Month: June 2004

I took delight in discovering some time ago that the “semantic web” was coined by Michel Foucault (“Les Mots Et Les Choses” 1966, aka “The Order of Things” to distinguish it from Quine’s “Word and Object”) many years before Tim Berners-Lee came along. Not that I have anything against Sir TBL – it’s just part of my interminable “nothing new under the sun” thread, whereby I keep finding evidence of no-brainers in the archaeology of knowledge management. (I’m currently reading Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge purely by coincidence).

In other words “Knowledge IS a Semantic Web”. That’s what it is, not just what someone, anyone calls it or characterises it.

Another link I unearthed today, re-reading Dan Brickley’s 2001 Semantic Web presentation (on RDF and all that), is Sir TBL’s original 1989 CERN Proposal for his “mesh” of information – the word “web” appears a couple of times, and the word semantic not at all. He coined “world-wide-web” later when first coding his ideas in 1990.

The facts that jumped out at me …. I’ve been involved in exploitation of associative information modelling since before web technology existed …. it has been amazing to see the convergence of the W3C technology with the ideas in general. The first key is “identification” (Namespaces & URI’s et al), the next is “overlapping vocabularies and meta-data conventions” and the third is relationships or more precisely “types of relationships”. The other mind-blowing point, given the “evolutionary schema frameworks” idea I’m currently working with, is this summary from Dan,

The common model:
why use ‘nodes and arcs’? :
[An associative model with identification of the nodes
and typing of the arcs.]

– arbitrarily extensible (just add more connections)
– we can decentralise control using URIs
– we can disagree about node and link types, yet still share infrastructure (syntax, databases, editors)
– URIs create a market for data merging, aggregation, annotation and filtering services

Spot on Dan. It’s the decentralised control and the “market” for services, which gives rise to “emergence” and evolution – the opportunity for change in an environment which is both nurturing and competitive.

Just updated my Pirsig Pages and links to pages of Pirsig Photos and of Montana State College, Bozeman, in order to better incorporate links to the excellent photo collection on Henry Gurr’s site and the Gary Wegner’s wonderful ZMM Route Map and Photos from his own 1978 trip.

I think I’ve just made a commitment to create a new version of the Route Map linking all our photographic and biographical resources ! My current feeble attempt remains here.

Watched a documentary on Alice Martineau (Cystic Fibrosis victim, model-musician-singer-songwriter, deceased aged 30 in 2003) last night. Someone very talented, whose work had sadly passed me by.

Anyway, the highlight for me was seeing Stevie Lange, voice coach and session singer to the stars and countless ads, in front of the camera, being interviewed about Alice, with occasional documentary clips where Stevie’s magic voice came through. I have a web-page of photos of Stevie from an earlier life. A Google on her name throws up a name-droppers dream of artists she’s coached or backed – Tears for Fears, Swing Out Sister, Robbie Williams, Sniff’n’the Tears, Manfred Mann (natch), Blue, even Limp Bizkit (!) to name a few.

Stevie now runs her own music business operation via “Let’s Talk Music”, which has a full bio / discography / artists list. Go to her page and click on her recent (1995!) track “What Would You Say” to get a taste of that rockin’ voice – 1979 again ! (And also 3 tracks from the 1979 “Night” album on that page.)

[Update – Stevie’s latest official site is stevielange.com]

Another good post by Ray Girvan. Pointing out his “boot-through-the-TV-screen moments” as evidence that the divide between scientific and artistic cultures can still be excruciatingly apparent. How can one be so happy being ignorant of the other ?