Attending OWLED last week gave me the chance to think about a part of the peculiar world of SemWeb
evangelism. In what follows I’ll describe what I think of as the peculiarity of that evangelism, and then
I’ll suggest a thought experiment that is relevant to ameliorating it.
Expressivity Wars are Stupid
The peculiarity is that SemWeb evangelists don’t seem to be able or willing to consistently distinguish
between the value of competition in a stable market and in a growing market. In short, competition is
useful in a stable market, but much less so in a growing market. In a stable market competition not only
helps buyers distinguish among relatively similar sellers, but it also helps spur innovation which would
otherwise not happen.
A growing market, however, is much more likely to grow if its sellers recognize the value of cooperation to
not only build the market, but to distinguish it, by cooperative action, from its competitors. All the
sellers in a growing market should work together to help buyers learn why they should abandon some other
market and take a risk on the growing one instead.
Every SemWeb evangelist should spend at least twice as much time explaining why (say) SQL and XML suck than why their pet SemWeb technology is better than some other SemWeb technology.
If we are all very lucky, the SemWeb is a growing market. There are some signs that it is, in fact, a growing market. I hope that it is, and I have made and continue to make business decisions based on that assumption.
My (rational) fear is that, in fact, the SemWeb market is not growing but is stable; and, thus, the
competition which I decry below isn’t stupid but is itself rational. But, again, I’m just not sure.
However, I am more sure that public fights about the utility of various representational formalisms—RDF
versus OWL; rules v. OWL; OWL Lite v. OWL DL; OWL Full v. OWL DL—are stupid, destructive, and
inappropriate.
They are stupid because they are really just proxies for a fight about which customers matter the most. But
in a growing market situation, they all matter to someone. (They are proxies because there’s no rational
reason to snipe and fight about representational expressivity; it’s a matter of scientific fact, and only
people ignorant of those facts fight about them directly.)
They are destructive because they form the basis for a reasonable perception of instability, and not the
kind that’s good.
They are inappropriate because they overstate the value of competition in (what we all hope is) a growing
market.
Expressivity Wars and the “Original Position”
Okay, so that’s my real point here: I don’t think it’s time to start competing in earnest yet; hence, I
think fights about representational expressivity do more harm than good right now. (Later on they’ll be
perfectly appropriate, rational, and helpful!)
But maybe you aren’t convinced. The rest of this piece is meant to convince you. Read on if you think you
might be convinced by more good reasons.
My attempt to convince you is basically a big analogy to one of the most important devices in contemporary
political philosophy: John Rawls’s Original Position.
Yeah, I know: what the hell is that, and how does it appy to the SemWeb? Glossing tons of details (when not
just getting them wrong…), here we go:
Working in the same social contractarian tradition as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, Rawls wanted to give an
argument that rational agents would have to accept about what form of social arrangement would be the most
just (that is, would maximize social justice). So he cooked up a device called the Original Position in
which rational agents exist behind a Veil of Ignorance.
So imagine that you have no idea what kind of person with what kind of social setting or natural
advantages, etc. you might have. Behind the Veil of Ignorance, you don’t know if you are rich or poor or
famous or a good athlete or logically-inclined or work with your hands or a mid-level manager, or… You
don’t know anything about that complex constellation of social and personal details that determine what we
might call your “lot in life”.
Behind the Veil of Ignorance, what kind of social arrangements is it reasonable for a rational agent to
prefer? Rawls’s argued that those arrangements will be fairness maximizing because if you don’t know who
or what you are or where you come from or how much you have, then the only reasonable solution is to
arrange things in as fair a manner as is possible. In other words, if you don’t know whether you are rich
or poor, it makes sense to arrange things such that the gap between rich and poor is as small as possible.
Rawls put it like this:
Each citizen is guaranteed a fully adequate scheme of basic liberties, which is compatible with the
same scheme of liberties for all others;
Social and economic inequalities must satisfy two conditions:
All offices and positions must be open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity;
Economic inequalities are only permitted insofar as they are to the greatest benefit of the least
well off members of society.
Or: things have to be fair, except if some unfairness makes those who are worse off better off.
But what does this have to do with SemWeb evangelism and expressivity wars?
I suggest that in a growing market, there is so much opportunity, that is, uncertainty about outcomes,
that market agents effectively function behind a veil of ignorance. None of us really knows where the
golden gooses are. We have guesses and hunches and existing commitments, but we don’t really know much
for sure. In particular, since no one knows which customer’s problem—if any!—will be the killer SemWeb
app, we don’t really know which expressivity regime is the most valuable. When low-expressivity people
argue for “just a bit more than SQL”, that can sound plausible. When full first-order logic people argue
for lots of expressivity, that can sound reasonable. And when, say, DL or rules or some other group
argues for their bits, they often sound reasonable too.
But, or so I suggest, none of us really knows. Which means that the only rational position is to
maximize the number and quality of the available options. A DL company may have to shift because of
unforeseen market realities to higher or lower expressivity formalisms. The rules-uber-alles group may
have to shift to DL for the same reason. Or we may all have to downshift to RDF plus a little bit of
OWL.
People sometimes act as if they know which will win (again, if any!), but that’s just various degrees of
bluff and bluster.
Since no one really knows for sure, I suggest that we should stop premature competition and public sniping
at the other guy’s best bet and maximize in the short and medium-term the degree to which we cooperate in
sending the message that our market is better than theirs. That is, that just about any of this
“semantic web stuff” is better than Yet Another SQL/PHP app, or Yet Another Database Silo, or Yet Another Half-Baked Java App, etc. I further suggest that this is in our
collective and individual self-interest for the same reason (by analogy, anyway) as Rawls’s arguments for
justice as fairness. In short,
Since you don’t know what technology will win, make sure you preserve as many potentially winning
options, both individually and collectively, as is possible and consistent with your continued existence
as a viable market participant.
Anyone who can’t do this because of their ideological commitments—that is, who’d rather not win at all
than win with the “wrong” technology—is just too ideological and inflexible to be of much good to anyone else.