Immortality, a false good idea

Immortality is trendy. According to some so-called "transhumanists", it is the promise of artificial intelligence at short or medium term, at the very least before the end of the 21st century. Considering the current advances in this field, we are bound to see amazing achievements which will shake our very notions of identity (what I am) and humanity (what we are). If I can transfer, one piece after another, neuron after neuron, organ after organ, each and every element which makes my identity into a human or machine clone of myself, supposing this is sound in theory and doable in practice, will this duplicate of myself still be myself? The same one? Another one? And if I make several clones, which one will be the "true" one? Do such questions make any sense at all? All this looks really like just another, high-tech, version of the Ship of Theseus, and our transhumanists provide no more no less than the ancient philosophers answers to the difficult questions about permanence and identity this old story has been setting, more than two thousand years ago.

None of those dreamers seem to provide a clear idea of how this immortality is supposed to be lived in practice, if ever we achieve it. A neverending old age? Not really a happy prospect! No, to be sure, immortality is only worth it if it goes with eternal youth! And even so, being alone in this condition, and seeing everyone else growing old and die, friends, family, my children and their children, does not that amount to buying an eternity of sorrow? Not sure how long one could stand that. But wait, don't worry, our transhumanists will claim, this is no problem because just everybody will be immortal! Everybody? You mean every single one of the 10 billion people expected to be living by 2100? Or only a very small minority of wealthy happy few? But let's assume the (highly unlikely) prospect of generalized immortality by 2050. In that case it will not be 10 but 15 billion immortal people at the end of the century if natality does not abate.That's clearly not sustainable. But maybe when everyone is immortal, there will be no need to have children anymore, and maybe even at some point it will be forbidden due to shrinking resources. Instead of seeing your children die like in the first scenario, you will not see children anymore. Not sure which one is the worst prospect!
Either way, alone or all together, immortality is definitely not a good idea. And if it were, life would have certainly invented and adopted it long ago. But since billions of years, evolution and resilience of life on this planet despite all kinds of cataclysms (the latest being humanity itself) is based on a completely different strategy. For a species to survive and evolve, individual beings have to die and be replaced by fresh ones, and for the life itself to continue, species have to evolve and eventually disappear, replaced by ones more fit to changing conditions.
So let's forget about actual immortality. We have many technical means to record and keep alive for as long as possible the memory of those who are gone, if they deserved it. To our transhumanists I would suggest to simply make their lives something worth remembering. It's a proven recipe for the only kind of immortality which is worth it, the one living in our memories.

[This post is available in French here]

Dimensions of online identity (about:me)

Ongoing discussion on how social accounts should be represented in schema.org is quite interesting to follow. I've not yet put directly my pinch of salt in this soup, just posted a side note on Google+, which triggered a small forking debate. I'm confident enough in people at schema.org to come out with some pragmatic decision, hence as +Dan Brickley likes to say those days, I don't worry too much. 

But underneath the technical issues, arise some good questions about online identity. Some people in that discussion seem to consider that their social accounts are not really identifying them. In a recent post, I defended the opposite view that URIs of social profiles are maybe the most representative of the online identity, and should be used as primary URIs at least in contexts where social interaction is at stake. I would like to go a little further in this analysis.

The following diagram is inspired by the work of Fanny Georges, with whom I had a few exchanges back in 2009 about those subjects of online identity. For those who read French, you can find some of the original concepts in this paper (see diagram on page 3), where she introduces the notions of declarative identity, active identity, and computed identity. I come out with a slightly different representation, but I wanted to acknowledge the source of most concepts in the picture.

This diagram defines two dimensions of the online identity : a personal-social axis, and a declarative-active one. Each corner of the diagram represents a combination of two poles of those axes. You can figure yourself easily where any resource linked somehow to you will fit, but better clarify by some examples :

Bottom left you find your good old' 96 web page : been there, done that, my home, my kids, my research papers, my collection of old bikes, whatever. All chosen and made by you. Today you will find there a static online CV, for example.

