At DEMO last month, I attended a panel of world-class experts on the question, Where the Web is Going: Web 2.0, 3.0, and Beyond (video). Here, I want to draw your attention to a portion of the discussion that touched on a truly new type of network. It included a personal testimony to a form of thought networking, many years in the making, and a glimpse into a future where digital thoughts are liberated from documents and social networks.
Past: Connecting People
Jon Udell was addressing the social dimension of the Web and its powerful influence on knowledge acquisition. We don’t just interact with this “global encyclopaedia”, he explained. People discover each other through the intersections of documents they create. “As people expose aspects of their thought process in tangible form as documents, human connections are made.”
“Absolutely perfect,” replied Howard Bloom, but unfortunately, a terribly protracted process. “When we try to find each other, and try to find the knowledge we get from each other, these days it’s as difficult as getting from New York to California in 1848.”
Howard offered researchers some suggestions to address the problem, such as personal agents, completely under our individual control, connecting people and their knowledge. These agents would work continuously, whether we’re engaged as active participants in the process or spending our time elsewhere.
Speaking with the conviction of his personal experience, Jon claimed that this vision is well on its way to becoming reality. “I feel like the distance [between people] has been shortened dramatically already, and those agents are already out there working on my behalf all the time. The corpus of documents I’ve extruded to the Web creates a surface area for interaction. Any time another document touches one of mine, I notice it; my sensors fire.”
Jon was alluding to the asset that his years of publishing on the Web has produced: a network of his thoughts. But as Howard put it, “It takes us years to write the stuff that we write. We create condensed knowledge in a form that we could never give to you on the fly…We need to make sure that the connect time between you and me goes down to seconds, not months.”
Future: Connecting Thoughts
Note how these perspectives on knowledge-sharing networks are tightly, almost inextricably tied to connecting people. To connect thoughts, we must connect thinkers. This is a pervasive meme: “While some social network Web sites are becoming destinations, the next wave will thread social networking into a wide variety of applications,” according to Chris Shipley, product analyst and executive producer of the DEMO conferences.
However, for knowledge acquisition, the goal isn’t connecting people, it’s about connecting knowledge. Today, the social dimension acts as an intermediary in the process. It’s like going to a friend to get their input into a task and ending up spending the rest of the day hearing about their vacation. As social animals, it’s a welcome distraction to be sure, but also extremely time-consuming.
Thought networks are created by people and are ultimately in the service of people. But to interoperate, thought networks don’t need people. It’s this capability of semantic interoperability that promises to reduce the friction between our thoughts. For a really fast and fluid exchange of ideas, you can’t have people in the middle, slowing things down. People should perform those functions that only people can accomplish: creating truly new thoughts and making complex decisions.
This is reminiscent of a common pitfall with any disruptive technology: The technology is first applied to an existing process, rather than allowing the technology to augment and even displace the process itself. To explain, let me take you back to the 19th-century as Howard did. When the telephone was first invented, many assumed it would inherit the modus operandi of the telegraph. They imagined that people would dictate their messages to a telephone operator, for the operator in turn to verbally pass along the message to the recipient. At the time, the telephone seemed confusing, prone to failure, and needlessly complex.
Of course, the telephone didn’t need that antiquated process. Its new technology demanded a leap in imagination. Researchers and entrepreneurs in semantic technology need to leap, as well. If the goal is connecting knowledge rather than socializing, it is wasteful to apply the “telegraph” model of social networking to the “telephone” model of semantic technology. The two are complementary and easily integrated, but they are also independent.
How do we shorten the distance between our thoughts? By recognizing that thought networking is not semantically-enhanced social networking. This is the essence of pure and frictionless semantic networks. Semantic representations, the language of thought, provide a medium that makes thoughts tangible. And unlike simple documents, these highly structured models provide the ability for computers to “read” our thoughts and mediate across the thoughts of different people. Decoupled from documents and social networks, the connect time between our thoughts can go from months to seconds.
Present: What’s Next?
I’m hoping this document, this static representation of my thoughts, manages to touch Jon’s network and the networks of all who may be thinking along these lines. But I certainly don’t expect it to happen immediately. The process is presently slow and plodding. In the meantime, Primal Fusion and others are working on more dynamic, more sophisticated, and increasingly frictionless systems of thought networking.
If you’re interested in exploring these ideas with us, I encourage you to subscribe to our blog and register for our alpha project. We’ll make every effort to get you involved as quickly as possible.
Thanks to the team at Primal Fusion for their help with this post.
Thanks to DEMO and Nova Spivack who assembled and moderated the panel. The panellists, Jon and Howard, Peter Norvig from Google and Prabhakar Raghavan from Yahoo, provided an engaging discussion. I highly recommend investing some time with it. The portion I’ve described begins around the 22-minute mark. The link to the video is in the opening paragraph of this post.
And for more discussion between Jon and Howard on “The Global Brain”, check out this edition of Interviews with Innovators.
In a nutshell, I would simply extend Jon’s comments by saying: we derive even more knowledge from the combination of links between our documents, and the links between entities within our documents, across our private and public data spaces (e.g. weblogs, wikis, shared bookmarks etc.).
Basically, we are making “What” connections across a Linked Data mesh (structured data network) that starts from the “Who” node in a semi-structured social-network.
The evolution of networking via the different layers of abstraction from router focus, to computer name focus (internet), to current document url focus (document web), and eventual entity URI focus (linked data web) is something I cover in a remix of my Linked Data Planet confderence keynote. The remix simply pulls in stuff from presentations TimBL has given about the same mater in the past re. the Semantic Web etc..
Links:
1. http://tinyurl.com/4pemgk – follow slides 15 – 22
2 http://ode.openlinksw.com – if you want to see this in practice on the Web today (start with the presentation since it is RDFa based)
Kingsley
The title “Thought Networks Don’t Need to Socialize” brings up a very interesting message to the person who views the described panel from the science history PoV; like what does this claim “Thought Networks Don’t Need to Socialize” mean in a bigger picture?
It means that the science (OK, the discipline) that deals with the problem has entered the stage of narrowing the research area, the stage of further and deeper defining its scientific object/subject.
If we have a look at how humanity developed its knowledge in various fields, we might notice that the object in focus was blurry at first and gradually became better defined and described.
Hence my suggestion: let us take advantage of the moment and clear out the picture; to do that we can ask the researchers to write the lists of:
1) what the thought network is NOT;
2) which features we notice (like, prefer, appreciate) the most;
3) what does it look like?
4) what are its manifestations?
5) which features are ‘bad’ (not desirable)?
6) which desirable features seem to be missing?
And then call for a brainstorming round table to share the ideas inspired by the lists.
That discussion might end up in developing a new research programme based on a more clear idea of where we are going.
Peter, thanks for this post: it makes it quite clear that nobody really wants to dwell into the peculiarities of something called “ontology”, which is Ok with me; the need to go there during a decision making process arises rarely, only when everything else stalls. At this moment your account of the current situation tells me that much:
– the actors in the field are of the same ilk and circumstances and they understand each other pretty well (one more reason not to bother with ontologies);
– we are talking of a new generation for an internet search engine;
– probably that will demand a new websystem, some more additional software (that will help to convert data from a format into any other);
– the most concern is to make it “smart”, similar to what Orson Scott Card described in his award-winning “Speaker for the Dead” as Jane. This Person-Device constantly sifts through all the possible data in the universe and gives Andrew Wiggin all the information he needs for every specific question that he poses in the format that suits most for that particular case. It is like a Jinn who is always ready to help you under any circumstances, and never acts on its own will (John Brisbin has recently voiced a concern: should AI have a will of its own. See his comment earlier in this blog.
However magic this sounds, it gives us an idea, a concept of what AI might look like.
Does it make any sense?
You want to know that it is?
Luckily, this is already done and shipped to millions of users, we don’t need to wait for Primal Fusion to tell us the obvious.
check out nepomuk.kde.org
The Semantic Desktop initiative followed this goal for many years now.
I think all would agree there’s a gap between our technical capabilities and the popular understanding of those capabilities. To argue what’s possible is not to argue what’s perceived as possible. And at the moment, it’s difficult to imagine these semantic networks existing independently from the document and social networks that are so dominant today. This is a constraint of our collective imagination, not our technology. The products we’re inventing use “semantic” as the qualifier for these primary networks/media: semantic PIMs, semantic document managers, semantic desktops, semantic social networks, semantic search, etc. The different types of networks obviously benefit from integration and cross-pollination, but semantic networks deserve a life of their own.