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\title{Animals that Belong to the Emperor}

Failing universal classification schemes from the Renaissance to the
Semantic Web

\author{Florian Cramer}

\date{}

\maketitle

The weapon with which European search engines intend to beat Google is
semantic information processing: pattern recognition in media in the
case of Quaero, Semantic Web technology in Theseus, its German cousin.
Originally, the Quaero project was a French-German collaboration, funded
by both governments, until the German Theseus project split off from
Quaero to pursue its own vision of future Web search. This vision is
twofold, involving a number of classical holy grails of computer
science: (a) provide search on the basis of semantic tags, (b) have
software recognize the contents of web pages in order to automatically
apply those tags. While the second point is utopian enough and something
that Artificial Intelligence research hasn't achieved in decades, I
would like to show why even point (a), in other words: the Semantic Web,
is doomed to fail. (I leave it to the audience to draw its own
conclusions why the Theseus projects receives high public funding
nevertheless.)

The ``Semantic Web'' itself is a highly misunderstandable term and
project. It was founded and is pursued by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator
of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s.  In 2004, prior to Quaero and
Theseus, the German federal government subsidized research on the
Semantic Web with 13.7 million Euros, reasoning that as a ``semantic
technology'', it would allow people to phrase search terms as normal
questions, thus giving computer illiterates easier access to the
Internet. But, alas, this is not at all what the Semantic Web is about,
or what it would even implement; it was, in another words, a 13.7
million Euro misunderstanding.\footnote{Ich hab irgendwie den Eindruck
dass unser Bundesforschungsministerium in der irrigen Annahme ist, das
13 Millionen Euro eine Software schaffen die es jedem
Computer-Analphabeten ermöglicht, ganz ohne den ``Extra Effort'' seine
``Pisa-Versagen vermarkten und als hochinnovative Rettung des
Wissens- und Wirtschaftsstandorts Deutschland (wers glaubt \ldots),
%%\url{http://www.heise.de/newsticker/result.xhtml?url=/newsticker/meldung/48662&words=Semantic%20Web%20Bundesministerium&T=%22Semantic%20Web%22%20Bundesministerium}
}
Indeed, natural language parsing is another holy grail of search engine
development, from ''Ask Jeeves`` (which renamed itself Ask.com, and
deemphasized its initial concept) to \ldots, recently brought up by
Geert Lovink on the Nettime mailing list. Natural language parsing falls
into the category b I mentioned before, as the Holy Grail that
artificial intelligence research for couple of decase has consistently
claimed to have almost, but just not quite reached -- while critical
A.I. researches like Luc Steels say that it won't ever be reachable with
current algorithmic computer architectures, regardless their speed. And in reality,
natural language search systems are no more than inefficient interface
wrappers around classical Boolean search expressions with logical AND,
OR and NOT operators.

The Semantic Web does not fall into this trap because it does not
involve any automatic interpretation of meaning. Berners-Lee is quite
outspoken on this, saying that his concept ``does not imply some magical
artificial intelligence which allows machines to comprehend human
mumblings'' -- much in contradiction to Quaero and Theseus.  Instead,
his Semantic Web is a universal markup or ``tagging'' schemes. In
Berners-Lee's words: ``Instead of asking machines to understand people's
language, it involves asking people to make the extra effort``.  This
effort, semantic tagging is well-known and a popular device on sites
like Flickr, digg.com and delicious. It simply means that users attach
keywords to texts, images and other information, so that this
information can be searched by its keywords or particular keyword
combinations. On Flickr, for example, the search keyword combination
``birthday'', ``children'' and ``clown'' results in a list of pictures
of clowns appearing at children's birthday parties, not because of any
Quaero-style computer recognition of the image contents, but because of
the keywords assigned to images by Flickr users. 

From a Semantic Web perspective, this system is flawed though, because
there are no nomenclatures for tagging. For example, a user might have
tagged an image with ``kids'' instead of ``children'', so it won't turn
up in the results. And the tags lack systematization: for
example, children could be classified as a subset of humans, humans as a
subset of mammals; birthdays as a subset of celebrations etc.etc. Then
one would also find pictures marked up with ``birthday'' and
``children'' in a more general search for pictures of human
celebrations. This is why unsystematic, ad-hoc, user-generated and
site-specific tagging systems like on Flickr are referred to as
``folksonomies''.\footnote{Wikipedia: Folksonomy (also known as
collaborative tagging , social classification, social indexing, social
tagging, and other names) is the practice and method of collaboratively
creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize Content. In
contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is not only generated
by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content.  Usually
freely chosen keywords are used instead of a controlled vocabulary.''}

The Semantic Web promises to overcome those
folksonomies with one, unified and standardized keyword tagging system
that can applied to anything.  In other words, it is a 
universal classificatory description system, a grand unified
hierarchical metatag design.

For somewhat mysterious or at least idiosyncratic reasons, Berners-Lee
calls this classifactory system an ``ontology'', making his project
particularly confusing for people with backgrounds in philosophy and
humanities -- because it is not an ontology, but a cosmology. 

