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The Foundation of Knowledge Applications Should Reflect its NatureEvery couple of months I return to the idea of the open world assumption (OWA) [1] and its fundamental importance to knowledge applications. What it is that makes us human — in health and in sickness — is but a further line of evidence for the importance of an open world viewpoint. I’ll use three personal anecdotes to make this case.
Believe it or not, Alfred Wegener‘s theory of continental drift was only becoming accepted by mainstream scientists in my high school years. I experienced déjà vu regarding a science revolution while a botany major at Pomona College in the early 1970s. A young American biologist at that time, Lynn Margulis, was postulating the theory of endosymbiosis; that is, that certain cell organelles originated from initially free-living bacteria.
This idea of longstanding symbionts in the cell — indeed, even forming what was our overall conception of cells and their parts — was truly revolutionary. It was revolutionary because of the implications for the nature and potential degree of symbiosis. And it was revolutionary in adding a different arrow in the quiver of biotic change over time than classical Darwinian evolution.
Today, Margulis’ theory is now widely accepted and is understood to embrace cell organelles from mitochondria to chloroplasts and ribosomes. The seemingly fundamental unit of all organisms — the cell — is itself an amalgam of archaic symbionts and bacteria-like lifeforms. Truly remarkable.
In the early 1990s, my oldest child, Erin, then in elementary school, had been going through a debilitating bout of periodic and severe stomach upsets. I sort of thought this might be inherited, since my paternal grandmother had suffered from ulcers for many decades (as did many at that time).
We were good friends with our pediatrician in our small town and knew him to be a thoughtful and well-informed MD. His counsel was that Erin was likely suffering from an ulcer and we began taking great care about her diet. But Erin’s symptoms did not seem to improve.
My wife, Wendy, is a biomedical researcher and began to investigate this problem on her own. She discovered some early findings implicating a gastrointestinal (gut) bacteria with similar symptoms and brought this research to our doctor’s attention. He, too, was intrigued, and prescribed a rather straightforward antibiotic regimen for Erin. Her symptoms immediately ceased, and she has been clear of further symptoms in the twenty years since.
The nearly universal role of the Helicobacter bacteria in ulcers is now widely understood. The understanding of peptic ulcers that had stood for centuries no longer applies in most cases. Though ulcers may arise from many other conditions, because of these new understandings the prevalence and discussion of ulcers has nearly fallen off the radar screen.
A few years back I began to show symptoms of rosacea, a facial skin condition characterized by redness. My local dermatologist recommended a daily dose of antibiotics as the preferred course of action. I was initially reluctant to follow this advice. I knew about the growing problem of bacterial resistance, and did not think that my constant use of tetracycline would help that issue. I also knew some about the controversial use of antibiotics in animal feeds, and had hesitations for that reason as well.
Nonetheless, I took the doctor’s advice. I rarely take any kind of medicine and immediately began to notice GI problems. My digestive regularity was immediately thrown out of kilter with other adverse effects as well. I immediately stopped using the antibiotics, and soon returned to (largely) my pre-regime conditions. (I also switched doctors.)
Over the past five years, due to a revolution in DNA sequencing [2], we are now beginning to understand the why of my observed reactions to antibiotics. Because we can now analyze skin and fecal samples for foreign DNA, we are coming to realize that humans (as is likely true for all higher organisms) are walking, teeming ecosystems of thousands of different species, mostly bacteria [3].
While there are some 23,000 genes in the native humane genome, there are more than 3 million estimated as arising from these fellow travelers. While we are still learning much, and rapidly, we know that our ecosystem of bacteria is involved in nutrition and digestion, contributing perhaps as much as 15% of the energy value we get from food. We also know that imbalances of various sorts in our walking ecosystem can also lead to diseases and other chronic conditions.
Though the degree and nature is still quite uncertain, our “microbiome” of symbiotic bacteria has been implicated in heart disease, Type II diabetes, obesity, malnutrition, multiple sclerosis, other auto-immune diseases, asthma, eczema, liver disease, bowel cancer and autism, among others. The breadth and extent of implications on well-being is staggering, especially since all of these implications have been learned over the past five years.