Upper left contains anything said online about you, if you are (un)happy enough to be a public person : articles about you, photographs and videos, library records of your publications, a Wikipedia article about you if you are notable enough (unless you have mingled into its redaction, in which case it will be somewhere on the middle left).

Bottom right contains the traces of your individual interactions on the Web : the pages you visit, the searches you perform, the transactions you make etc. This part of your identity is split on many servers. A piece at your bank, a piece on Amazon, a piece at Google etc. This is the most obscure and frightening part of your identity, because you have no real control on that. Many systems know many things about you, that you might have forgotten.

Upper right contains all the interactions you have on the social Web : FB wall, comments on you blog posts, retweets, GMail etc.

Orthogonal to those two axes is whatever is computed from those data. Many things have been computed behind the scenes long ago from your personal activity (bottom right) : cookies on your browser, suggestions from Amazon, and all sorts of adware or malware entering your computer. Things computed from the social-active upper right are suggestions (friends, books ..) and anything Google or Facebook or whoever "thinks" you would like to do, read, buy etc.

The Semantic Web on the other hand, has been interested mainly in computing on declarative identity : DBpedia descriptions (upper left), FOAF profiles (bottom left). 

Google, for the Knowledge Graph, seems to gather stuff from all over the place : what I say and what I do, what others say about me and what other do in interaction with me. And at the end of the day, even if it's scary to see all this stuff put together and crunched by mysterious algorithms on Big G servers, all together it might yield a more balanced view of my identity than any of its aspects. That's why I take my Google+ URI to be as close as possible to the "about:me" node in the center of the diagram.

[Added 2014-04-14] See also Cybernetics and Conversation. Quote from the reference article (1996) 

Thus we find ourselves being constructed (defined, identified, distinguished) _by_ that conversation. From this point-of-view, our selves emerge as a consequence of conversation. Expressed more fully, conversation and identity arise together.

• Follow-up and comments on Google+

Query + Entity = Quentity

Neologisms are cool, particularly those of the portmanteau kind. Taking two old words and biding them together into a new hybrid semantic species is indeed as exciting, tricky and risky as tree grafting. And it takes some years, either for words or for trees, to figure out success or failure. Will you eventually harvest any fruit, will the hybrid survive at all? Nine years ago I introduced hubjects, and four years before that it was the semantopic map. Neither of those have grown in the expected direction or yielded the expected fruits, although they are both alive and well. Those poor results will not prevent me to try a new grafting experience with quentities, and let's meet here after 2020 under this new tree, and enjoy the fruits, if any.

So, what is this new semantic graft all about? I've ranted here last year about Google not exposing public linked data URIs for its Knowledge Graph entities, and defining linked entities jus as yet other queries. A similar criticism applies to the Bing version of the Knowledge Graph I just invited yesterday to play in this blog. But thinking twice about it, I wonder now if queries are not the right way, and maybe the best way, to consider entities in the Web of data. After all, many (most) URIs in the linked data cloud actually resolve to a query behind the scene, even if they look like plain vanilla URIs. URIs at DBpedia, Freebase, VIAF, WorldCat, OBO, Geonames (just to name a few) are deferenced through some query on some data base, which might be or not a SPARQL query on a triple store. 

Let's take this query which you can pass to the DBpedia SPARQL endpoint.

SELECT DISTINCT ?mag ?quake
WHERE
{
?quake  dbpprop:magnitude  ?mag
FILTER (contains(str(?quake), "earthquake"))
FILTER (contains(str(?quake), "/20"))
FILTER (?mag > 7)
FILTER (?mag < 10)
}
ORDER BY DESC(?mag)

I've tweaked the filters in order to cope with the quite messy state of earthquakes data in DBpedia : no single class nor category for earthquakes, no consolidation of datatype in the values of magnitude (hence the max value filter), date absent or in weird formats, but fortunately quite standard URI fragment syntax (every 21st century earthquake has a URI starting with http://dbpedia.org/resource/20 and containing "earthquake"). Default explicit semantic filters, use syntactic ones ... if you know the implicit semantics of the syntax, of course.

