It is so because it is so

I've been through a few mountain paths and Chinese ancient texts this summer, both demanding fitness and attention of body and mind, and quite interesting to put together. 

道行之而成
物謂之而然

The above image I captured yesterday, the caption is extracted from one of the most challenging pages of Zhuangzi, quite close in spirit to another taoist piece we've been through in a previous post. We have here also a symmetrical sentence conveying the idea of a parallel ontogenesis for paths and things. The following is my synthesis of various translations.

Walk the path and it is completed

Name the thing and it is like this

The second part is indeed close to Laozi (having a name is the mother of all things). The implicit assumption, in a taoist context, is that there are adequate ways for both walking and naming. Even if, like in the above image, the path is barely visible and seems to vanish at some point. Such unsteady tracks quickly disappear if not regularly trodden, but they are not as contingent as they could seem. Even without any visible track, any (good) walker would make its way through the scree towards the background pass following a more or less similar path. From a taoist viewpoint, the (good) walker's path would fit the lines of the landscape, his path in harmony with the general way of things, both being called 道 (dào). The (wise) man will do the same in naming things, following the natural lines of his current cultural landscape. Bearing in mind that this landscape is bound to change, hence neither path or thing have any absolute and definitive existence.
And Zhuangzi in the following sentence pounds the point that there is no need for further explanation or dispute about it, through the insisting use of the word 然, meaning here "so" or "like this". The (adequate) path is so because it is so, the (adequate) thing is so because it is so. 

The translation at Chinese Text Project is adding an extra layer of interpretation.

A path is formed by (constant) treading on the ground. 
A thing is called by its name through the (constant) application of the name to it. 

This "constant" is not explicit in the original text, but it makes sense in the cultural context of Zhuangzi writing. For the track to become a path, it has to be trodden again an again by many people, and the name gets its meaning by usage. Paths and things are polished cultural artefacts. 

From names to sentences, the Web language story.

Conversation about text and names and how they are interwoven within the Web architexture is going on here and there. The more it goes, the more I feel we need more non technical narratives and metaphors to have people get what the (Semantic) Web is all about. We have drowned them under technical talks and schemas of layers of architecture and protocols and data structures and ontologies and applications ... and the neat result is that too many of them, and smart people, think only experts, engineers and geeks can grok it. So let me try one of such - hopefully simple - narratives. 

The story of the Web is just the story of language, continued by other means. Forging names to call things, and weaving those names in sentences and texts. On the Web, things have those weird names called URIs, but names all the same. As we have seen in a previous post, a name is to begin with a way to shout and identify people and things in the night. On the Web to call a thing by its URI-name you will use some interface, a browser, a service, an application, and at this call something will come through the interface. Well, the thing you have called does not actually come itself to you through the network, but you get something which is hopefully a good enough representation of the thing. The deep ontological question of the relationship between the name and what is named has been discussed for ages and will continue forever. The Web does not change that issue, does not solve it, just provides new use cases and occasions to wonder about it. But this is not my point today.

On the first ages of the Web, calling things was all you could do with those URI-names. You had the language ability of a two years old kid. You could say "orange" or "milk" when you were thirsty, and "dog" and "cat" and "car" and "sea" and "plane" when you saw or wanted one, and cry for everything else you could not express or the dumb Web would not understand. With no more sophisticated language constructs, you could nevertheless discover the wealth of the Web, through iterative serendipitous calls. Because courtesy of the Web is such that when you call for a thing the answer comes often back with a bunch of other names you can further call (an hyperlink just does that, enabling you to call another name just by a click). You would bring back home things you had not the faintest idea of the very existence a minute before. Remember this jubilation, the magic of your first Web navigation, twenty years ago? Like a kid laughing aloud when discovering the tremendous power of names to call things.
Today in many (most) of our interactions with the Web we are no more aware of using names. We make actions with our fingertips, barely guessing that under the hood, this is transformed in a client calling a server or something on this server by some name, and many calls are made on the network to bring back what your fingers asked. Only geeks and engineers know that. The youngest generations who have not known the first ages of the Web, and interact only through such interfaces, are plainly ignoring all that names affair. Did you say URL Dad? What's that? It sounds so 90's ...

Now when you grow older than two, you go beyond using names just for shouting them in the face of the world, you begin to understand and build yourself sentences. That's a complete new experience, a new dimension of language unfolding. You link names together, you discover the texture, the power to understand and invent stories and to ask and answer questions. You still use the same names, you are still interested in oranges, cats, dogs and cars, and all the thousands of things which are the children of naming. But you are now able to weave them together using verbs (predicates), qualifiers and quantifiers and logical coordination. You have become a language weaver.