There are considerable differences between different human populations and cultures, too, in terms of differing compositions of the microbiome. And these effects are not limited to the gut. Skin and orifices to the outside world have their own denizens as well, likely also involved with both health and disease. Humans are not just complicated beasts, but a world of other species unique unto ourselves.
Each of these three anecdotes — and there are many others — point to phenomenal changes in our understanding of the human organism. This new knowledge has also arisen over a remarkably short period. Who knows when the pace of these insights might slow, if ever?
These anecdotes are exemplary about the fundamental nature of knowledge: it is constantly expanding with new connections and heretofore unforeseen relationships constantly emerging. These anecdotes also point to the fact that most knowledge problems are systems problems, intimately involved with the connections and inter-relationships among a diversity of players and factors.
It makes sense that how we choose to organize and analyze the information that constitutes our knowledge should have a structure and underlying logic premise consistent with expansion and new relationships. This premise is the central feature of the open world assumption and semantic Web technologies.
Fixed, closed, brittle schema of transaction systems and relational databases are a clear mismatch with knowledge problems and knowledge applications. We need systems where schema and structure can evolve with new information and knowledge. The foundational importance of open world approaches to understanding and modeling knowledge problems continues to be the elephant in the room.
It is perhaps not surprising that one of the fields most aggressive in embracing ontologies and semantic technologies is the life sciences. Practitioners in this field experience daily the explosion in new knowledge and understandings. Knowledge workers in other fields would be well-advised to follow the lead of the life sciences in re-thinking their own foundations for knowledge representation and management. It is good to remember that if your world is not open, then your understanding of it is closed.
There are many semantic technology terms relevant to the context of a semantic technology installation [1]. Some of these are general terms related to language standards, as well as to ontologies or the dataset concept.
<attribute name, value>
Linked Data is Sometimes a Useful Technique, but is an Inadequate FocusWhile in Australia on other business, I had the great fortune to be invited by Adam Bell of the Australian War Memorial to be the featured speaker at the Canberra Semantic Web Meetup on April 23. The talk was held within the impressive BAE Systems Theatre of the Memorial and was very well attended. My talk was preceded by an excellent introduction to the semantic Web by David Ratcliffe and Armin Haller of CSIRO. They have kindly provided their useful slides online.
Many of the attendees came from the perspective of libraries, archives or museums. They naturally had an interest in the linked data activities in this area, a growing initiative that is now known under the acronym of LOD-LAM. Though I have been an advocate of linked data going back to 2006, one of my main theses was that linked data was an inadequate focus to achieve interoperability. The key emphases of my talk were that the pragmatic contributions of semantic technologies reside more in mindsets, information models and architectures than in ‘linked data’ as currently practiced.
The semantic Web and its most recent branding of linked data has antecedents going back to 1945 via Vannevar Bush’s memex and Ted Nelson’s hypertext of the early 1960s. The most powerful portrayal of the potential of the semantic Web comes in Douglas Adams’ 1990 Hyperland special for the BBC, a full decade before Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues first coined the term ‘semantic web’ [1]. The Hyperland vision of obsequious intelligent agents doing our very bidding has, of course, not been fully realized. The lack of visible uptake of this full vision has caused some proponents to back away from the idea of the semantic Web. Linked data, in fact, was a term coined by Berners-Lee himself, arguably in part to re-brand the idea and to focus on a more immediate, achievable vision. In its first formulation linked data emphasized the RDF (Resource Description Framework) data model, though others, notably Kingsley Idehen, have attempted to put forward a revisionist definition of linked data that includes any form of structured data involving entity attribute values (EAV).
No matter how expressed, the idea behind all of these various terms has in essence been to make meaningful connections, to provide the frameworks for interoperability. Interoperability means getting disparate sources of data to relate to each other, as a means of moving from data to information. Interoperability requires that source and receiver share a vocabulary about what things mean, as well as shared understandings about the associations or degree of relationship between the items being linked.