Granted, this query is as ugly as the data themselves are, but the result is not that bad and one could proudly call this "List of major earthquakes in the 21st century, sorted by decreasing magnitude".

Now I've encapsulated the query on DBpedia endpoint into a tiny URI. Does http://bit.ly/1lNkb0R qualify as a URI for an entity in the common meaning of "named entity"? One can argue forever to know if that "List of major earthquakes in the 21st century" is or is not an entity, but in my opinion it is one, no more no less than every individual earthquake in that list (the ontological status of an individual earthquake is a tricky one, too, if you think about it). 

One can argue also that this entity is a shaky one, because the result of this query is bound to change. The current list in DBpedia might be inaccurate or incomplete, some instances might escape the filter for all sort of obvious reasons, and obviously new major earthquakes are bound to happen in this century. Moreover, a stable meaning for this URI depends on the availability and stability of the bit.ly redirection service, on the availability of the DBpedia SPARQL endpoint, on the stability of Wikipedia URI policy and DBpedia ontology. Given all those particularities, let's assume we have a new kind of entity, defined by a query, that I propose to call for this very reason a quentity (shortcut for query entity), and an associated URI which I would gladly call a qURI (shortcut for query URI).

This qURI of course makes sense only as long as the technical context in which you can perform it is available. But is it different for any other kind of URI? To figure what a URI means in the Web of data, you have to use a HTTP GET, which is nothing more than a query over the global data base which is the Web, and what you GET generally depends on the availability and stability of as many pieces of hardware, software and data as in the above example. 

Indeed any URI can be seen, no more no less than the above bit.ly one, as an encapsulated query, making sense only when it's launched across the Web. And is not the elusive entity represented (identified) by this URI better seen as the query itself rather than as the query result? The query is permanent, whereas the query result is dependent on the everchanging client-server conversation context. 

So, if you want some kind of permanence in what the URI defines or identifies or represents (pick your choice), look at the query itself, not at the result. If you abide by this strange but inescapable conclusion, every entity in the Web is a quentity, and its URI is a qURI.

Follow-up discussion on Google+

Added 2014-04-09 : In the G+ discussion is introduced another and certainly better example to make my point : http://bit.ly/R2e3VV, a SPARQL CONSTRUCT yielding the same list in n3, making clear that the RDF description one GET from this URI does not, and cannot, include any triple describing the URI itself.

Linked Open Vocabularies, please meet Google+

The Google+ Linked Open Vocabularies community was created more than one year ago. The G+ community feature was new and trendy at the time, and the LOV community gathered quickly over one hundred members, then the hype moved to someting else, and the community went more or less dormant. Which is too bad, because Google+ communities could be very effective tools, if really used by their members, and LOV creators, publishers and users definitely need a dedicated community tool. We made lately another step towards better interfacing this Google+ community and the LOV data base. Whenever available, we now use in the data base the G+ URIs to identify the vocabulary creators and contributors. As of today,  we have managed to identify a little more than 60% of LOV creators and contributors this way. 

Among those, only a small minority (about 20%) is member of the above said community, which means about 80% of this community members are either lurkers of users of vocabularies. It means also that a good deal of people identified by a G+ profile in LOV still rarely or never use it. One could think that we should then look at other community tools. But there are at least two good reasons to stick to this choice.

Google+ aims at being a reliable identity provider. This was clearly expressed by Google at the very beginning of the service. The recent launch of "custom URIs" such as http://google.com/+BernardVatant through which a G+ account owner can claim her "real name" in the google.com namespace is just a confirmation of this intention. "Vanity URLs" as some call them, are not only good at showing off or being cool. My guess is that they have some function in the big picture of the Google indexing scheme, and certainly something to do with the consolidation of the Knowledge Graph.

We need dynamic, social URIs. I already made this point at the end of the previous post. And the more so for URIs of living and active people. Using URIs of social networks will hopefully make obsolete the too long debate over "URI of Document" vs "URI of Entity". Such URIs are ambiguous, indeed, because we are ambiguous. 

