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• The knowledge industry (read: “publishing industry”) needs to be actively involved in IT development.• Must include assessments of potential value of new opportunities in
bottom-line calculation, instead of only looking for cost-savings in existing lines of business.
• The conventional wisdom is always to avoid disruption. Instead, expect disruption, and seek to be its cause, rather than its victim.
• Consider productivity enhancement a function of the effective knowledge-richness of the tools in use• Note: Knowledge-richness would increase even without new IT…
• Knowledge businesses need to keep adding value• Interoperability of content and services can and must improve• Increasing complexity of all kinds of systems, not just IT systems• Consumer demand for increasing knowledge-richness will continue; it
makes life easier and more enjoyable• Other drivers: citizens’ rights; government transparency, IPR payback,
security concerns, ecological concerns.
• …but the available IT defines the investment opportunities in knowledge-richness. It’s generally better to make smarter, better-protected investments, right?
5. Smart Content: a common vision about disclosing the semantics of content and processes
• Both processes and content should be semantically self-describing.• Emphasize the importance of declaring everything about processes.
• Avoid having processes without content that declares their semantics. • Avoid leaving undeclared semantics hidden in processes.• Make access to the declared semantics of processes inherent in the
process interfaces.
• Emphasize the importance of declaring everything about content.• SGML and relational traditions have much to offer• Make access to the declared semantics of content inherent in the process
interfaces
• Lots of work to do here. Dialectic tension between the camps is productive. When one side “wins”, everybody loses.
• Web services need to be self-describing, and in a way that enables the semantics of their descriptions to co-exist and interoperate, regardless of their diversity.• …and regardless of whether the things described are content or
processes.
• Incoming and outgoing messages need to describe themselves, too, and in the same terms that the web service uses.
• Self-description is a harder problem for content than for processes.• Processes already have formal descriptions, or they wouldn’t work.
• Content is fantastically diverse and usually open to interpretation. Content descriptions resist formalization.
5. Smart Content: a common vision about disclosing the semantics of content and processes
• A banner for diverse research intended to accelerate the exploitation of ideas.• The "smartness" of content is its “ability to participate fully, at the
semantic level, in the ambient intelligence space”.
• The “smartness” of content is its “readiness to be semantically integrated with other smart content”
• Smart content is formally self-describing, and • Smart content is interpretable in such a way as to support semantic (i.e.,
subject-based) indexing, so that master indexes can be automatically and freely generated from diverse, arbitrary combinations of smart sources.
• What is the absolute minimum ontological commitment required to allow Smart Content to be formally self-describing, so as to be "ready to be semantically integrated with other smart content"? • One answer: The Topic Maps Reference Model
• What systematic metaphorical "compasses" can be used to navigate in the "subject spaces" that result from integrating diverse Smart Content, including Smart Content whose ontological diversity is entirely uncontrolled?• What is “Collective Intelligence” and how can we make it a science?
See the work of Pierre Lévy, Canada Research Chair in Collective Intelligence (University of Ottawa).
• How can the internet be used as an infrastructure that provides accountability for user actions without compromising the independence or privacy of computer owners?• Sacrifice the “end-to-end” doctrine in order to achieve a decentralized
solution to the accountability problem?
• How to avoid dangerous concentration of power:• How to avoid the branding, domination, and monopolistic abuse of basic
public services by private interests?• How to avoid the increasing imposition of centralized authority?
• BIG EU projects in the “Sixth Framework Programme”
• EC is betting far more money on Semantic Web Services than on Smart Content.
• Just started an Austrian national testbed for “intelligent objects” in a GRID.
• Semantic wikis: smart content objects for exchanging content between semantic wikis. See http://ikewiki.salzburgresearch.at. (US researchers are licensing it.)
• However, real communities emerge only from real circumstances. They never exist simply because somebody wants them to exist, no matter how good their intentions..
• By definition, communication occurs only within communities. Each community defines its language, and each language defines its community.
• Fortunately, everybody participates in multiple communities.
• Problem:• Power always wants to accumulate more power.
• A government by, for, and of the people must be transparent.
• Transparency is inimical to power consolidation/concentration.
• GPO’s mission is to be the US government’s organ of transparency.
• Small wonder that GPO gets so little cooperation! The less access the public has to integrated views of the workings of government, the less transparency there is.
GPO’s opportunity• Each agency is actually a community of communities, each
struggling to adapt to constant change, each constantly inventing its own language(s). If GPO had ontological authority over them, GPO would not thereby make the government more effective, responsive, and adaptable. The reverse would be far more likely!
• Opportunity: GPO can work to create conditions in which those with knowledge of multiple disparate government communities can profit from allowing the public to exploit their diverse cross-community perspectives. GPO can encourage the development of a marketplace of mappings across all manner of government information.