The current concept of linked data attempts to place these burdens mostly on the way data is published. While apparently “simpler” than earlier versions of the semantic Web (since linked data de-emphasizes shared vocabularies and nuanced associations), linked data places onerous burdens on how publishers express their data. Though many in the advocacy community point to the “billions” of RDF triples expressed as a success, actual consumers of linked data are rare. I know of no meaningful application or example where the consumption of linked data is an essential component.
However, there are a few areas of success in linked data. DBpedia, Freebase (now owned by Google), and GeoNames have been notable in providing identifiers (URIs) for common concepts, things, entities and places. There has also been success in the biomedical community with linked data.
Meanwhile, other aspects of the semantic Web have also shown success, but been quite hidden. Apple’s spoken Siri service is driven by an ontological back-end; schema.org is beginning to provide shared ways for tagging key entities and concepts, as promoted by the leading search engines of Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Yandex; Bing itself has been improved as a search service by the incorporation of the semantic search technologies of its earlier Powerset acquisition; and Google is further showing how NLP (natural language processing) techniques can be used to extract meaningful structure for characterizing entities in search results and in search completion and machine language translation. These services are here today and widely used. All operate in the background.
These failures and successes help provide some pragmatic lessons going forward.
While I disagree with Kingsley’s revisionist approach to re-defining linked data, I very much agree with his underlying premise: effective data exchange does not require RDF. Most instance records are already expressed as simple entity-value pairs, and any data transfer serialization — from key-value pairs to JSON to CSV spreadsheets — can be readily transformed to RDF.
This understanding is important because the fundamental contribution of RDF is not as a data exchange format, but as a foundational data model. The simple triple model of RDF can easily express the information assertions in any form of content, from completely unstructured text (after information extraction or metadata characterization) to the most structured data sources. Triples can themselves be built up into complete languages (such as OWL) that also capture the expressiveness necessary to represent any extant data or information schema [2].
The ability of RDF to capture any form of data or any existing schema makes it a “universal solvent” for information. This means that the real role of RDF is as a canonical data model at the core of the entire information architecture. Linked data, with its emphasis on data publishing and exchange, gets this focus exactly wrong. Linked data emphasizes RDF at the wrong end of the telescope.
The idea of common schema and representations is at the core of the semantic Web successes that do exist. In fact, when we look at Siri, emerging search, or some of the other successes noted above, we see that their semantic technology components are quite hidden. Successful semantics tend to work in the background, not in the foreground in terms of how data is either published or consumed. Semantic technologies are fundamentally about knowledge representation, not data transfer.
Where linked data is being consumed, it is within communities such as the life sciences where much work has gone into deriving shared vocabularies and semantics for linking and mapping data. These bases for community sharing express themselves as ontologies, which are really just formalized understandings of these shared languages in the applicable domain (life sciences, in this case). In these cases, curation and community processes for deriving shared languages are much more important to emphasize than how data gets exposed and published.
Linked data as presently advocated has the wrong focus. The techniques of publishing data and de-referencing URIs are given prominence over data quality, meaningful linkages (witness the appalling misuse of owl:sameAs [3]), and shared vocabularies. These are the reasons we see little meaningful consumption of linked data. It is also the reason that the much touted FYN (“follow your nose”) plays no meaningful information role today other than a somewhat amusing diversion.
In our own applications Structured Dynamics promotes seven pillars to pragmatic semantic technologies [4]. Linked data is one of those pillars, because where the other foundations are in place, including shared understandings, linked data is the most efficient data transfer format. But, as noted, linked data alone is insufficient.
Linked data is thus the wrong starting focus for new communities and users wishing to gain the advantages of interoperability. The benefits of interoperability must first obtain from a core (or canonical) data model — RDF — that is able to capture any extant data or schema. As these external representations get boiled down to a canonical form, there must be shared understandings and vocabularies to capture the meaning in this information. This puts community involvement and processes at the forefront of the semantic enterprise. Only after the community has derived these shared understandings should linked data be considered as the most efficient way to interchange data amongst the community members.
Identifying and solving the “wrong” problems is a recipe for disappointment. The challenges of the semantic Web are not in branding or messaging. The challenges of the semantic enterprise and Web reside more in mindsets, approaches and architecture. Linked data is merely a technique that contributes little — perhaps worse by providing the wrong focus — to solving the fundamental issue of information interoperability.