The only strong argument against G+ URIs is that using URIs held by a private company namespace to identify people in an open knowledge project is a bad choice. Indeed, but alternatives might turn to be worse. 

Coreference using substitution rules

Note : This is mostly copied/adapted from a message I posted last week in yet another conversation about the identity issue on W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group internal mailing list.

Coreference as a Service

Yahoo! releases Concordance as part of GeoPlanet API. The aim of this service is to provide equivalence between identifiers for geo entities defined in different namespaces. Quoting Gary Gale on Yahoo! Geo Technologies Blog.

We’ve collected these identifiers and namespaces as a single object, a concordance, which empowers a user to reference each source. You can think of it as a mapping of an identifier in a namespace to its equivalent in another namespace. But it’s not a joining of information; we’re only enumerating the identifiers, not the back-end data or attributes that they describe.

The last sentence is important. The service is agnostic on the data model or ontologies used by the various identifiers publishers. Ontological emptiness makes the service useful.

Another striking example is provided by Ellerdale, reconciliating Wikipedia or Freebase topics with Twitter hashtags to build amazing dynamic pages.

Let's guess that many more of the same will emerge in the months to come.

Open GUID : anchoring hubjects

Jason Borro has announced yesterday his Open GUID initiative on the Linking Open Data forum. After a first day of open discussion, it appears that he has came with the right implementation of hubjects, and moreover with a great metaphor. Hubjects must be anchored in signs, bot human-readable and computer-readable. Here is what I come with this morning.

Own your identity

ownyouridentity.com is a blog about owning your online identity in a world with an increasing amount of software that wants to own it for you. It's written by the chi.mp team and friends.

URIs for languages

I've eventually given up trying representing hubjects at all, at least for the moment. I had a serious try at it at lingvoj.org. But after discussions in the Linking Open Data forum, I eventually surrendered and published the languages description in a way conformant to W3C recommandations for Semantic Web architecture, with content negociation, 303 redirects and the like. I've even suppressed the previous post here saying otherwise, which would be now full of dead links and would bring about confusion.

So we'll see how this flies. Feed your favourite tool with the URI http://www.lingvoj.org/lang/zh, and figure by yourself if it provides a useful description of the Chinese language, both for humans and machines.

Adieu to Published Subjects

I've learnt those days that the OASIS Published Subjects Technical Committee, which I've chaired for two years from its foundation in August 2001, was closed. Actually it was officialy closed by OASIS in November 2006, but I had not received any notification from anyone. Sounds like learning the death of an old friend months after.
Actually the activity of the TC was dormant since the publication of its first and somehow unique deliverable Published Subjects: Introduction and Basic Requirements. This output does not seem much after two years of work, but it figures there was not much more we could achieve. In a recent private exchange about the future of Published Subjects, Patrick Durusau, who chaired also this TC after 2003, still wants to believe that it is not the end of it, that the work has stalled mainly by lack of task force, but maybe anyway this TC was a case of premature specification.

I think that the notion of a published "identification" of a subject, whatever you want to call it, is probably a good idea, so long as anyone can add their identification of the same subject. On the other hand, a notion that this *is* the identification of a subject, well, that leads to losing propositions like the stuff you find at Swoogle. How many different identifications of person are there?

I already set this question here two years ago. Amazingly enough, the figures does not seem to have changed since (399 answers by today).
I take the opportunity to point to this paper by Patrick. If you have not figured out what a subject can be, even after an extensive reading of this blog (or don't care going into so much reading) this is a must. Short, clear and to the point.

OWL ontology for identity on the web

This paper by Valentina Presutti and Aldo Gangemi at SWAP2006 begins with a clear introduction to the issue of resource identity, and the ambiguity of the term resource itself. Then it goes on with a very smart OWL model attempting to articulate the various aspects of this concept. Maybe too smart and conceptual to become really popular, but interestingly enough, it goes against the popular Semantic Web assumption that URI can actually identify "non-addressable things", and is rather in the line of letting the referent entities outside of the identification framework.

The definitions of resource that can be found in literature show ambiguity, making the issue of handling the identification of a web resource very problematic.

