February 15, 2009 at 11:43Semantic web as an operating system: with users and access rights!
- Transfer
Very soon, semantic network data will be precisely marked out, so looking for it will become significantly easier. This will further accelerate the development of the trend, when the Internet and the global community turn into two networks closely connected with each other, which will constantly increase interconnections and transparency for each other. Are we obligated to sacrifice anonymity in order to maintain trust for such cooperation? Or we will see an emerging "new network" that will function as a kind of operating system with various users and rights - and will be launched on this global machine, which we call the Internet.
This Kevin Kelly talk about the future of the Internet made me think. Kelly says that the first step in the evolution of the Internet was about connecting computers to each other - through which you, for example, can now access files on another computer via FTP. The second step was to create the World Wide Web (WWW), i.e. connecting HTML pages, each of which had a URL, and users “jumped” from page to page by clicking on the links embedded there. Kevin very seriously points out that the next step in the development of the Internet will be the semantic web , where the data itself will be interconnected.
The concept is not to have data only shown on page (
Figure 1: The semantic web is about connecting words and concepts, and now it’s never “just HTML pages” (borrowed from the presentation slide by Kevin Kelly Kevin on TED: www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html CC- by-nc-nd 3.0)
Kelly was probably not the first in such statements about the Internet, but for the first time he proposed to consider the Internet as a universal planetary machine, and the Web as its operating system. With the advent of AJAX web applications, Google Chrome and YouTube, this operating system is becoming more skilled every day. This machine is basically decentralized and, therefore, completely reliable - in particular, it “in general, as a system” has no downtime. As Linus Tovalds put it: “Why make backups? I’ll just put these things on the net and people will mirror them! ” This huge machine is an environment for unprecedented (so far) communications and cooperation - and the corresponding information network is woven more and more every day and is becoming increasingly important. A computer without the Internet is now not much more than an ordinary typewriter. As the web becomes more semantic, every part of the network becomes part of this “universal" machine. Even simple actions, such as writing a small paragraph in a Wikipedia article, become meaningless in isolation from the whole.
On the Internet, abstraction layers such as HTML or a semantic framework reduce the time and, therefore, the cost of finding and accessing information. In general, it seems that as the cost of connecting between nodes decreases, it becomes more efficient for parts of the system to both specialize in one thing and integrate more closely with each other. As a result, the resulting whole is much more valuable than the sum of its parts. Moreover, parts of such a system become interdependent (all parts depend on each other).
Figure 2: The Internet as a global network or planetary machine (borrowed from Kevin Kelly's presentation at TED:
www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html CC-by-nc-nd 3.0)
In each interdependent system, stopping (interrupting) connections is a real threat to the integrity of the entire system. Each time you build interdependent systems, you take this risk and, of course, you must do everything you can to ensure that the connections are always operational.
A tendency toward closer networking can occur at the expense of our privacy. This is another topic discussed by Kevin Kelly and Marisa Maya from Google. The fact is that the network is becoming more and more information about you, which is easier to find. What will happen when the era of the semantic web comes? On the other hand, the very idea of a network is to facilitate the search for information. There are those who think that there is no room for anonymity in the semantic web. They argue: that which is based on intensive cooperation and interdependence, must have reliable mechanisms of personal responsibility, and therefore anonymity is an enemy of trust.
It is important to know who is behind a particular blog post if you want to use this information for your own product. Similarly, if you intend to collaborate on major projects with a person you have never met, you will want to have access to reliable information about him. This applies to any user-generated content on the network, the quality and reliability of which is largely determined by the "personal brand", especially if it is not published on the New York Times, but on a shared resource with many authors. As the network becomes more and more interdependent, personal responsibility is becoming increasingly important for the operation of the system. You will not be able to trust anonymous as much as users with a certain reputation.