Once this focus shifts, a number of new insights emerge. Structure is good in any form; arguments over serializations or data formats are silly and divert focus. The role of semantic technologies is likely to be a more hidden one, to reside in the background as current successes are now showing us. Building communities with trusted provenance and shared vocabularies (ontologies) are the essential starting points. Embracing and learning about NLP will be important to include the 80% of content currently in unstructured text and disambiguating reference conflicts. Ultimate users, subject matter experts and librarians are much more important contributors to this process than developers or computer scientists. We largely now have the necessary specifications and technologies in place; it is time for content and semantic reconciliation to guide the process.
It is great that the abiding interest in interoperability is leading to the creation of more and more communities, such as LOD-LAM, forming around the idea of linked data. What is important moving forward is to use these interests as springboards, and not boxes, for exploring the breadth of available semantic technologies.
Below is a link to my slides used in Canberra:
Also, as mentioned, the intro slides are online, a video recording of the presentations is also available, and some other blog postings occasioned by the talks are also online.
Adaptive Information is a Hammer, but Genes are Not a NailSince Richard Dawkins first put forward the idea of the “meme” in his book The Selfish Gene some 35 years ago [1], the premise has struck in my craw. I, like Dawkins, was trained as an evolutionary biologist. I understand the idea of the gene and its essential role as a vehicle for organic evolution. And, all of us clearly understand that “ideas” themselves have a certain competitive and adaptive nature. Some go viral; some run like wildfire and take prominence; and some go nowhere or fall on deaf ears. Culture and human communications and ideas play complementary — perhaps even dominant — roles in comparison to the biological information contained within DNA (genes).
I think there are two bases for why the “meme” idea sticks in my craw. The first harkens back to Dawkins. In formulating the concept of the “meme”, Dawkins falls into the trap of many professionals, what the French call déformation professionnelle. This is the idea of professionals framing problems from the confines of their own points of view. This is also known as the Law of the Instrument, or (Abraham) Maslow‘s hammer, or what all of us know colloquially as “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail“ [2]. Human or cultural information is not genetics.
The second — and more fundamental — basis for why this idea sticks in my craw is its mis-characterization of what is adaptive information, the title and theme of this blog. Sure, adaptive information can be found in the types of information structures at the basis of organic life and organic evolution. But, adaptive information is much, much more. Adaptive information is any structure that provides arrangements of energy and matter that maximizes entropy production. In inanimate terms, such structures include chemical chirality and proteins. It includes the bases for organic life, inheritance and organic evolution. For some life forms, it might include communications such as pheromones or bird or whale songs or the primitive use of tools or communicated behaviors such as nest building. For humans with their unique abilities to manipulate and communicate symbols, adaptive information embraces such structures as languages, books and technology artifacts. These structures don’t look or act like genes and are not replicators in any fashion of the term. To hammer them as “memes” significantly distorts their fundamental nature as information structures and glosses over what factors might — or might not — make them adaptive.
I have been thinking of these concepts much over the past few decades. Recently, though, there has been a spate of the “meme” term, particularly on the semantic Web mailing lists to which I subscribe. This spewing has caused me to outline some basic ideas about what I find so problematic in the use of the “meme” concept.
As defined by Dawkins and expanded upon by others, a “meme” is an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. It is proposed as being able to be transmitted through writing, speech, gestures or rituals. Dawkins specifically called melodies, catch-phrases, fashion and the technology of building arches as examples of memes. A meme is postulated as a cultural analogue to genes in that they are assumed to be able to self-replicate, mutate or respond to selective pressures. Thus, as proposed, memes may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution.
However, unlike a gene, a structure corresponding to a “meme” has never been discovered or observed. There is no evidence for it as a unit of replication, or indeed as any kind of coherent unit at all. In its sloppy use, it is hard to see how “meme” differs in its scope from concepts, ideas or any form of cultural information or transmission, yet it is imbued with properties analogous to animate evolution for which there is not a shred of empirical evidence.