Our approach restricts the nature of the web resource to that of a computational object. This choice is motivated by the fact that a resource is something that has to be addressable, and things like cars and people are not addressable for their nature. Hence, it is wrong in principle to use the same mechanism of addressing for entities that have such different sorts.

More thoughts on that Blue Glass

John Black commented on my previous post, providing links to interesting pieces of thoughts. Anatomy of a Reference and Ambiguity and Identity are certainly in the line of what we try to entangle here.

Let's put those pieces together. John's blue glass, physically tagged with its URI is a clear example of the difference between access and naming as explained by Pat Hayes. What is accessed using this http URI is an image of the blue glass, but the URI is intended to name the glass itself. Tagging physically the blue glass with a URI sticker or a bar code is something very close to what Pat calls ostention, but it's not the silver bullet to kill ambiguity.

As John clearly points, when you stick a tag somewhere in the physical world, you still need interpretation to know which part of the world is tagged this way, since the world is not "naturally" divided, things and their limits are always the result of some mental operation of division. So a common interpretation of the tag needs a common understanding of the limits of things, and having a common understanding of classes of things, and which kind of tags you put on which class of things is really useful. This is something well known in geographical maps. On ill-designed maps, names are not printed properly, and it's often unclear what (town, river, mountain ...) is named. In well-designed maps, there are a lot of implicit or explicit disambiguation tricks, such as fonts, colors, position of the name vs the named feature etc. One has to know all that to make sense of the map (actually many people are not able to make sense of a map properly). When you come to the ground, you have similar physical tags indicating towns, rivers, streets and house numbers, and you also need similar knowledge to construe those tags in context : this kind of sticker is for a town, that kind is for a street, and so on. And even so, what is the limit of a town, a street, a valley or a mountain remains basically undecidable.

[2016-06-20] John Black's Kashori archives have moved. The reference articles are now here:
http://www.kashori.com/archives/2006_06_11_archive.html
http://www.kashori.com/archives/2006_07_02_archive.html

Ambiguity, Ostention and Description

Pat Hayes' In Defence of Ambiguity, presented at IRW 2006, has been on my desktop for weeks, and I take it as the most challenging food for thought currently available about the Semantic Web. If you have not yet read it, you should now.
There is only one point on which I would argue. Pat holds that reference can be made by ostention (gesticulation showing what you are about) or description. All Pat writes thereafter about description being inherently ambiguous, I strongly agree with : disambiguation being a contextual process, the more precise the description, the more ambiguity you get, and so on.
But I would hold that ostention is as ambiguous as description, so that reference is ambiguous in nature whatever the way it's done.
Suppose I am holding a book and ask you : "Have you read this?". The reference to "this" is by ostention, since I seem to hold and show "this". But the "ostentatum" indicated by "this" is actually some copy of some edition of some book. Does "this" refer to this specific copy, which happens to be my own personal copy (maybe annotated in some way), or is the referent the particular edition of which this specific copy is a sample, or is it the abstract entity, the book independent of any physical support, of which what I am currently holding happens to be some physical avatar? Every one of those interpretations is meaningful, and only the context of the conversation might disambiguate. So even with ostention, there is ambiguity left.

Wikipedia's semantic cow paths

I've been quite silent here on this blog for two months, and meanwhile resumed a bit of my Wikipedian activity lately. Although I'd been an enthusiastic early adopter of Wikipedia back in 2001, I have a poor and episodic editing history so far. But every time I've been coming back to the editor dashboard after months or years of inactivity, I've been amazed by the tremendous qualitative growth of the toolkit made available to users. Wikipedia's growth has been stressed again and again in terms of quantity and quality of articles, languages, editors, popularity as a reference resource etc. But was has not been stressed enough is the parallel growth in terms of features supporting better search and editing. And many of those features are in fact adding a quality of information which makes it ready for semantic parsing, and easy RDF re-writing. The basis of it all is a sound use of URIs, names and namespace.

