) to find ever-granular information. Most bookstores just lump it all together.

I’ve not been able to find any follow-up information as to whether it worked or not. Their page shows they now have over 30,000 items in the library, but nothing about its current layout/organization or popularity. I wish I’d found this article when we read Weinberger’s piece.

PS: I wish I could claim the title as original, but I borrowed it.

“Researchers from the Validation and Business Applications Group based at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid’s School of Computing (FIUPM) have developed a new method for building multilingual ontologies that can be applied to the Semantic Web.”

So ontologies are the cool thing to be developing these days given the promise of the Semantic web looming over us.  But up until yesterday, a big limitation with ontologies was that they were relatively single-minded when it came to language.  “The application of ontologies to the Internet comes up against serious problems triggered by linguistic breadth and diversity. This diversity stands in the way of users making intelligent use of the web.”

People have tried to bridge the gap, but strategies like expert-based terminology (ahem, Svenonius, ahem) and using one language as the “pivot”, have failed miserably.  But these researchers claim to have created a method for building ontologies IRRESPECTIVE of language. And their secret weapons appear to be universal words and the assumption that “any text has implicit ontological relations that can be extracted by analysing certain grammatical structures of the sentences making up the text“. (I mean, I could’ve told them that, but whatever)

Interesting stuff, and will probably be even more interesting when I finally grasp what an ontology actually is. (just kidding) (sort of)

Apparently, Paul Otlet came up with what is arguably the first iteration of the World Wide Web in 1934, the Mundaneum. Located in Belgium, it’s comprised of millions of 3 by 5 index cards stored in thousands of boxes. It never fully took off because of funding problems and the German invasion of Belgium during the World War. The article doesn’t describe in full detail how the system is implemented, but one thing that stands out is its revised version of hypertext, which differs from standard hypertext in that a link can indicate whether or not other links are similar to itself. Professor Buckland describes the Semantic Web as being “rather Otlet-ish.” The ill-lived story of the Mundaneum could prove to be a lesson to learn about the Semantic Web and whether or not it will fail depending on the way that it is structured and the labor that it will require. 

Relevant Lecture: The Semantic Web