Figure 3: Do we need to sacrifice online anonymity in order to maintain trust for closer and more productive collaboration? (Source: slide from Kevin Killy's presentation on TED: www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html CC-by-nc-nd 3.0)
On the other hand, there is a risk of completely losing anonymity on the network. There is even an opinion that the virtual world should reflect the physical world, in which, for obvious reasons, we have less anonymity. But the problem is that the physical world is not so omnipresent for search than the web. Thanks to the semantic web, in just a few seconds you can collect all the information about a person that has ever been published. Let's imagine that you made some statements in an advanced state and they are still in the archives of the social network, in the form of comments on photos of your family or friends on Flickr, that your political statements are forever imprinted on someone on the blog. In the virtual world there is no room for anonymity and secrets. In the physical world, only if you are not a famous person, You can not worry about your privacy, for example, walking around the city or meeting with friends in a restaurant. Only the people who surround you can become random witnesses of what you are talking about, and even then they are unlikely to remember this for a long time. On the other hand, if you say something on the Internet, anyone, sooner or later, will be able to find out about it. And even if you try to delete this message, it will still remain as a copy in Google or in the Internet archive (Internet Archive)!
How to resolve this conflict of interest?
I think the key to understanding is that in order to gain credibility and trust in the network you do not have to disclose your “real” identity. Think about the people involved in developing open source software. They will not inspire team lead confidence by saying, “Hi, I'm Peter Smith from San Francisco, and my family never had a drug problem.” Not! They usually begin to make minor improvements to the program and, if their work is good enough, they are given full access to the repository. The ability to write good code has nothing to do with their problems in the physical world. And, if you are respected in the Internet community for expressing political views, this also has nothing to do with the ability to program well.
Figure 4: Several OpenID identifiers per person could bring a balance between transparency and privacy (Source: OpenID Foundation, openid.net/logos - fair use)
Let's go back to the analogy that the Internet is a giant machine and the Web is its operating system : Have you ever seen an operating system without users and differentiation of access rights to files and resources? Some people create multiple user accounts on the same computer. For example, one for work, and the other for personal purposes. I suggest using OpenID in a similar wayidentifiers or other similar mechanism for the user to create completely independent virtual accounts, each of which is potentially recognized on all websites. Perhaps you decide to create one account to participate in the community for the development of open source software, another for activity related to your work in the physical world. Also, it is possible that you will want to create a third account for personal contacts and communication on social networks. One of the reasons why the Internet has become so widespread is the ability to remain incognito. We do not advocate a return to the principles of the physical world (one body - one person). In the virtual world, you can play many roles, and the Internet will lose a lot if it is deprived of such a feature.
With multiple OpenIDs, we have different single user accounts on our operating system, but we still need permissions to access data stored by the system. After authorization on a website or web application using one of your OpenIDs (or your browser will do this for you, remembering it when you first access the site), you can go to the settings and specify a specific group of users who will be available for viewing Publications, images, and other artifacts of your online activities, similar to your current social network friends. Or you can change the settings so that your notes are published openly, but the current OpenID identifier was visible only to friends. Some of these “trusted friends” will be able to combine several of your virtual accounts into one (like the current instant messenger programs, in which you can specify accounts with GMail, AIM and ICQ for a contact). On the other hand, you can unite all your services that you use through various accounts in a single application (just like today's email clients allow you to work with multiple email addresses at the same time).
Of course, this system is not absolutely safe: you will need to trust the companies and organizations managing your accounts, and those services that you have allowed to collect and provide information about you. But, ultimately, this is the price of personalization and data sharing, if you use the services of third-party web services, and do not begin to install and maintain your own server locally. And you may have to come to terms with the advertising messages that this web service will display in order to remain free.
However, managing access rights and accounts, and deciding which parts of your life to openly publish, will always remain a delicate matter. But there will be a basic framework open, decentralized and providing the benefits of owning personal brands. They identify users and provide trust without the need to renounce confidentiality and anonymity, coupled with total transparency and accessibility to search for what the semantic web offers, the future for which we need to unite.
© IEEE Internet Computing
Original (English):
Original (English): The semantic web as an operating system: with users and permissions!
Translation: © Denis Egorov ( ur001 ),xasima , Dmitry Ulanov ( dulanov ).