For example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcano defines without ambiguity the unique page dedicated to this geological feature, while http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcano_(disambiguation) is a hub to potential homonyms such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcano_(film). Links are provided to similar resources in other languages such as http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcan. One can reasonably use any of those URIs to identify the concept "Volcano". But what about a class Volcano? Here come Wikipedia categories. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Active_volcanoes is ready-made for a class, and parsing the page will give you easily the list of instances, with a link to the full description page. This description itself is formatted using templates such as "infoboxes", so that a page in a category "Active Volcanoes" will yield standard properties in a standard format. Easy to turn this into a data base, and if one interprets the infobox elements as so many properties, turn it into a RDF description, and the infobox structure itself in a RDFS or OWL description of the matching class.

What should we learn from that? That from a collaborative and mostly non-directed process, are emerging cow paths which look more and more like semantic markup, ready to be spidered by smart parsers and tools, either to improve Wikipedia content itself (there are already a bunch of bots and agents doing that), or to extract of this amazing knowledge base any kind of structured data in whatever format, including implicit ontology, like structure of categories, attributes used, and the like. And my hunch is that this process will be quickly much more effective for Semantic Web building than many costly academic ontologies nobody will ever use.

[2010-04-08] : What is described here is exactly what DBpedia started in 2007

Identifying things - blank nodes again

Still trying to figure if the hubject seeds are likely to grow somewhere, so I dropped one today on Danny Ayers' blog, as a comment on a post itself commenting on another one from Jon Udell where is introduced the cool notion of collaborative aliasing. "What a concept!" will say Jack. And actually, it's no more no less the idea that hubjects can be created out of aggregation of resources being "about the same thing". An aliasing service, which really looks like tagging.
So my suggestion again is here to use blank tagging, that is, allow users, in a simple way, to make all those resources point to the same blank node.
Now something is slowly coming from the back of my mind. I thought for a while we needed a specific and mysterious vocabulary to do that, hubjects and the like. Since this kind of stuff is far from being on the track of adoption, maybe using more popular and less exotic vocabulary, such as dc:subject or something similar would make the whole thing more understandable. Seems there is no formal opposition to declare things like:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00006RCLH dc:subject _:b
http://labs.oclc.org/xisbn/068981836X dc:subject _:b
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_the_Wild dc:subject _:b

And actually, any other property could be used as well, such as the following, to take the example from Jon Udell's post
http://upcoming.org/venue/3669/ a:venue _:x
http://eventful.com/venues/V0-001-000150985-3 a:venue _:x

This kind of declaration keeps completely agnostic on what a venue in general, and this particular one actually is. It simply says that the two resources are about the same one.

Identity vs Meaning

Under this really boring title "The Semantics Are Important", Seth Ladd in his Semergence blog is making a really good point :

The identity is singular. The meaning is relative.

In other words, identity and identifiers can be shared, global, universal, whereas semantics/meaning, such as expressed in a particular RDF graph, is local, relative, context-bound, perspective-defined. And therefore multiple, orthogonal, non-compatible, globally inconsistent.

I like it more and more. This goes along the same lines as Pat Hayes' recent post, and puts again the question of how to deal with context. I'm not sure now, munching over Pat's arguments, that the context always needs to be explicited. I've been working those days on SKOS used to express simplified view of hierarchies (of any kind) in an OWL ontology. In some OWL ontology, one would find

a:SomeRegion a:partOf a:SomeCountry

In a simplified SKOS view

a:SomeRegion skos:broader a:Some Country

Reasoners and RDF stores are happy with the OWL version, search engines, taxonomy managers and the like are happy with the SKOS version. So one perspective by kind of tools/applications. What would not make sense would be to merge them, and entail that a:SomeRegion is at the same time an instance of a:Region and skos:Concept. It is not at the same time, it is one in some application context, and the other one in another context. No problem with that. So what is a:SomeRegion in essence, to use this arrogant word I saw passing in the previous post? Well, it's neti, neti, neither this, nor that. No big deal. Who cares?

Set this question about a week ago on the SKOS forum. An astounding silence has been the answer so far ...

[2013-08-01] : Still waiting for an answer ... more than 7 years after the issue is still open.