One might say, so what, the idea of a “meme” is merely a metaphor, what is the harm? Well, the harm comes about when it is taken seriously as a means of explaining human behavior and cultural changes, a field of study called memetics. It becomes a pseudo-scientific term that sets a boundary condition for understanding the nature of information and what makes it adaptive or not [3]. Mechanisms and structures appropriate to animate life are not universal information structures, they are simply the structures that have evolved in the organic realm. In the human realm of signs and symbols and digital information and media, information is the universal, not the genetic structure of organic evolution.
The noted evolutionary geneticist, R.C. Lewontin, one of my key influences as a student, has also been harshly critical of the idea of memetics [4]:
Consistent with my recent writings about Charles S. Peirce [5], many logicians and semiotic theorists are also critical of the idea of “memes”, but on different grounds. The criticism here is that “memes” distort Peirce’s ideas about signs and the reification of signs and symbols via a triadic nature. Notable in this camp is Terrence Deacon [6].
It is not surprising that the concept of “memes” arose in the first place. It is understandable to seek universal principles consistent with natural laws and observations. The mechanism of natural evolution works on the information embodied in DNA, so why not look to genes as some form of universal model?
The problem here, I think, was to confuse mechanisms with first principles. Genes are a mechanism — a “structure” if you will — that along with other forms of natural selection such as the entire organism and even kin selection [7], have evolved as means of adaptation in the animate world. But the fundamental thing to be looked for here is the idea of information, not the mechanism of genes and how they replicate. The idea of information holds the key for drilling down to universal principles that may find commonality between information for humans in a cultural sense and information conveyed through natural evolution for life forms. It is the search for this commonality that has driven my professional interests for decades, spanning from population genetics and evolution to computers, information theory and semantics [8].
But before we can tackle these connections head on, it is important to address a couple of important misconceptions (as I see them).
In looking to information as a first principle, Claude Shannon‘s seminal work in 1948 on information theory must be taken as the essential point of departure [9]. The motivation of Shannon’s paper and work by others preceding him was to understand information losses in communication systems or networks. Much of the impetus for this came about because of issues in wartime communications and early ciphers and cryptography. (As a result, the Shannon paper is also intimately related to data patterns and data compression, not further discussed here.)
In a strict sense, Shannon’s paper was really talking about the amount of information that could be theoretically and predictably communicated between a sender and a receiver. No context or semantics were implied in this communication, only the amount of information (for which Shannon introduced the term “bits” [10]) and what might be subject to losses (or uncertainty in the accurate communication of the message). In this regard, what Shannon called “information” is what we would best term “data” in today’s parlance.
The form that the uncertainty (unpredictability) calculation that Shannon derived:
very much resembled the mathematical form for Boltzmann‘s original definition of entropy (as elaborated upon by Gibbs, denoted as S, for Gibb’s entropy):
and thus Shannon also labelled his measure of unpredictability, H, as entropy [10].
After Shannon, and nearly a century after Boltzmann, work by individuals such as Jaynes in the field of statistical mechanics came to show that thermodynamic entropy can indeed be seen as an application of Shannon’s information theory, so there are close parallels [11]. This parallel of mathematical form and terminology has led many to assert that information is entropy.
I believe this assertion is a misconception on two grounds.
First, as noted, what is actually being measured here is data (or bits), not information embodying any semantic meaning or context. Thus, the formula and terminology is not accurate for discussing “information” in a conventional sense.
Second, the Shannon methods are based on the communication (transmittal) between a sender and a receiver. Thus the Shannon entropy measure is actually a measure of the uncertainty for either one of these states. The actual information that gets transmitted and predictably received was formulated by Shannon as R (which he called rate), and he expressed basically as:
R = Hbefore – Hafter
R, then, becomes a proxy for the amount of information accurately communicated. R can never be zero (because all communication systems have losses). Hbefore and Hafter are both state functions for the message, so this also makes R a function of state. So while there is Shannon entropy (unpredictability) for any given sending or receiving state, the actual amount of information (that is, data) that is transmitted is a change in state as measured by a change in uncertainty between sender (Hbefore) and receiver (Hafter). In the words of Thomas Schneider, who provides a very clear discussion of this distinction [12]:
Information is always a measure of the decrease of uncertainty at a receiver.