License: www.ieee.org/web/publications/rights/privacy.html
Semantic Web
This Kevin Kelly talk about the future of the Internet made me think. Kelly says that the first step in the evolution of the Internet was about connecting computers to each other - through which you, for example, can now access files on another computer via FTP. The second step was to create the World Wide Web (WWW), i.e. connecting HTML pages, each of which had a URL, and users “jumped” from page to page by clicking on the links embedded there. Kevin very seriously points out that the next step in the development of the Internet will be the semantic web , where the data itself will be interconnected.
The concept is not to have data only shown on page (
cat), but to associate such data with their definition or something similar (- cat
df:about="http://dbpedia.org/resource/Catwhich is much more accurate. And, for example, if the same object is marked with its GPS coordinates, you can easily find “All the Cats on the web” and automatically display their location on a map of the world. Figure 1: The semantic web is about connecting words and concepts, and now it’s never “just HTML pages” (borrowed from the presentation slide by Kevin Kelly Kevin on TED: www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html CC- by-nc-nd 3.0)
Networks
Kelly was probably not the first in such statements about the Internet, but for the first time he proposed to consider the Internet as a universal planetary machine, and the Web as its operating system. With the advent of AJAX web applications, Google Chrome and YouTube, this operating system is becoming more skilled every day. This machine is basically decentralized and, therefore, completely reliable - in particular, it “in general, as a system” has no downtime. As Linus Tovalds put it: “Why make backups? I’ll just put these things on the net and people will mirror them! ” This huge machine is an environment for unprecedented (so far) communications and cooperation - and the corresponding information network is woven more and more every day and is becoming increasingly important. A computer without the Internet is now not much more than an ordinary typewriter. As the web becomes more semantic, every part of the network becomes part of this “universal" machine. Even simple actions, such as writing a small paragraph in a Wikipedia article, become meaningless in isolation from the whole.
On the Internet, abstraction layers such as HTML or a semantic framework reduce the time and, therefore, the cost of finding and accessing information. In general, it seems that as the cost of connecting between nodes decreases, it becomes more efficient for parts of the system to both specialize in one thing and integrate more closely with each other. As a result, the resulting whole is much more valuable than the sum of its parts. Moreover, parts of such a system become interdependent (all parts depend on each other).
Figure 2: The Internet as a global network or planetary machine (borrowed from Kevin Kelly's presentation at TED:
www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html CC-by-nc-nd 3.0)
In each interdependent system, stopping (interrupting) connections is a real threat to the integrity of the entire system. Each time you build interdependent systems, you take this risk and, of course, you must do everything you can to ensure that the connections are always operational.
Anonymity versus Trust
A tendency toward closer networking can occur at the expense of our privacy. This is another topic discussed by Kevin Kelly and Marisa Maya from Google. The fact is that the network is becoming more and more information about you, which is easier to find. What will happen when the era of the semantic web comes? On the other hand, the very idea of a network is to facilitate the search for information. There are those who think that there is no room for anonymity in the semantic web. They argue: that which is based on intensive cooperation and interdependence, must have reliable mechanisms of personal responsibility, and therefore anonymity is an enemy of trust.
It is important to know who is behind a particular blog post if you want to use this information for your own product. Similarly, if you intend to collaborate on major projects with a person you have never met, you will want to have access to reliable information about him. This applies to any user-generated content on the network, the quality and reliability of which is largely determined by the "personal brand", especially if it is not published on the New York Times, but on a shared resource with many authors. As the network becomes more and more interdependent, personal responsibility is becoming increasingly important for the operation of the system. You will not be able to trust anonymous as much as users with a certain reputation.