Identity -- some philosophical musings

Here are some interesting words taken from the link. Follow the link for more. Following, I'll sketch what I am thinking. This is a bit disjoint, but, I think, necessary. It seems that our topic maps are becoming sophisticated enough that we are now able to push the boundaries of subject identities that motivated Bernard to start this blog in the first place. Maybe someone else, or something else (hubjects?) will help resolve some things dealing with subject identity. Possibly longish.

IDENTITY

Crystals appear (on the scene of Reality) -- just like organisms -- always as individuals. Such an individual has a definite Identity that remains constant during its existence. It is, say, A, it is not B, not C, etc. A developing crystal of Salt (growing in a solution) can change its shape while its Identity remains the same. For organisms this applies even stronger. We ourselves (being an organism) seem to have direct experience of our Identity staying the same during all of our life in spite of the fact of the many changes we constantly undergo. Some insects undergo a strong metamorphosis (for example from caterpillar to butterfly) but nevertheless their Identity stays the same. So it seems for every entity, which is an intrinsic whole, that there is something that remains the same, and something else not remaining the same, but always changing. In Philosophy such changes are called "accidental" or "per accidens" in relation to the persistent Identity. This Identity is called the "intrinsic Essence" of the thing, so every real uniform being has such an Essence.

IDENTITY AS A PRINCIPLE

But what then is this Essence?
Where does it abide?
Does it abide outside the thing (as Plato assumed), or inside the thing (as his famous pupil Aristotle assumed)?
And if the Essence is located inside the thing (meaning that the Essence of every being abides in "our world", and not in some external immaterial world transcending the material world), which I consider the most probable position, where in the thing is it located and in what way? Could this Essence be a concrete part of the thing, the "heart" or "soul" of the thing, which implies that the Essence itself would also be a thing (and this thing should of course also have an Essence of its own........Oh my god, where are we going???), or is it in the thing in an abstract way (whatever that means), like a principle?

A background sketch: together with Joshua Levy, I am building a subject mapped social bookmarking application. We call it Tagomizer (tm). It's being fun. But, it's also causing (moi) brain pain. What is a subject? Let me translate. Someone bookmarks a webpage. This means that the URL of that page, and the page title, are sent to Tagomizer, which then paints a form in which the user can add tags (words or phrases for now, images and other objects later), and a body of text taken as a comment. A user can come in later and add more comments or more tags, or remove tags. Tags are a large part of Web 2.0, where folksonomies are breaking out everywhere.

What is a subject? When Tagomizer creates a bookmark, it creates several subject proxies in the subject map where those objects don't already exist. Tagomizer is a kind of TMA (topic maps application -- or SMA in the newspeak of the TMRM), so it is responsible for identification of its subjects, some of which might already have subject identity granted by other TMAs. What, then, is a subject? Consider the webpage itself. Tagomizer asks the core TMA to create a subject proxy for a webpage with a given URL. If that subject proxy already exists, it is returned. Otherwise, a new one is created and granted subject identity by way of a PSI associated with the core TMA. Tagomizer, as a different TMA then grants that subject proxy subject identity with a different PSI, one that says "this is a subject identified by Tagomizer." Other TMAs might grant an SIP (psi) of their own. This is necessary because each individual TMA will be adding other properties to the proxy, mostly assertions.

So, a webpage has granted to it subject identity. What is the subject? In this case, subject identity has been granted to a particular resource, a webpage. Nothing more than that. The resource exists, it is located on the web at a particular URL, and it has been granted subject identity based on that URL by one or more TMAs. Each TMA is going to confer other properties on that subject. We know from nothing about the subject itself other than those properties of location and object type. What is contained/presented at that webpage will be the subject(s) of other subject proxies, for which that resource becomes an instance of an occurrence.

Brain pain, for me (warning: admission of ignorance forthcoming), stems from notions of essence. Essence is mentioned in the quote above as an intrinsic issue. Now, we're deep into the same issues that come up from time to time in the OODB community, intrinsic vs. extrinsic properties. There's an interesting thread on web resource identity, not dissimilar to Bernard's previous post on URI ambiguity. That xml-dev thread starts here.
Intrinsice-extrinsic properties are discussed here.