Just as cosmologies are by no means new, so are universal classification
and tagging systems of the world. In his essay and short-story ``The
Analytical Language of John Wilkins'', Jorge Luis Borges writes about
the English 17th century scholar that

\begin{quote}
``He divided the universe in forty categories or classes, these being
further subdivided into differences, which was then subdivided into
species. He assigned to each class a monosyllable of two letters; to
each
difference, a consonant; to each species, a vowel. For example: de,
which
means an element; deb, the first of the elements, fire; deba, a part of
the element fire, a flame.'' [\ldots]
\end{quote}

Similar classification schemes have been developed throughout the Middle
Ages and Renaissance, by Ramon Llull, Giordano Bruno, and especially in
17th century encyclopedism of Johann Heinrich Alsted and Jan Amos
Comenius in whose tradition Wilkins works and thinks.  Since
encyclopedias, before Diderot and d'Alembert, structured their knowledge
systematically, not alphabetically, they developed increasingly complex
tree-like classification systems of all things in the world as described
in them. [picture] The so-called ``ontology'' of the Semantic Web does
not only do something similar, but it does exactly the same again. 

The Renaissance classificatory cosmologies could only work on the basis
of a stable assumption of what the world is and how it is structured:
for example, by the four directions, the four seasons, the temperaments,
the seven virtues and vices etc. In other words, they were still
embedded into the paradigm of Medieval scholasticist science which in
turn was derived from Aristotle's system of categories that broke up all
things in the world into genres and species.  The Semantic Web boils
down to nothing else but technocratic neo-scholasticism, and a
questionable if not dangerous belief that the world can be described
according to a single, objective, universally valid viewpoint and
classification -- a blatant example of an engineer's blindness to 
ambiguity and cultural issues. 

Although there was no Semantic Web yet in the 1940s, Borges pins
down the issue in his essay. One is tempted to just replace the
name John Wilkins with Tim Berners-Lee when he examines the former's
categories to find out that stones, for example, are absurdly classified
as either common, or modic, precious, transparent and insoluble, or that
beauty is assigned to a ``living brood fish''. Borges' 
concludes that

\begin{quote}
``These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those
which doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopaedia
entitled 'Celestial Empire of benevolent Knowledge'. In its remote pages
it is written that the animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the
emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f)
fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification,
(i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair
brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that
from a long way off look like flies.``
\end{quote}

Although this is Borges' own fiction, it nevertheless reveals the
arbitrariness of categories and classifications. It also had a thorough
impact as a philosophical critique. The first chapter of Michel
Foucault's ``The Order of Things'' is a discussion of precisely the
above list of animals. Foucault confesses that for him, it ``shattered
all the familiar landmarks of his thought'', opening his eyes on how the
order of knowledge is culturally constructed, and may be thought
differently.  To understand Foucault's discourse theory, in order words,
one just needs to read Borges.

But the order of things, and unified classification schemes, do not just
break down in fiction. Sticking to the example of animals, it is obvious
how Aristotelian philosophy continues to exist today, in the notion of
gender and species [and even more questionably in the categorization of
humans into biological races], we're still working within the paradigm
introduced by Aristotle's zoology.  But the problem is that does it not
always work even in zoology itself.  The prime example is the platypus,
an Australian animal that is a breastfeeding mammal, but it lays eggs,
lives in the water and has a brill like a bird. If the platypus
breaks genre and species classification of zoology, where does it fit
the Semantic Web?  

This situation is by no means new. In his book ``Kant and the
Platypus'', Umberto Eco makes the animal a symbol for scholastic versus
empirical science.  A bit confusingly, he differentiates ``cultural
cases'' -- that means categorically defined phenomena -- from
``empirical cases'', i.e. phenomena that are observed instead of
predefined. ``To be recognized as such,'' Eco states, cultural cases
``need reference to a framework of cultural norms'' (Eco 1997, p. 139).
For Eco as a semiotician, this means that Being, or existence, is the
frontier that systematic science cannot conquer. And this is 
what ontology means. 

The innovation of modern science since Galileo, Newton and Descartes is
that it operates without the reference to those norms. When Diderot and
d'Alembert abandoned the old classificatory order of knowledge in
encyclopedias and replaced them with a non-classificatory,
non-systematic alphabetic order, they precisely followed the empirical
paradigm, taking phenomena as they occurred and not as they fit.
In other words: It was the innovation of modern critical science that it
gave up ``Semantic Web'' schemes in its ordering of knowledge.

But to go back from academic discourse to folksonomies on the Internet,
an even better example than the Platypus was brought up in a Web forum
of the computer news site heise.de. Discussing the Semantic Web and its
classification scheme, an anonymous poster brought up the hypothetical
example ``A Muslim is a potential terrorist'' in order to show that a
unified ``ontology'' cannot be built.\footnote{URL} And this example
scratches only the surface of the pending cultural problems. In other
words, not the empirical, but the cultural cases bear the actual
dynamite.  The whole Semantic Web, and the search engines built upon it,
rest on the illusion that there can be one objective assessment of the
world. This is not only cosmology falsely named ontology, but also
metaphysics disguised as physics.

On top of that, it is relying on the illusion of a culture where
semantic tags wouldn't simply be used for spamming and search engine
manipulation, which is why Google already ignores metatags. And while
Berners-Lee is a realist enough to assess that tagging cannot be done by
bots like those planned by the Theseus project, his Semantic Web
consequently implies a complexity nightmare of meta information
overtaking information, i.e.  where each piece of information would
create at least twice as much work for its semantic markup  than for its
original creation.

It would be good if creators of so-called next-generation search engines
would read up on Borges who concludes:

\begin{quote}
``I have registered the arbitrarities of Wilkins, [and] of the unknown
(or false) Chinese encyclopaedia writer [\ldots]; it is clear that there
is no classification of the Universe not being arbitrary and full of
conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what
thing the universe is.''
\end{quote}





\end{document}