And that's exactly and simply what the Semantic Web is about, and how it extends the previous Web. Just growing and learning to weave sentences, telling stories, asking questions. But using the same URI-names as before. Any URI-name of the good old Web can become a part of the Semantic Web. Just write a sentence, publish a triple using it as subject or object, and here you are. 

Common names, proper usage

What follows might be, as previous posts, relevant to the raging debate in and around the W3C Shapes Working Group. If you don't care too much about Latin, Greek, French, German, etymology, translation and languages at large, you can go straight to the last paragraph. But I trust my faithful readers (whoever they are) to follow me through the long preliminary linguistic meanders.

I had a while ago pointed at the enclosure of common names as trademarks. Maybe I should have written common nouns. But in French (my native language), there is a single word nom to translate both noun and name, all being cognates to Latin nomen, Greek ὄνομα, and many more avatars of the same Indo-European root. In French grammar you will say "nom commun" for "common noun" and "nom propre" for "proper noun", and a French native speaker is likely to translate in English "common name" and "proper name", both ambiguous out of context. And my purpose today is indeed to look at what it can mean for names to be common or proper beyond what it means for grammatical nouns.
Let's look into Latin again, where communis and proprius, as well as their ancient Greek equivalents κοινός and ἴδιος have roughly the semantic scope they have kept in French and English. Together they split the world into what belongs to the commons and what is proprietary or private. Beyond and before use in grammar to denote universals and particulars, further meanings have built upon good or bad characteristics associated with each term. Typically, "common" will be used as a derogatory qualifier for whatever belongs to the vulgum pecus, those common people which do not behave, think or speak properly.  The French "propre" even goes further down this derogatory path to mean "clean", with disambiguation by position ("c'est ma propre maison" = "it's my own house" vs "sa maison est propre" = "her house is clean"). Such extensions seem indeed characteristic of a language controlled by some aristocracy. It's worth noticing that the English "own" and its German cognate "Eigen" do not seem to have suffered similar semantic drifts. 

Sticking to the original meaning and forgetting the interpretations of either grammar or aristocracy, common names would be simply names belonging to the commons. Which is true, if you think about it, for just any name. A name with no community (or communality) would be useless, and actually barely a name, just a string with no shared usage and agreed-upon denotation. Under such a definition, even proper nouns are common names. From a grammatical viewpoint, "Roma" is a proper noun, but it's common to all people using it to denote the capital of Italy. To make it short, all names belong to the commons, otherwise they don't name anything at all.
The above analysis does not apply only to natural languages names (aka nouns), but also to all those technical names handled in our information system internal languages, the names used by machines to call each other in the dark (see previous post) and take actions. URIs, addresses, objects and classes names ... if those were not common names, we would have no open Web, and no open source code with reusable libraries.
But those common names, when used and interpreted by software, behave internally at run time as proper names, by all means of "proper". They each call a well defined individual object, method or whatever piece of executable code. A URI sent through the HTTP protocol is eventually calling by their internal names specific pieces of data on one or more servers, all of them running by their own, proper, often proprietary code with its idiosyncratic functional semantics.
Otherwise said, if the declarative semantics of a technical name (description of what it denotes) belongs to the commons, its performative semantics (what it does when called) is proper to the system in which it is used, and conditions at run time.

How is that relevant to the W3C Shapes debate? What this group is (maybe) seeking (or should seek) is actually a (standard) way to describe proper performative semantics for systems using RDF data. On the DC-Architecture list, +Holger Knublauch is complaining a few days ago.

Yet, there used to be a notion of a Semantic Web, in which people were able to publish ontologies together with shared semantics. On this list and also the WG it seems that this has come out of fashion, and everyone seems "obsessed" with the ability to violate the published semantics.

Violate the published semantics? Well, no, it's just about describing how the common semantics behave properly in my system. But whether that can be achieved through yet another declarative language or some interpretation of existing ones without blurring the RDF landscape a bit more, is another story. 

You need names on the Web, it's dark in there.

The chinese character 名 (name) which we have seen in the previous post as the mother of all things, has an interesting origin. It's composed from the characters 夕 (night, symbolized by a crescent moon) and 口 (an open mouth). The clue of such a mysterious association is that you need a name either to call someone, or to identify yourself, in the dark of night. In daylight, you don't really need to know the name of your interlocutor to recognize each other and engage into conversation. You don't need names of things to find and handle them.

