The implications of wikileak’s success: “

Almost a week ago there was a great buzz about a relatively new wiki, called wikileaks. One of the reasons for this popularity burst was, that this wiki accepts submissions that are

classified, censored or otherwise restricted […] of political, diplomatic or ethical significance. Wikileaks does not accept rumor, opinion or other kinds of first hand reporting or material that is already publicly available.

The emergence of a censorship issue about the content of wikileaks, boosted the wiki’s popularity even more. To summarize the story:

The case in San Francisco was brought by a Cayman Islands bank, Julius Baer Bank and Trust. In court papers, the bank said that ‘a disgruntled ex-employee who has engaged in a harassment and terror campaign’ provided stolen documents to Wikileaks in violation of a confidentiality agreement and banking laws.
According to Wikileaks, ‘the documents allegedly reveal secret Julius Baer trust structures used for asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion.’ On Friday, Judge Jeffrey S. White of Federal District Court in San Francisco granted a permanent injunction ordering Dynadot, the site’s domain name registrar, to disable the Wikileaks.org domain name.

This case is not only interesting as one more censorship issue of the cyberspace but also as an example of the power and growth of the web. The indirect points that are raised are:

1. The decentralized nature of the web manages to overcome obstacles.
2. It seems that wikis are slowly evolving in authoritative resources.

Decentralization

The wikileaks domain was shut down, not allowing any users to visit the site. In any centralized network, shutting down the front door of a node would be enough to bring him down.
But the web’s decentralized nature, easily manages to overcome this issue. The wikileaks domain could be accessed

• by mirror sites across Europe [Wikileaks.be],
• the secure site of the wiki [http://wikileaks.cx/wiki/Wikileaks]
• and even by the sites IP Adress [http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks].

This proves the difficulty of local, real life laws to be applied in cyberspace. Internet has always been a self-organized place and efforts to control it haven’t brought any results until now.

Authority in Wikis

If we go back to December, we will find several discussions about the trustworthiness of wikis. The reason was Google’s announcement of their ‘unwiki’ platform Knol.

The fact alone, that this wiki received such attention speaks for the role of wikis in knowledge and information.
If wikis were really not trustworthy sources, which provide unproved data then why did this Bank step up against wikileaks?

It seems to me, that this case shows the strength of wikis, the power of the collective intelligence and the decreased role of authority and authorship.

The result

Latest news say that wikileaks got its domain back. Not because the Julius Baer Bank found the wiki less trustworthy and decided to drop the case, but because of the hard work and engagement of several lawyers and institutions (Public Citizen, the California First Amendment Coalition, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Project on Government Oversight, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation).

It seemed to be a lost case anyway.

Technorati Tags: Authorship, collective intelligence, wiki, wikileaks

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(Via social media and green horses.)

Exhibition wiki for Worlds Away: “

In the research process for Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes, Design Director and Curator Andrew Blauvelt uncovered many interesting words invented to describe suburbia. Andrew enlisted now-former Design Fellow Jayme Yen and Visual Arts Fellow Rachel Hooper to assist in the research for the exhibit, and to further research the lexicon of suburbia. To make the collecting of the terminology easier, we set up a private wiki for them to use.

The wiki of terms has transformed into the lexicon found in the Worlds Away exhibition catalog (soon to be found in the Walker Shop). We thought the lexicon would make a great resource, so it was decided to build it into a larger exhibition website.

Site URL: http://design.walkerart.org/worldsaway/

The exhibition website is still a wiki, and you can help enhance and add to the terms in the lexicon. Each entry in the lexicon consists of a definition, a section for images, and a google map. You can modify or enhance the definitions, or add new terms we might not know about. Images can be added to better describe the term. And map locations can also be submitted to give a satellite overview for terms that may best be seen from above (cloverleaf, for instance). We also added bios for all the artists in the exhibition, as well as a few sample essays and excerpts from other essays found in the catalog. Additionally, the selected videos from our YouTube competition can be found on the video section of the site.

The design of the site is drawn from the exhibition catalog design by Senior Designer Chad Kloepfer. The book uses different paper and ink colors in different sections to compartmentalize the types of content (essays, interviews, lexicon, and topics). The site also takes the book or paper metaphor and uses it as the navigation mechanism, allowing you to always see the index for the other sections of the site.

I wanted to enforce a rigours structure on the wiki, not let it grow out of hand, and only allow public edits in the lexicon section. Like our other wiki sites, this one is based on pmwiki, which allows for a rigorous permissions system. We’re using a few extensions, extended markup (for footnotes), Google Map API, NewPageBoxPlus, and DictIndex (for the lexicon list). Pmwiki is quite hackable, and the skin we constructed makes good use of that hackability. For the animation and accordion, I’m using my favorite javascript library, MooTools.

Please take some time to explore the site and enhance the lexicon of terms.