These points do not directly bear on the basis of information as discussed below, but help remove misunderstandings that might undercut those points. Further, these clarifications make consistent theoretical foundations of information (data) with natural evolution while being logically consistent with the 2nd law of thermodynamics (see next).
The 2nd law of thermodynamics expresses the tendency that, over time, differences in temperature, pressure, or chemical potential equilibrate in an isolated physical system. Entropy is a measure of this equilibration: for a given physical system, the highest entropy state is one at equilibrium. Fluxes or gradients arise when there are differences in state potentials in these systems. (In physical systems, these are known as sources and sinks; in information theory, they are sender and receiver.) Fluxes go from low to high entropy, and are non-reversible — the “arrow of time” — without the addition of external energy. Heat, for example, is a by product of fluxes in thermal energy. Because these fluxes are directional in isolation, a perpetual motion machine is shown as impossible.
In a closed system (namely, the entire cosmos), one can see this gradient as spanning from order to disorder, with the equilibrium state being the random distribution of all things. This perspective, and much schooling regarding these concepts, tends to present the idea of entropy as a “disordered” state. Life is seen as the “ordered” state in this mindset. Hewing to this perspective, some prominent philosophers, scientists and others have sometimes tried to present the “force” representing life and “order” as an opposite one to entropy. One common term for this opposite “force” is “negentropy” [13].
But, in the real conditions common to our lives, our environment is distinctly open, not closed. We experience massive influxes of energy via sunlight, and have learned as well how to harness stored energy from eons past in further sources of fossil and nuclear energy. Our open world is indeed a high energy one, and one that increases that high-energy state as our knowledge leads us to exploit still further resources of higher and higher quality. As Buckminster Fuller once famously noted, electricity consumption (one of the highest quality energy resources found to date) has become a telling metric about the well-being and wealth of human societies [14].
The high-energy environments fostering life on earth and more recently human evolution establish a local (in a cosmic sense) gradient that promotes fluxes to more ordered states, not lesser unordered ones. These fluxes remain faithful to basic physical laws and are non-deterministic [15]. Indeed, such local gradients can themselves be seen as consistent with the conditions initially leading to life, favoring the random event in the early primordial soup that led to chemical structures such as chirality, auto-catalytic reactions, enzymes, and then proteins, which became the eventual building blocks for animate life [16].
These events did not have preordained outcomes (that is, they were non-deterministic), but were the result of time and variation in the face of external energy inputs to favor the marginal combinatorial improvement. The favoring of the new marginal improvement also arises consistent with entropy principles, by giving a competitive edge to those structures that produce faster movements across the existing energy gradient. According to Annila and Annila [16]:
Via this analysis we see that life is not at odds with entropy, but is consistent with it. Further, we see that incremental improvements in structure that are consistent with the maximum entropy production principle will be favored [17]. Of course, absent the external inputs of energy, these gradients would reverse. Under those conditions, the 2nd law would promote a breakdown to a less ordered system, what most of us have been taught in schools.
With these understandings we can now see the dichotomy as life representing order with entropy disorder as being false. Further, we can see a guiding set of principles that is consistent across the broad span of evolution from primordial chemicals and enzymes to basic life and on to human knowledge and artifacts. This insight provides the fundamental “unit” we need to be looking toward, and not the gene nor the “meme”.
Of course, the fundamental “unit” we are talking about here is information, and not limited as is Shannon’s concept to data. The quality that changes data to information is structure, and structure of a particular sort. Like all structure, there is order or patterns, often of a hierarchical or fractal or graph nature. But the real aspect of the structure that is important is the marginal ability of that structure to lead to improvements in entropy production. That is, processes are most adaptive (and therefore selected) that maximize entropy production. Any structure that emerges that is able to reduce the energy gradient faster will be favored.