Interaction through information systems, and singularly on the Web, is a conversation in the darkest of nights. You can't see your interlocutors, you can't wave or bow at them, and you don't see either what you are looking for, and the system does not see you. So you need names everywhere. You need names to enter the system, to login, to send messages. You need to know names to connect to people on the social web. You need to know a name of what you search to ask a search engine. One can argue that all of this is rapidly changing, with identification using your finger or eyeprint, connecting to stuff or people using icons and various fancy non-textual interfaces. But under the hood, the system will still exchange ids, keys, adresses, all those avatars of names used by machines. If our online experience gets closer and closer to daylight conversation, poor machines will keep  for a long time shouting names to each other across the dark of Web.

名可名，非常名

My conversation with good old 老子 is a neverending story, and I had to revisit him with the untranslatables paradigm in mind. I discovered long ago the extreme difficulty of translating the chinese characters and singularly in ancient writings through the excellent introduction I already mentioned here some years ago, this "Idiot chinois" by Kyril Ryjik. This book had sold out long ago, my exemplar was lost in a former life, fortunately a few years ago on some obscure blog I stumbled on a PDF copy I was preciously keeping safe ... but I can now forget about all those. After thirty years of dark ages, L'Idiot Chinois is now republished, and this new edition should land on my bookshelves anytime soon ...

The infamous and cryptic first chapter of the 道德經 would certainly be easily short listed in any challenge of the best untranslatables ever. It is an example Ryjik is presenting, because it's both too well known and too much translated, and certainly deeply misunderstood by most western translators.

Here goes the first part, which even if you don't read Chinese will strike you by the rhythm and sheer graphical refinement of its 24 characters. Note that the character 名 (míng, "name") is repeated five times, a hint at this story being about names and naming, mainly. 

道可道，非常道

名可名，非常名

無名天地之始

有名萬物之母

Ryjik holds that all but a few western translations and interpretations project a transcendental interpretation of 道 which does not make sense in the historical/political/cultural context where this text was produced. This is still the case of many available translations, for which the Dao has too much the look and feel of our western monotheist God. If nothing else, the initial caps everywhere are suspicious, there is no upper-case in Chinese. 道 should certainly be taken with a more mundane meaning : the way the world is going, and that human beings should try to follow, individually and collectively, in order to live in harmony with the general flow. Only physics, no metaphysics.

With this in mind, Ryjik posits that the negative 非 in the first sentence should be certainly read as a determinant of 常 (constant, unchanging, regular, in one word steady), rather of the whole group 常道. 

In other words, where most translators read 非(常道) not (steady way) one should rather read (非常)道 (not steady) way. Which makes the whole sentence read  something like (a) way really way is not a steady way. In other words : if you want to conform your way to the way (of the world at large) you have to adapt and change (as the world does). In the historical context, Ryjik holds that this is a moral and political recommandation not to stick to a rigid application of ancient rules despite the situation is everchanging. But this is a general consideration, just put there to introduce the main point of the story : the role of names.

Reading in the same spirit 名可名，非常名 yields name really name is not a steady name. Since things as the world flows are everchanging, the names you give to things are also bound to change to keep their accuracy. And in this spirit I just changed the title of this blog ...

As for the following two sentences which seem more mysterious, I've not been fully convinced by any translation so far, even the one by Ryjik. I'm pushed towards proposing my own translation by a beautiful edition entitled "La Danse de l'Encre", illustrated by Lassaâd Metoui, a tunisian calligraph. Thomas Golsenne writes in the introduction (in French, my translation)

"To read the Tao Te King against the grain, out of context is not only a right granted to the reader, it's a sort of duty  ... Understanding or translating [it] "faithfully" does not make any sense, because there is nothing to be faithful to, nothing but emptiness"

So be it, here goes my own unfaithful version of the two following sentences

無名天地之始  : there is no name at the origin of the universe

有名萬物之母  : having a name is the mother of all things

Which I read : the world as a whole 天地 (sky and earth) exists before and beyond any name, and does not need any name to exist, but with names come the separation in things, this and not-this, one, two and the ten thousand beings like said further on in chapter 42. 道生一，一生二，二生三，三生萬物. Dao is father of one, one is father of two, two is father of three, three is father of the multitude of beings.

I'm not sure we need another subject than 無名 and 有名 in those two sentences, a subject which would be implicitly 道, as most translations have it, like "Without name the Dao is the origin of the Universe" etc ... here comes the Holy Ghost, the Logos and the heavy monotheist capitalization. But the dao has nothing to do with the Holy Ghost. There is no metaphysics in the dao, only physics. 

