Emerging World [part three]
The Semantic Web
Pierre Lévy explains the modus operandi of dialectics and rhetoric as part of the “operations of virtualization:”
“A prehistoric man sees a branch. He recognizes it for what it is. But history doesn’t stop there, for the man, initiating a process of dialectic, sees double. He squints at the branch and imagines a stick. The branch signifies the stick. The branch is a virtual stick. Substitution. All technology is founded on this capacity for twisting and doubling reality… A real entity, embedded in its identity and function, suddenly harbors a different function, another identity, becomes a component in new assemblies…” And the process goes on and on until it becomes ubiquitous, being at the core of the way we create meaning by a system of association in which any particular object can have multiple names with the same meaning or multiple meanings attached to the same name.
In the virtual world of the web, text is one of the essential tools to make sense of the limitless wealth of information that exists in its networks. The problem with text is that it is too objective for the computerized mind and requires human discern to decode it in a real, human way. A front page article in yesterday’s New York Times posed an answer to this problem in the shape of an improvement in the way people and computers collaborate.
The article explained that researchers are “working to exploit the content of social computing sites, which allow users to collaborate in gathering and adding their thoughts to a wide array of content, from travel to movies.” The objective of that content “exploitation” is simply to aid database networks to become better at identifying associations and therefore at adding meaning. Software alone can identify text and even rank it a la Google; however it has been unable to precisely make sense of all the human nuances attached to it.
As discussed in our previous post on this subject, tagging is already contributing to the evolution of language, in this case via facilitating the textualization of images, sound, and video. This has tremendous implications on the way the new generation of database systems (the NYT article mentioned Radar Networks as a leading technology) will impact our lives through perfecting artificial intelligence that can save huge amounts of time making (human) sense of the web for us, so we can dedicate more time to enjoy life in the good old human way.