However, remember, these are probabilistic, statistical processes. Uncertainties in state may favor one structure at one time versus another at a different time. The types of chemical compounds favored in the primordial soup were likely greatly influenced by thermal and light cycles and drying and wet conditions. In biological ecosystems, there are huge differences in seed or offspring production or in overall species diversity and ecological complexity based on the stability (say, tropics) or instability (say, disturbance) of local environments. As noted, these processes are inherently non-deterministic.
As we climb up the chain from the primordial ooze to life and then to humans and our many information mechanisms and technology artifacts (which are themselves embodiments of information), we see increasing complexity and structure. But we do not see uniformity of mechanisms or vehicles.
The general mechanisms of information transfer in living organisms occur (generally) via DNA in genes, mediated by sex in higher organisms, subject to random mutations, and then kept or lost entirely as their host organisms survive to procreate or not. Those are harsh conditions: the information survives or not (on a population basis) with high concentrations of information in DNA and with a priority placed on remixing for new combinations via sex. Information exchange (generally) only occurs at each generational event.
Human cultural information, however, is of an entirely different nature. Information can be made persistent, can be recorded and shared across individuals or generations, extended with new innovations like written language or digital computers, or combined in ways that defy the limits of sex. Occasionally, of course, loss of living languages due to certain cultures or populations dying out or horrendous catastrophes like the Spanish burning (nearly all of) the Mayan’s existing books can also occur [18]. The environment will also be uncertain.
So, while we can define DNA in genes or the ideas of a “meme” all as information, in fact we now see how very unlike the dynamics and structures of these two forms really are. We can be awestruck with the elegance and sublimity of organic evolution. We can also be inspired by song or poem or moved to action through ideals such as truth and justice. But organic evolution does not transpire like reading a book or hearing a sermon, just like human ideas and innovations don’t act like genes. The “meme” is a totally false analogy. The only constant is information.
The closer we come to finding true universals, the better we will be able to create maximum entropy producing structures. This, in turn, has some pretty profound implications. The insight that keys these implications begins with an understanding of the fundamental nature — and importance — of information. According to Karnani et al [19]:
All would agree that the evolution of life over the past few billion years is truly wondrous. But, what is equally wondrous is that the human species has come to learn and master symbols. That mastery, in turn, has broken the bounds of organic evolution and has put into our hands the very means and structure of information itself. Via this entirely new — and incredibly accelerated — path to information structures, we are only now beginning to see some of its implications:
The idea of a “meme” actually cheapens our understanding of these potentials.
Ideas matter and terminology matters. These are the symbols by which we define and communicate potentials. If we choose the wrong analogies or symbols — as “meme” is in this case — we are picking the option with the lower entropy potential. Whether I assert it to be so or not, the “meme” concept is an information structure doomed for extinction.
The httpRange-14 issue and its predecessor “identity crisis” debate have been active for more than a decade on the Web [1]. It has been around so long that most acknowledge “fatigue” and it has acquired that rarified status as a permathread. Many want to throw up their hands when they hear of it again and some feel — because of its duration and lack of resolution — that there never will be closure on the question. Yet everyone continues to argue and then everyone wonders why actual consumption of linked data remains so problematic.
Jonathan Rees is to be thanked for refusing to let this sleeping dog lie. This issue is not going to go away so long as its basis and existing prescriptions are, in essence, incoherent. As a member of the W3C’s TAG (Technical Architecture Group), Rees has worked diligently to re-surface and re-frame the discussion. While I don’t agree with some of the specifics and especially with the constrained approach proposed for resolving this question [2], the sleeping dog has indeed been poked and is awake. For that we can thank Jonathan. Maybe now we can get it right and move on.
I don’t agree with how this issue has been re-framed and I don’t agree that responses to it must be constrained to the prescriptive approach specified in the TAG’s call for comments. Yet, that being said, as someone who has been vocal for years about the poor semantics of the semantic Web community, I feel I have an obligation to comment on this official call.
Thus, I am casting my vote behind David Booth’s alternative proposal [3], with one major caveat. I first explain the caveat and then my reasons for supporting Booth’s proposal. I have chosen not to submit a separate alternative in order to not add further to the noise, as Bernard Vatant (and, I’m sure, many, many others) has chosen [4].
