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Understanding the Semantic Web – 4

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In this final post exploring questions and themes around Karen Coyle’s Understanding the Semantic Web report, I want to look at the coexistence of the universal and the particular in the Semantic Web. This is something that Karen touches on in her report:

Of course, it is not reasonable to assume a single system of identifiers for everything on the Web. Undoubtedely, different communities will assign identifiers of their own, some overlapping with those of another community.

This may seem reasonable in the year 2010. However, a glance back at the history of ideas might make us a little more circumspect. Certainly, for the last three centuries, the dominant paradigm among scientists and intellectuals has been the universal over the particular. The universal is what Karen is referring to with “a single system of identifiers for everything on the Web.”

But in this postmodern moment, there is a strong suspicion of universalism, as articulated by Karen, and a favouring of the local and particular. We have seen this in the flourishing of folksonomies alongside more authoritative taxonomies.

Making sense of the world

The reasons behind the breakdown in belief in universal values is an intellectual question far too big for this post, involving the horrors of two world wars, the end of the Cold War signalling the demise of big ideas, and other more local crises such as May 1968 in France and the US’s Vietnam War, all of which contributed to a sense of disillusion with the certainties of the old order and a distrust of grand narratives.

We only have to look back at the archetypal Victorian amateur botanist to see how much things have changed. He would have been concerned with the coining of universal terms to describe objective features, with orders and classes depending on the number and position of male and female organs of the flower, for example – in other words universally recognised objective features.

In fact, the relationship between the universal and the particular has always been in flux. The universal is not dead; it is alive in the technology domain at least, where a machine will either work or not work and is not subject to personal interpretation. Even in the heyday of the Victorian botanist, there were subtle processes undermining a universalist paradigm, although these would not reach their full expression until the 20th century. There were also vestiges of a particularist past and present, in more folkloric approaches to botany which occasionally contradicted universalist findings – where superficial impressions might lead to a a categorisation that would later be disproven by a DNA examination revealing radical differences due to divergent evolutionary lineages.

It is the ability to manage this constantly shifting emphasis between the universal and the particular which, for me, marks the Semantic Web as an emerging technology with serious potential for longevity. It will enable the coexistence of local and particular frameworks with “switching stations” as Karen calls them, or linking hubs “that gather identifiers that are equivalent or nearly so” to enable interoperability.

Crucially, linked data has the flexibility to manage these historical fluxes, just in case the postmodern moment passes and humanity recovers its confidence in grander truths. The Semantic Web can be agnostic in that sense, and that is a good thing, as the determinants arguably lie beyond the technological realm for the main part.

Stuck in the middle with you

In the meantime, the library finds itself uncomfortably positioned right on the interface between the universal and the particular. It has historically served as intermediary between the two – with the library standing as a repository of an authoritative and universal view of the world and both the library and librarians helping individuals move from their particular viewpoint into the wider world of knowledge. This is what the traditional public library gave to the likes of Michael Caine, widening their world and enabling them to transcend the circumstances of their particular upbringing. It is incorrect, in my view, to believe that technology alone has been responsible for this disintermediation – there are broader cultural and and intellectual forces at work.

Local perspectives have gradually assumed a greater importance over time, and the apotheosis of this – the library user as Google searcher – has greatly undermined the confidence of the library, wrenching it from its comfortable intermediary position. Whether the library can redefine itself in this context is something many of us have been asking for a long time now. But the good news, for me, is that the Semantic Web has the potential to safeguard the universal whilst giving expression to the local and particular, the latter being important in any intellectual climate.

The library world has to date been only subconsciously aware of the size and shape of these forces, and has intermittently adopted defensive ideas in response. To understand is the first step, and maybe the second step is to see the Semantic Web as a valuable tool in the repositioning of the library in a global setting of multiple particulars in which universal values are still out there somewhere.


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