Closure? Is closure possible? I post this because I am interested in looking for concensus reality related to interoperable ways in which subject identity can/should be conferred on the subjects of future topic/subject maps. My sense is that the inquiry I reveal in this post represents the, um, essense of this entire blog and of Bernard's inquiry. I'll take my answers anywhere I can find them.

Identity, Reference and the Web

A challenging workshop to be held in Edinburgh in May 2006. I've been invited today by the co-chair Harry Halpin to participate in the Program Committee. From the "Goal and Theme" section of the description.

URIs are the primary mechanism for reference and identity on the Web. To be useful, a URI must provide access to information which is sufficient to enable someone or something to uniquely identify a particular thing and the thing identified might vary between contexts. There is no doubt that as mechanisms for identifying web pages the URI has been wildly successful. Currently, URIs can also be used to identify namespaces, ontologies, and almost anything. However, important questions are the interpretation and use and meaning of URIs have been left unquestioned ...

Exactly indeed, what we are about here ... Interesting to see also Pat Hayes in the co-chairs list. I remember that quite a while ago in a private communication, Pat had stressed the fact that identity issues had been "sadly overlooked" so far by current Semantic Web technologies.

Revisiting Content Negotiation

I attended yesterday a very interesting telecon of the SWBPD Vocabulary Management Task Force. The agenda was highly technical - define best practices on how to provide through its URI, both computable RDF description for computers and human-readable description for humans, of an RDF vocabulary term. Use cases were SKOS and FOAF, with their respective editors Alistair Miles and Dan Brickley, and Dublin Core, represented by Tom Baker. All those smart guys have already explored the subject in-depth during recent Dublin Core Conference in Madrid, and agreed that current state of their respective vocabularies was suboptimal.

Devil is in the details there, for example many vocabularies use #URIs, such as http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#prefLabel.

From Topic Maps Published Subjects viewpoint, such an URI would be called a subject identifier, but in your browser, the fragid is not taken into account, because http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#prefLabel points to an RDF schema. So the subject identifier does not provide directly a human-readable HTML subject indicator, such as the one actually provided by http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-skos-core-spec/#prefLabel

Everybody agreed that it would be good to have the subject identifier provide redirection to the subject indicator (even if this is not the terminology used so far in RDF land), at least for human users (that is, in a regular browser), whereas computers would keep being fed with the RDF description.

Consensus in this meeting was that content negotiation is the way to go. While it's unclear at this stage (at least for me) how it can be technically achieved, particularly with #URIs, it sheds a new light on Published Subjects specification, on which I expand in this post.

New thing here is that at the time of the specification (2003), we did not explore both possibilities offered and issues raised by content negotiation for Published Subjects.

Thinking further about it, it strikes me that content negotiation mechanism is very similar to hubjects. A URI managed through content negotiation is defining a subject/resource which is neither this content nor that one, but a superposition of all possible contents, the actual one being delivered in a given interaction depending of the client-server dialogue. It's amazing that impact of content negotiation on URI meaning seems to have been so much overlooked. Although the specification is now quite old, it seems to have been only used as a borderline technical trick, whereas it could become a fundamental mechanism to deliver, through the same URI, a variety of views of a subject to a variety of users, humans and computers as well.

Axioms of Identity

Here is what Scott C. Lemon said:

In my research into digital identity, I created a set of 'axioms' that have molded my perspective of the subject. I developed these axioms as the foundation for how I would create a digital identity solution ... a software solution to accumulate identity, and provide controlled dissemination of that information.

The First Axiom of Identity

I posit that we humans do not have any inherent identity.


The Second Axiom of Identity

I posit that identity does not exist outside the context of a community.


The Third Axiom of Identity

I posit that identity is exchanged in transactions that occur within a context of trust and authentication.

nota bene: given the last update on these (4-3-2005), I'm guessing that Bernard didn't already mention them here earlier :)