This is actually somehow akin to the (too noisy) recent thesis of Markus Gabriel "Warum es die Welt nicht gibt". Things exist insofar as they are named, but the world cannot be named as a separate entity because there is nothing from which it could be separated from.

Amazingly enough, there is no entry for name in the Dictionary of Untranslatables. Not even a small entry in the index. This is certainly food for thought to expand in a future post.

Thou shalt not take names in vain

This is certainly too serious a subject for a Friday night in the middle of August, but that's a good time for old ideas to be written down. And indeed this has been on my mind for so long, at least since I realized that common nouns such as english time, word, windows, apple, caterpillar, shell, bull, french orange, printemps, champion, géant, carrefour, german kinder, and many more, had been "borrowed" from the language commons to become brands. This is in principle forbidden by various trademark legislations, but there are subtle workarounds. I have always considered such practices as unacceptable enclosures in the knowledge commons. They might look anecdotic, leading to rather silly cases, but some borderline practices from major Web actors show that this affair is more important that it could seem at first sight.
One could argue that the market gives back words to the commons, lists of generic or genericized trademarks are easy to find, in a variety of languages. But curiously enough,  the other way round, systematic lists of common nouns used as trademarks I could not find either in Wikipedia or anywhere else. Note sure if they could get any longer than the former, in any case the lists I proposed to start on Wikipedia were proposed for deletion a few minutes after creation by zealous wardens of the Wikipedia Holy Rules, for lack of notability of the subject. Forget about it, I'm now trying to figure how to query DBpedia to get such a list, but the distinction between a proper name and a common noun is no more explicit in DBpedia descriptions and ontology than it is in Wikipedia.

Anyway, this is not necessarily the most important aspect of the way information technologies can impact, misuse and abuse our language commons at large. There is quite a lot of rules or guidelines one could imagine for that matter, some already explicited by laws even if tricky to enforce, some yet to be specified, not to mention being enforced. There is something deeply anchored in our culture about the fair use of names, coming certainly from the way they are rooted in our religions, hence I have only a slight compunction to take inspiration below from one of the most holy and ancient set of rules. Apologies to believers who might read the following as blasphemy uttered by an old agnostic, and disclaimer to everyone else : those were not cast in stone by any god on any mountain. But if the first and main item in this list seems clearly inspired by the Third Commandment, well, yes it is, and not only in form. The underlying claim is that every word, every name, carries along with it enough history and legacy to be honoured. Those who don't care that much about such religious considerations can read this as pragmatic deontological guidelines for a fair, efficient and sustainable use of names in our information systems at large, and on the Web in particular.

Here goes, ten items of course to stick to the original format. 

1. Thou shalt not take names in vain
2. Honour the many meanings of a name, for they belong to the Commons
3. Acknowledge linguistic and semantic diversity, polysemy and synonymy
4. Do not steal names from the Commons to be your proper names
5. Do not sell and buy names, for they belong to the Commons
6. Do not hide yourself or your products under false names
7. Do not use names against their common meaning 
8. Do not enforce your own meanings upon others
9. Expose your meanings to the Commons, for they will be welcome
10. Share your own names with the Commons, for they will thrive forever

I won't dwelve today in the details of each of those, some might look quite cryptic and need to be expanded in further posts. Just a remark on the first (and most important) one. The "take in vain" used by the King James version of the Bible has been replaced in more recent translations by "misuse". I prefer the former, which conveys the notion that whenever you use the name, it's not for nothing or something without importance and consequence. When you use a name, you should have well thought about its meaning. In French you would translate at best "Tu ne prendras pas les noms à la légère."

Hubject : the story so far

I coined the word hubject back in 2005. At the time I checked the pun was new, or at least unknown by Google. All I found were typos in the spelling of subject. The word and underlying concepts had not the success I secretly expected, adoption was actually limited to a relatively small circle of readers of this blog. Thinking there could be a business model I bought the domain name hubjects.com, which I never used beyond hosting this blog. I used hubject for a while as a pseudonym on Twitter, but with time came to the conclusion that the idea and the word were bound to slowly fade away.
Last year I discovered hubject.com was the Web of a company "connecting emobility across Europe", in plain words dealing with infrastructure for electrical vehicles. What was aimed at being a common name is now the proper name of Hubject GmbH, Torgauer Straße, 12-15 10829 Berlin. I sent them a mail asking if they were aware of previous use of the word, and as of today got no answer [1]
Yet I have not surrendered completely. Yesterday I reinstated the cloud of tags in the left menu. I never liked "tags" too much so I entitled it "hubjects" instead.

That's the story so far. Next summary around 2020.

