March 27, 2004

SKOS 1.0 Released

SWAD-Europe has announced the availability of SKOS-Core 1.0. Accoding to the guide, the Simple Knowledge Organization System is designed to support the definition of words and the association between words and phrases. One intended use for SKOS is in RDF thesauri.

SKOS-Core allows you to define concepts and concept schemes. A concept is any unit of thought that can be defined or described. A concept scheme is a collection of concepts.

A concept may have any number of attached labels. A label is any word, phrase or symbol that can be used to refer to the concept by people. A concept may have only one preferred label, and any number of alternative labels.

Relationships may be defined between concepts within the same concept scheme. Any such relationship is referred to here as a semantic relation.

Mappings may be defined between concepts from different concept schemes. Any such mapping is referred to here as a semantic mapping. Source

March 24, 2004

Danah Boyd on RELATIONSHIP

Danah Boyd has posted a thought-provoking criticism of the RELATIONSHIP ontology (by way of Marc Canter) While I approach this matter from a strongly technical perspective, the perspective she presents should be carefully considered as we define social software standards.

• Relationships are situated within a CONTEXT.
• Relationships are defined by CULTURE; their types are SOCIAL CONSTRUCTS.
• Relationships do not exist without POWER.

Source

My answer is that we will have to allow the semantics of relationships to emerge from the somewhat distorted political dynamics of the labeling process. Openly developing standards for the assignment of relationships surely is better than relying on online services to force standards through flat, html interfaces.

Categorical Context

At the very least, the surface sort of relationship context (i.e. defined by logical groups of relationships) must be incorporated into a relationship ontology. Beyond adding a new dimension of expressiveness, this would create a natural framework for participation. I can see all kinds of useful (and humorously useless) ontologies of relationships withing a certain category being maintained. RDF and OWL allow for contributions from whomever wishes to host one - what ends up being adopted is a different matter entirely.

Perspective

The context of perspective (i.e. defined by who may be viewing this information about your relationship) is something that must be customized by the person maintaining their own information. Identifying the viewer would allow more detailed access, or contextualized access, to the relationship resources.

Culture

As for the cultural aspect, this can be accomplished through subclassing of context, or through the definition of new contexts. Translation services might play a role in how this information may be understood by people of other cultures. Lets be friends in the American sense, or pen pals in the Japanese sense. Actually, lets just be friendster friends.

Power

The power dynamic aspect may be (somewhat badly) incorporated into a standard through guiding the formation of a relationship, especially those which may need to require some sort of verification. Ultimately, the complex power dynamics of relationships should be simply interpreted by the users. My favorite implementation of this notion: the "open marriage" designation.

With a more expressive ontology for defining relationships (certainly more so than RELATIONSHIP), we may actually end up with a better understanding of the social dynamics of the real world, across the world. In order to have a conversation, we need to agree on some conventions, so we can't complain too much about the RELATIONSHIP. :)

March 23, 2004

RELATIONSHIP: Two Worldviews

Clay Shirky has posted a very interesting clarification of his earlier comments about the RELATIONSHIP schema.

Human social calculations are in particular a kind of thing that cannot be made formal or explicit without changing them so fundamentally that the model no longer points to the things it is modeled on...

The flaw in RELATIONSHIP is not that you can’t characterize someone as a colleague and an employee, but rather that you can’t completely specify the fullness of any reasonably complex relationship, you can’t know in advance which of those characterizations you would use in what circumstances, and you can’t make even a subset of those things explicit without changing the thing you are trying to describe. Source

I completely agree with Clay's comment about the importance of circumstance. I have been working on the issue of circumstance in developing a framework for customized social networks. There needs to be a means to contextualize the relationship: friends, co-workers, co-students, acquaintences, strangers (one-way), family members, participants in a common activity, and so on. There may also be more than one context: family members who are also co-workers.

Providing a relationship contexts would place restrictions on the nature of the relationships that could occur between two personae, which would also provide a higher level of expressiveness for users. Further, I believe that working circumstance into a social networking standard would also simplify the development of a means to fetch and query the distributed data.

March 20, 2004

Markdown

Borrowing from email conventions and possibly wiki formatting, Aaron Swartz and John Gruber have developed Markdown, a text markup syntax which can be converted into html by a perl script. There is also a plugin for MT. Play with it using Dingus. (via Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing)