Renaissance Reboot

Whether desktop or server-based, information will always require a human component in a human world. We are social creatures, for one thing. For another thing, the fact that not everyone can be an expert in everything, necessitates interaction with others who are experts. The question becomes not so much where the information will be stored, but who will access it, how it will be shared, and how we will work together to use it.

I have done a lot of thinking over the years about where technology is going and what it means for us as consumers of information. In the past several months, however, things have begun to get very exciting. I know that librarians sometimes have controversy over offering computer games in the library, but here is what I think: gaming is leading the way into a whole new way of learning and disseminating information.

Learning will become, indeed, is already becoming a collaborative effort. Look at the origins of the Web, for instance, which are in academia and the need to share information efficiently. Look at what we are doing now with online education, and with Wikis. Then look at online gaming and how users of this technology are entering a whole new realm of interaction.

Gaming is graphical, visual, mobile, and is becoming independent of hand controllers as of the advent of Microsoft’s new gaming console, and to some extent with Nintendo’s Wii. Movement of the user’s hands and body controls the interaction with the game, and indeed with hundreds or even thousands of other players’ actions around the world.

Enter the age of the avatar. When you examine the need for human interaction in our society, avatars become the new method of real-time contact. As they become more and more human (dare I hope holographic real-time representations of ourselves?) the ability to interact with a reference librarian in real time with face-to-face-like qualities, to peruse the shelves of a virtual library and hold open a virtual representation of a book will become a reality as well.

It occurred to me last night, as I was lying awake thinking about the implications of technology for physical books, that the reason we do not yet see where digital content is headed vis-a-vis printed content, might be that we have not yet reached a tipping point, believe it or not, in our technological capabilities.

Imagine if you could use technology to not only digitize and search for information, but if that information were meshed with virtual reality in such a way that the printed book became a 3d holographic representation of a book that could be flipped through (which is useful in the extreme and the lack of which is something I regret about digital content), while also having a computer available to help you home in on the content that is most relevant to you? At the same time, you have at your disposal remotely, a reference librarian familiar with using the content you are searching. This reference librarian, even if she is hundreds of miles away, in this scenario, adds a human element both mentally and physically, enriching and helping direct your experience as needed.

There will always be a need for real human interaction, librarians in physical libraries, and a love for paper books in my view of the world; however, when I think about what we are capable of, and how far we have come in so short a span of human history, I can’t help believe that we will see the things I have written about here come to pass. When we stop to examine the technology we have today and its effects on our world, we need to consider that human minds can imagine the solutions to the problems we encounter with our inventions. As long as we have a need to communicate information, we will find more efficient and more comfortable ways to to do it.

Mark Birbeck, proponent of the RDFa (Resource Description Framework-in-attributes) at the W3C wrote an Introduction to RDFa for A List Apart on June 23, 2009. It is a succinct and elegant document that I can only take a vague stab at explaining here, so if you are interested in the least, please see the original article.

Essentially, RDFa takes XHTML’s meta and link elements and allows them to be attributed with semantic annotation from vocabularies such as Dublin Core or Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) via the XML Namespace declaration. Markup of web documents in this way allows machines to understand nuances of human language.

For instance, when referring to an alternate source in a web page, using RDFa and the Dublin Core’s “source” tag allows a machine to parse the tagged data and, through a web browser, serve a searcher the web page as a derivative work from the tagged source.

Expert System claims to have created an engine, Cogito, that, among other things, can automatically mark up existing XHTML content with Dublin Core and FOAF tags with 90% accuracy.

I am still trying to figure out how RDFa and Dublin Core would work together in comparison to MARC, but I haven’t gotten that far yet. If you know, please comment. I will update with another post as I further uncover the mysteries of metadata.

What is the Semantic Web?

Very simplistically, if you think of Web 2.0 as facilitating social networking, think of Web 3.0 as intelligently serving data to users. For example, as my friend Daniel Abraham pointed out:

Web 1.0: Here is my recipe for strawberry shortcake.
Web 2.0: Here is a FaceBook entry by Fred commenting on my strawberry shortcake recipe.
Web 3.0: Here are the search results for strawberry shortcake recipes of people living within a 30 mile radius of Fred along with links to the pick-your-own strawberry places.

Read Write Web offers a straightforward and eloquent entry point into understanding the concept in the blog post,

Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web.

As someone who enjoys HTML and the design aspect of creating web pages, but who has not until now put a toe into the deeper waters of linked data with RDFa (see the W3C RDFa Primer), the blog post was enlightening. If you want a clearer understanding of what that shadowy thing, Web 3.0, might be, you’ll get it there too.

The thing that came to mind while reading the article was that librarians will now have a whole new area of employment as those who classify web content for semantic readability. There are millions of web pages out there that will need to be retrofitted with RDFa and the Dublin Core’s metadata standards, which read like a web version of Dewey or the Library of Congress classification system.

It will take those experienced with containerizing data to sift the great amounts of the stuff on the web into its proper place before Web 3.0 can become a reality. I, for one, look forward to the challenge and its results.

The name of the blog portion of this site, Renaissance Reboot, is derived from a WSJ article titled The Next Age of Discovery by Alexandra Alter published on May 8, 2009. It is also a nod to the newest Star Trek movie, which many fans are calling a “reboot” of the original.

At once our fascination with technology is exemplified and encouraged in popular culture’s most recognized nod to technology, Star Trek. Digitizing scholarly texts and sharing the resulting data and resources electronically allows a new kind of globalization where the pursuit of knowledge is unfettered by access to a passport, visa, or the threat of a bigger carbon footprint. Information is the new frontier.

As Alter points out in her article, data that was once inaccessible for reasons of material degradation or dysfunction, that was too buried or too remote, can now be shared with anyone who has access to a computer. It can be preserved, cataloged, analyzed, expounded upon. Humans, in short, have found a way to democratize information in ways previously unimaginable.

We are entering a second Renaissance, as Alter says. It is an age of discovery, connections, learning, and wonder. What a heady time to be alive, when a monk can read a scroll that has never been unrolled, or a researcher can examine a layer of now-hidden text to reveal works of playwrights long thought to be lost, and then share that information with a world of eager scholars.

Content managers and creators dive into this ever growing ocean of digitized information and emerge with the pearls. This blog focuses on how we navigate these waters and chart the course for our future adventures.