Figure 3: Do we need to sacrifice online anonymity in order to maintain trust for closer and more productive collaboration? (Source: slide from Kevin Killy's presentation on TED: www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html CC-by-nc-nd 3.0)
On the other hand, there is a risk of completely losing anonymity on the network. There is even an opinion that the virtual world should reflect the physical world, in which, for obvious reasons, we have less anonymity. But the problem is that the physical world is not so omnipresent for search than the web. Thanks to the semantic web, in just a few seconds you can collect all the information about a person that has ever been published. Let's imagine that you made some statements in an advanced state and they are still in the archives of the social network, in the form of comments on photos of your family or friends on Flickr, that your political statements are forever imprinted on someone on the blog. In the virtual world there is no room for anonymity and secrets. In the physical world, only if you are not a famous person, You can not worry about your privacy, for example, walking around the city or meeting with friends in a restaurant. Only the people who surround you can become random witnesses of what you are talking about, and even then they are unlikely to remember this for a long time. On the other hand, if you say something on the Internet, anyone, sooner or later, will be able to find out about it. And even if you try to delete this message, it will still remain as a copy in Google or in the Internet archive (Internet Archive)!
Several virtual personalities per person
How to resolve this conflict of interest?
I think the key to understanding is that in order to gain credibility and trust in the network you do not have to disclose your “real” identity. Think about the people involved in developing open source software. They will not inspire team lead confidence by saying, “Hi, I'm Peter Smith from San Francisco, and my family never had a drug problem.” Not! They usually begin to make minor improvements to the program and, if their work is good enough, they are given full access to the repository. The ability to write good code has nothing to do with their problems in the physical world. And, if you are respected in the Internet community for expressing political views, this also has nothing to do with the ability to program well.
Figure 4: Several OpenID identifiers per person could bring a balance between transparency and privacy (Source: OpenID Foundation, openid.net/logos - fair use)
Let's go back to the analogy that the Internet is a giant machine and the Web is its operating system : Have you ever seen an operating system without users and differentiation of access rights to files and resources? Some people create multiple user accounts on the same computer. For example, one for work, and the other for personal purposes. I suggest using OpenID in a similar wayidentifiers or other similar mechanism for the user to create completely independent virtual accounts, each of which is potentially recognized on all websites. Perhaps you decide to create one account to participate in the community for the development of open source software, another for activity related to your work in the physical world. Also, it is possible that you will want to create a third account for personal contacts and communication on social networks. One of the reasons why the Internet has become so widespread is the ability to remain incognito. We do not advocate a return to the principles of the physical world (one body - one person). In the virtual world, you can play many roles, and the Internet will lose a lot if it is deprived of such a feature.
With multiple OpenIDs, we have different single user accounts on our operating system, but we still need permissions to access data stored by the system. After authorization on a website or web application using one of your OpenIDs (or your browser will do this for you, remembering it when you first access the site), you can go to the settings and specify a specific group of users who will be available for viewing Publications, images, and other artifacts of your online activities, similar to your current social network friends. Or you can change the settings so that your notes are published openly, but the current OpenID identifier was visible only to friends. Some of these “trusted friends” will be able to combine several of your virtual accounts into one (like the current instant messenger programs, in which you can specify accounts with GMail, AIM and ICQ for a contact). On the other hand, you can unite all your services that you use through various accounts in a single application (just like today's email clients allow you to work with multiple email addresses at the same time).
Finally
Of course, this system is not absolutely safe: you will need to trust the companies and organizations managing your accounts, and those services that you have allowed to collect and provide information about you. But, ultimately, this is the price of personalization and data sharing, if you use the services of third-party web services, and do not begin to install and maintain your own server locally. And you may have to come to terms with the advertising messages that this web service will display in order to remain free.
However, managing access rights and accounts, and deciding which parts of your life to openly publish, will always remain a delicate matter. But there will be a basic framework open, decentralized and providing the benefits of owning personal brands. They identify users and provide trust without the need to renounce confidentiality and anonymity, coupled with total transparency and accessibility to search for what the semantic web offers, the future for which we need to unite.
© IEEE Internet Computing
Original (English):
Original (English): The semantic web as an operating system: with users and permissions!
Translation: © Denis Egorov ( ur001 ),xasima , Dmitry Ulanov ( dulanov ).
License: www.ieee.org/web/publications/rights/privacy.html