February 08, 2008
Category: language
Tags: collection, interface, language, study, wiki
Comments (0)

My “Outdated View” of the Semantic Web: ”

By Tim O’Reilly

I’ve gotten hammered in the comments on my post about freebase for suggesting that the semantic web was only about controlled ontologies.

James Hendler, the primary author of the OWL FAQ wrote:

I’m glad you’re beginning to grok what the Semantic Web is about, but I must take issue with your claim that ‘unlike the W3C approach to the semantic web, which starts with controlled ontologies, Metaweb adopts a folksonomy approach, in which people can add new categories (much like tags), in a messy sprawl of potentially overlapping assertions.’

If you look at what I’ve been writing since 2001 (in the Semantic Web article in Scientific American, coauthored w/Tim Berners-Lee and Ora Lassila) through my recent posts on the ‘Dark side of the Semantic Web‘ – I, and many others, have not been arguing for controlled ontologies – rather, we designed the Semantic Web technologies, and especially OWL, to encourage linking and reuse. We do believe there will be some carefully controlled ontologies in high value areas (such as the Cancer ontology which the national cancer institute maintains) but that much use would be by extension and linking to these….

With due respect, I think you, and even more egregiously Clay Shirky, have been misrepresenting what the Semantic Web is, and critiquing based on that misunderstanding, not on the reality.

Ouch!

Stefano Mazzocchi, whom I know through his work on Apache, wrote to me in email rather than in the comments (but gave me permission to republish here):

I read your blog post about Freebase with interest but I think you have an outdated understanding of the ideas around the semantic web and the current state of the art around it.

In my day job I work for the SIMILE project at MIT and we follow the an ‘emergent structure’ approach in every aspect of our design.

Tools like Piggy Bank or Exhibit are based on RDF and the core design decisions of the semantic web, but they are completely (and explicitly so!) ontology agnostic.

Our wiki is powered by Semantic Mediawiki, a mediawiki plugin that allows us to deliver all sort of additional value to our web pages in form of RDD statements (with which we can create ‘meta’ pages that are a ‘view’ of queries against the wiki-as-a-database (look at the wikitext of that page to understand what I’m talking about). [Note from Tim: you have to login to do so.

Semantic Mediawiki does NOT regulate your use of ontologies, you can just add some special wikitext to your data and it will generate RDF statements for you, then you can further augment that data to add ontologies on top.

I agree with you that most of the past research and development around the semantic web has been polluted with ontologies and rigid formalisms, but this is NOT inherent in the semantic web model. [It] is just a way to use it. TimBL’s own thoughts about ontologies in the semantic web clearly indicate that he does not believe in an ontologically-heavy use of the semantic web as a way to bootstrap it.

Also, you might want to take a look at dbpedia.

These comments are certainly an eye-opener. The simile projects are really cool — before this, I’d only looked at timeline. I’m still not completely convinced that my ideas about the semantic web are wrong, but I’ll certainly accept Stefano’s assertion that they are ‘outdated.’ The view I’m castigated for does seem to be a big part of the semantic web’s history and culture. Even Jim’s ‘dark side’ post (linked to above) refers to this:

[this is] the side of the Semantic Web that is looking at how do you use a small amount of Sem Web (think Foaf or Skos) to add a bit of organizational knowledge (and to webize with URIs) to tagging sites, microformats, and etc. It is the realization that the REST approach to the world is a wonderful way to use RDF and it is enpowered by the emerging standards of SPARQL, GRDDL, RDF/A and the like. In short, it is the Semantic Web vision of Tim’s, before Ora and I polluted it with all this ontology stuff, coming real!

In short, it sounds like the bottom-up approach to Web 2.0 and the current thinking on the Semantic Web are growing closer together every day.

Just to be clear, I’ve always loved the vision of the Semantic Web. But much of the early work at the W3C always seemed to me to be a case of premature standardization, which is why I’ve stayed away from it. I’m a big belief in the early IETF mantra, ‘No kings, no priests, just a rough consensus and running code.’

It’s always seemed to me that Web 2.0 as it was evolving would eventually turn into the Semantic Web, just that it was too early to specify the means by which it would do so. What’s at issue is not where we’re going, but what tools we will use to get there.

PageRank and all the other heuristics that Google has developed for relevance, to give one example, seem to me to be an example of a kind of implicit ontology that would never be developed or even modeled a priori by a W3C committee. Similarly, the tag structure that emerges from collective activity on Technorati or Del.icio.us or Flickr would never be modeled as an ontology — but it could certainly perhaps be expressed by one after the fact.

What’s going to be really interesting is to see how the Semantic Web technologies develop now that we have actual, real life, messy use cases to work from, derived by people who don’t think about rigor, but just about the shortest path to the jam jar.

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[tags]semantic, ontology, web, online, community, intelligence, analyse, wiki, word, data, metadata, archive[/tags]

(Via O’Reilly Radar.)