From its earliest days, the promise of the Semantic Web has been to bring networked computers closer to the forms and priorities of human inquiry. This promise depends on mark-up language that gives data some structure, and frameworks that bring such structure into recognizable relationships. As a May 2001 Scientific American piece by Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues put it, “for the semantic web to function, computers must have access to structured collections of information and sets of inference rules that they can use to conduct automated reasoning.”
Automated reasoning! This dream may be coming to life in e-science, with its highly structured and interoperable datasets, but in many other contexts the idea of a Semantic Web sits uneasily with the younger and more popular kid on the block, the Participatory Web. Web 2.0 environments amasses a lot of data and, more importantly, a lot of information about this data generated by humans downright impervious to the need of machines for identifiable and consistent structure. Such tags are generally free-form, non-hierarchical, not expressing relationships in a predictable and consistent way; they dance to “folksonomy” not “taxonomy”; they are blithely untethered to “ontologies,” to any URI-based language standards.
Nevertheless there is intriguing thought out there about the potential interplay of the Semantic Web and Web 2.0. The Tagcommons sites lays out Use Cases that envision sharing tags across databases, and sketches out some functional requirements to make that interoperability happen. Tom Gruber, in particular, has argued energetically for “collective intelligence systems” built from syntheses of structured data and social software; his travel-review site RealTravel uses a “snap-to-grid” model to disambiguate and structure user-supplied tags.
And now in Yahoo! Research Berkeley labs, algorithms are starting to take into account aggregate patterns in order to sift out meaning from vast oceans of community-generated tags despite all their unstructured messiness — or, as computer scientists like to say, despite all their “noise.” It’s a matter of inference and cluster analysis. Case in point: the photo-sharing site Flickr‘s new experiments in extracting “practical information about the world” from the snapshots and tags poured into it by the great unwashed. The report “How flickr helps us make sense of the world: context and content in community-contributed media collections,” describes a layered process of tag and image analysis–one that can be conducted entirely by machines–that identifies representational tags as well as place and event semantics.
What does all this do for us? For one thing, it can improve a search through piles of community-contributed materials; my search for “Harlem” stands a better chance of coming up with the most representative picture of the neighborhood, or a set of iteratively varied views of the neighborhood, or even a conglomeration of views for a composite view. I could determine the most visited place in the neighborhood, or the scenes of important events. Yahoo!’s researchers are even thinking about automatic tagging of photos, or suggestions for tags, that are generated by visual content abetted by contextual and geographical cues.
Here are a couple of spins of Yahoo! Labs’ TagMaps:
^ TagMap’s World Browser analyzes Flickr tags to locate “Harlem” on a map and offer a set of representative photos (on the right). Harlem seems pushed to the west, and the chicken picture is a little odd, but this machine-generated guess seems viable enough.
^ A search for ‘Paris’ in TagMap’s World Browser whisks us to a city in the middle of France, not Texas, and avoids any pictures of over-photographed heiresses. See: machines have taste too.
Teasing meaning out of cacophony, evaluating ‘where what & when’ through dumb processing of inconsistent human traces: it’s not hard to sense an artificial intelligence awakening here with its own priorities, despite the human decision (conscious or not) to ignore machine-oriented information conventions. What is the ultimate effect of algorithms trained to crunch through the idiosyncratic and identify the representational? Could such aggregate processing of unstructured data fuel a general regression to the mean, as alchemist Jonah Bossewitch muses? As a Trekkie (or is it Trekker?) might say, streaming into yet another convention, resistance is futile.
The fear of human conglomeration coming into sudden sentience is nothing new, of course. I just re-read Frankenstein with a set of fresh young readers, and alarmist correlations of that good old story to a improbably persistent, flexible, and collective-mashed form of AI doubtlessly come too easily to me now. But I do sometimes wonder whether we too will wake up from our most logocentric tagging idylls to sense senseless and unblinking eyes, watching us in the dark and hungry for more.