I first commented on the absurdity of the ‘information resource’ terminology about five years ago [5]. Going back to Claude Shannon [6] we have come to understand information as entropy (or, more precisely, as differences in energy state). One need not get that theoretical to see that this terminology is confusing. “Information resource” is a term that defies understanding (meaning) or precision. It is also a distinction that leads to a natural counter-distinction, the “non-information resource”, which is also an imprecise absurdity.
What the confusing term is meant to encompass is web-accessible content (“documents”), as opposed to descriptions of (or statements about) things. This distinction then triggers a different understanding of a URI (locator v identifier alone) and different treatments of how to process and interpret that URI. But the term is so vague and easily misinterpreted that all of the guidance behind the machinery to be followed gets muddied, too. Even in the current chapter of the debate, key interlocutors confuse and disagree as to whether a book is an “information resource” or not. If we can’t basically separate the black balls from the white balls, how are we to know what to do with them?
If there must be a distinction, it should be based on the idea of the actual content of a thing — or perhaps more precisely web-accessible content or web-retrievable content — as opposed to the description of a thing. If there is a need to name this class of content things (a position that David Booth prefers, pers. comm.), then let’s use one of these more relevant terms and drop “information resource” (and its associated IR and NIR acronyms) entirely.
The motivation behind the “information resource” terminology also appears to be a desire that somehow a URI alone can convey the name of what a thing is or what it means. I recently tried to blow this notion to smithereens by using Peirce’s discussion of signs [1]. We should understand that naming and meaning may only be provided by the owner of a URI through additional explication, and then through what is understood by the recipient; the string of the URI itself conveys very little (or no) meaning in any semantic sense.
We should ban the notion of “information resource” forever. If the first exposure a potential new publisher or consumer of linked data encounters is “information resource”, we have immediately lost the game. Unresolvable abstractions lead to incomprehension and confusion.
The approach taken by the TAG in requesting new comments on httpRange-14 only compounds this problem. First, the guidance is to not allow any questioning of the “information resource” terminology within the prescribed comment framework [7]. Then, in the suggested framework for response, still further terminology such as “probe URIs”, “URI documentation carrier” or “nominal URI documentation carrier for a URI” is introduced. Aaaaarggghh! This only furthers the labored and artificial terminology common to this particular standards effort.
While Booth’s proposal does not call for an outright rejection of the “information resource” terminology (my one major qualification in supporting it), I like it because it purposefully sidesteps the question of the need to define “information resource” (see his Section 2.7). Booth’s proposal is also explicit in its rejection of implied meaning in URIs and through embrace of the idea of a protocol. Remember, all that is being put forward in any of these proposals is a mechanism for distinguishing between retrievable content obtainable at a given URL and a description of something found at a URI. By racheting down the implied intent, Booth’s proposal is more consistent with the purpose of the guidance and is not guilty of overreach.
One of the real strengths of Booth’s proposal is its rejection of the prescriptive method proposed by the TAG for suggesting an alternative to httpRange-14 [7]. The parsimonious objective should be to be simple, be clear, and be somewhat relaxed in terms of mechanisms and prescriptions. I believe use patterns — negotiated via adoption between publishers and consumers — will tell us over time what the “right” solutions may be.
Amongst the proposals put forward so far, David Booth’s is the most “neutral” with respect to imposed meanings or mechanisms, and is the simplest. Though I quibble in some respects, I offer qualified support for his alternative because it:
I would wholeheartedly support this approach were two things to be added: 1) the complete abandonment of all “information resource” terminology; and 2) an official demotion of the httpRange-14 rule (replacing it with a slash 303 option on equal footing to other options), including a disavowal of the “information resource” terminology. I suspect if the TAG adopts this option, that subsequent scrutiny and input might address these issues and improve its clarity even further.
There are other alternatives submitted, prominently the one by Jeni Tennison with many co-signatories [8]. This one, too, embraces multiple options and cow paths. However, it has the disadvantage of embedding itself into the same flawed terminology and structure as offered by httpRange-14.
