Semantic Webs - and The Rest of the World

While Ross Parry is facilitating our SW workshop (Friday,
12.30 till 1.30) at MW 2008, the digital museum community in the UK is carrying
on the debate Ross opened up for comment in the session.

Principal strands planned for the workshop included key
questions we have become aware of during our Semantic Web Think Tank, a 2006/7
AHRC-funded research project. Hopefully Montreal participants were able to
offer some comment/wisdom in response to the workshop, and to the paper that
accompanies it.

Ross explored some questions that arose in our project: do
we [ie the informed MW audience, but beyond that, the less informed, general
cultural community] have a sense of what the semantic web really is?

Is the ‘sw’ a machine, or chain of interoperating machines?
Is it more likely to be a lightweight, taggable, socially-inspired
cloud-computing moment? Is Mike Ellis’ excellent Onetag idea the sort of
‘nearly there’ semantic tech we can envisage being a stepping stone to a more
meaningful web?

What do we do next? Our UK-based project was framed
around British concerns, and the paper we wrote is really focussed on the
ecology of the culture web in Europe. Can our MW participation bring in fresh
US-orientated ideas to open our minds to some more innovative approaches? It’d
be great if it did.

Is the semantic web one web, or lots of devolved webs?
Looking at the cool way Onetag has scooped up and conjoined different techs
into one place on this conference site might be a clue – tags are lightweight,
can be developed, can make connections, can be changed, and could be swapped
and redefined rather like CSS.

The Museums Computer Group newslist is right now exploring
some new avenues, and really presciently, listers (led by Jeremy Ottevanger
seeding a discussion) have begun to imagine the proposed European Digital
Library project in a more open-ended way, rather than seeing it as yet another
digital portal. Of course, the main barriers to this fertility are related to
the way things are funded.

Beyond the museum and gallery sector, the UK has a
regulatory body for the mass media, OFCOM, and they reported this week on the
state of publicly-funded digital culture. Some parts of the report don’t make
comfortable reading. Fiona Romeo of the National Maritime Museum opened the
pages of the report and posted some comments on the MCG list which should give
us pause for real thought in a post-web 2.0 world.
http://ofcompsbreview.typepad.com/summary/

The report (OFCOM’s Second Public Service Broadcasting
Review) calls into question the state of the general digital information space
in the UK, and the museum and gallery part of it is seen as haphazardly
developed and inconsistently funded; fundamentally not a place likely to spawn
the sorts of serendipitous or intentional semantic connections we are all mad
to see.

Speaking on April 10 on the BBC’s Today radio programme, Ed Richards,
CEO of OFCOM, touched on the idea that moving the public service ethic forward
in the new media age would be a good work plan for the next few years, allowing
the BBC to redefine and clarify its offer in that area.

For the rest of us, a better-defined public service new
media policy (consensually developed, but government sanctioned ) would allow
us to lobby for core funding for a sustainable web ecology that could grow the
sort of semantic infrastructure we’re all dreaming about, right now.