Robot Wisdom auxiliary

not just
in
every grain of sand

but in every field
of every database

(even the simplest:

name address age gender title
etc)

we
must
see
the whole potential universe

ie
all those simple fieldobjects'
real-or-potential
relationships
with all other fields/objects

naturally ordered
most-important first (a

literary

criterion
you must then
(now) begin
to spend the whole rest
of your life
studying)

as if
every field has an extra
asterisk p.s.

where anomalies are noted

(how certain is the value?
why or why not?
when and why did it last change?
etc)

 
 
 
 
.

the semantic web movement is 8 years old
and has delivered little more than
a microformat for business cards [Wiki]

and nothing to rank with
roget or lenat

so i'd like to propose
using del.icio.us for prototyping
much more ambitious
microformat-like linksets

starting eg with
prototype person-profiles
[Jorn Barger]

replacing pagetitles with microformat fieldnames

using Wikipedia placeholders
if the fieldvalue isn't already a url

using del.icio.us tags
to sort fieldtypes



other possible prototypes:
website-profile microformat
webpage-profile microformat
blog-profile microformat
video-profile microformat
song-profile microformat
porno-profile microformat

(each of these should be
summarizable
via heraldic barcodes)

[pre-amble]

say
parallel processing : arts
::
serial processing : sciences

science blindly following
a narrow incremental logical/verbal path

while art makes grand intuitive leaps
on the basis of
rich broad spatial imaginings

even the poet's words
individually reset
into the space of sounds

the novelist's
into the space of everyday life



[amble]

for the semantic web to work
someone (or some group)
has to come up with a
finite controlled vocabulary that captures
a significant portion of the
important meanings
on the web

and their intent
for microformats
is to break that task down
into manageable subtasks
by attacking
one domain of meaning
at a time

but they're having to confront
the paradox that every domain
is unruly
with a shifting core
of most-important themes
and an infinitely attenuating halo
of subordinate variations

that quickly nudge microformats
towards 'macro' territory

for which pathology i'll propose
an antidote in the form
of heraldic barcodes
that graphically/visually
symbolically/iconically
intuitively/flexibly
summarise a domain

using three principal layers:
- a narrow frame of varying thickness and color
- a background pattern
- a foreground icon

and for my
test/example/domain
i'll choose (ambitiously)

webpagetypes

with heraldicbarcode backgroundpatterns
that symbolically schematise
the distribution of info on the page

simple text as a block of grey
(embedded media colored by filetype)

a heterogeneous list
as a stack of colored bars
(narrow topical range =
narrow spectrum of colors)

uniform list-granularity =
uniform bar-size

ordering principles for lists
(alphabetical newest-1st best-1st
rhetorical didactic ontological)
indicated somehow



one edgerow of icon pixels
could be a logarithmic timeline/changelog
1st pixel = 1992-2000 (8yrs)
(black until the page's creation)
2nd = 2000-2004, 3rd = 2004-2005, 4th 2006
5th 6mos 6th 3mos 7th 45days 8th 20days
9th 10 10th 5 11th 2 12th 1

major/minor content changes
(or even changes of url)
differentiated by color

other edgerows possibly capturing
pageweight, % cruft
topical breadth, completeness, necessity

and finally a foreground icon
shaped to represent the primary
(range of) topic(s):
tech news, celeb gossip, etc
(with colorfill representing... what?)



[microformat]

and if some of this
proves less valuable
than other missing dimensions

one should
feel
this
in the belly
and tweaks should almost suggest themselves

formfields:

page-age
page-weight
% cruft
topical scope
completeness
necessity
revision-frequency
revision-intensity
revision-patterns
% original text
% copied/quoted text
% new images/audio/video/code
% copied ditto
# custom links
# link sources
granularity
ordering

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
.

the challenge of meditation
is not to think

the mind normally filled
with neurotic habits

and the challenge of artistic creativity
is to subvert cliche
(vs nabokov's gap-fillers)

and the scandal of philosophy
is the sophomoric sophistries
like free will or epistemological solipsism
tying innocent minds in useless knots

and usenet newsgroups often used to
suffer from negative intelligence
flamewars displacing constructive discussion
like coinage under gresham's law

or kneejerk techno-utopianism
urging (eg) educators
to squander their budgets on digital multimedia
when the real problem as always
is rewarding the best teachers

so the semantic web movement
for its earliest days
jumped the track
seduced by the shiny
techno quick fix
of xml
and its pie-in-the-sky promises
about embedded metadata

delivering only a flatline
adoption curve
while (eg) wikipedia
keeps rocketing up exponentially

and while journalistic coverage
of 'web 3.0' increases
the hype sounds more and more
hollow and anemic
rdf topicmaps microformats blahblahblah

endless jargonmania
but no 'there' there
never jam today

so i'll suggest again
that metadata belongs in the file header
(not in embedded markup)

and that wikipedia article titles
have solved one semantic problem
by automatically redirecting visitors
when an article title has changed
(i wish blogger did this)

so webpages can begin painlessly
categorizing themselves in their headers
with the closest wikipedia article title/s

and google should index these
with a special keyword
eg "wikiarticle:Ajax_(programming)"

but even more
we can categorise filetypes
"filetype:timeline"

and even more, i now propose
an ontology wiki
eg "ontoclass:business/merger"

that encourages experiment
and redirects changed classnames automatically

and that uses storycycles
as the macroformat

allowing description of
any random news story
any random wikipedia article
any random web resource

by sketching a universal
usual story

of everyperson (eg their wikipedia biographies)
of everyproduct (eg their history and web resources)
of everyprogram (eg the software lifecycle)
of everyenterprise (eg their corporate history)
of everyfile (its creation and dissemination)
ov everyword (its etymology)
of everyidea (its genesis and evolution)
of everyspecies (its selection pressures)

so that the metadata
for any given object
can emphasize precisely
those 'slots' in the usual storycycle
where the object's particular history
deviates from the usual expectations

these storycycles being compiled
incrementally, wiki-fashion
by storytellers who understand
the usual range of details
(a storycycle storycycle)

with an ongoing appreciation of the impermanence
of particular wording
or particular orderings

software storycycle
biography storycycle
business storycycle
hardware storycycle

.

imagine analysing
all wikipedia biographies
to determine
what sorts of facts
(birthplace, creative output)
are mentioned most often

now compose
the 100 most common of these
into a generic
biography template
for no-man/everyman

(fill-in-the-blanks
like the game of mad-libs)

now repeat this process 1000 times
for the 1000 most common
classes of article
(countries, cities, animals, historical events)

so we have 1000 article-templates
with 1000 fact-madlibs each

approximating the million most useful
kinds of facts

now pick any arbitrary webpage
and look for examples of those million facts

and assign metadata to that page
telling which article templates were used
which fact madlibs
and what madlib-fillers

(how big a chunk
this will take
out of the semantic-web problem
depends on how many pages
fall outside those 1000 article-types)

.