[1] Update: On 2013-01-29 I eventually received a polite answer from hubject.com. "It is interesting for us to get to know that hubjects is used in a completely different context." 

Changing blog title

I know, changing names, like changing URIs, is a silly idea. Cool names never change. But I decided yesterday to re-activate the original univers immedia in French. And since 'The wheel and the hub' has definitely been for a while and certainly will continue to be, the motto of this blog, it had to make its way up to the title.

Subject Identity: Now more than ever...

Heard on the radio this morning while driving to work. Story about a woman who discovered that her 11-month old son was a terrorist. How could this be? A ticket agent at an airline prevented the child from boarding a flight. That's how. It seems that the given name of the child was found on the list of people to be prevented from boarding flights. It would seem that, in the context of merging topics in a topic map, it's dangerous to rely on names for things as a valid criteria.

They Ain’t Nothin’ ‘til I Call ‘em!

In today's article in EContentMag, Bob Doyle writes :

There is nothing wrong with creating new words for branding and marketing purposes, but it makes a company look foolish if they don't know the basic technical vocabulary of their own industry. The problem is that technical jargon is notoriously slippery and it is often difficult to determine whether a true meaning for a word even exists.

Web Proper Names

SWAD Forum is definitely the place to monitor those days. After introduction of Subject Indicator in SKOS-Core, Alistair Miles launched a very lively thread "Working around identity crisis" which has attracted Harry Halpin of University of Edinburgh to introduce yesterday in the debate an amazing paper called "Web Proper Names: Naming Referents on the Web".
The paper proposes a process, leveraging the statistical results yielded by search engines, to define and name bottom-up equivalence classes of URIs, which all together 'probably' are about the same thing. The concept is somehow similar to the notion of Subject Identity Measure, since the probability of sameness can be quantified.

Identity and Disambiguation in Wikipedia

Browsing around "Identity" article in Wikipedia, I discovered an interesting page called "Identity (disambiguation)" linking to different flavors of identity in different contexts, and itself an instance of the more generic category of page called "Disambiguation", explaining

the pragmatic solutions adopted by Wikipedians on this issue:

"Disambiguation in Wikipedia and Wikimedia is the process of resolving the conflict that occurs when articles about two or more different topics have the same natural title."

Seeing As...

I just googled "seeing as" and got 405,000 hits. Now, there's a physterity if there ever was one. Some of those posts are really like "seeing as to how..." so they're off topic, sortof, but many of the others are close to the notions of subject identity that I'd like to toss out here. Specifically, I'd like to start the discussion around the notion that subject identity has two (maybe more!) senses, one of which is some absolute identity, and the other of which is context sensitive.

Absolute identity, itself, is a tricky thing. If you start with my name, Jack Park, and google that, you will get some good hits (moi!), and some not-so-good hits, like someone with my name authored a book on sporting events. So, names alone, won't cut it.

in context identity, now that's a whole 'nother bag-o-worms, with an entailment mesh as wide as the universe. So, I'm going to go out on a limb (copyright-wise) and type into here some of the the words of Gian-Carlo Rota [1] who was describing the words of Stanislaw Ulam, under the banner "In Memoriam of Stan Ulam: The Barrier of Meaning". I do so, to start a discussion about that marvelous mantra of working biologists: Context is everything, which comes from the amazing ability of a pluripotent stem cell to morph into just about any of the zillions of kinds of cells in an organism according to the local context, as defined by the hormonal bath surrounding it. This relates directly, I think, to part of the thinking behind the latest topic maps Reference Model in which identity, or the composition of identity in a topic is more robust than naming or published subject indicators. The quote:

"Now look at that man passing by in a car. How do you tell that it is not just a man you are seeing, but a passenger?

When you write down precise definitions for these words, you discover that what you are describing is not an object, but a function, a role that is inextricably tied to some context. Take away the context, and the meaning also disappears.

[skipped text]

Do you then propose that we give up mathematical logic? said I, in fake amazement.

Quite the opposite. Logic formalizes only very few of the processes by which we actually think. The time has come to enrich formal logic by adding to it some other fundamental [n]otions. What is it that you see when you see? You see an object as a key, you see a man in a car as a passenger, you see some sheets of paper as a book. It is the word "as" that must be mathematically formalized, on a par with the connectives "and," "or," "implies," and "not" that have already been accepted into a formal logic."

[1] in Physica 22D (1986) 1-3, North-holland, Amsterdam, and found in Doyne Farmer, Alan Lapedes, Norman Packard, Burton Wendrof, editors, Evolution, Games, and Learning: Models for Adaptation in Machines and Nature, North-Holland.