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Semantic Virtual Reality

Posted by john.ringland | Filed under Semantic Resources

Wouldn’t it be nice to visualise ontologies as networks within a 3D modelling environment and to describe and augment virtual spaces with semantic metadata and ontologies? Furthermore, ontologies could play a key role in the modelling process.

Here are some links to information about where the technology is currently at.

Coupling ontologies with graphics content for Knowledge Driven Visualization
This paper presents a model, a methodology and a software framework for the semantic web (Intelligent 3D Visualization Platform – I3DVP) for the development of interoperable intelligent visualization applications that support the coupling of graphics and virtual reality scenes with domain knowledge of different domains. The graphics content and the semantics of the scenes are married into a consistent and cohesive ontological model while at the same time knowledge-based techniques for the querying, manipulation, and semantic personalization of the scenes are introduced. We also provide methods for knowledge driven information visualization and visualization-aided decision making based on inference by reasoning.

X3D is the ISO standard XML-based file format for representing 3D computer graphics, the successor to the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML). See the X3D FAQ

Visualizing the Semantic Web: XML-based Internet and Information Visualization
The book presents the state-of-the-art research in the emerging field and focuses on key topics such as: Visualization of semantic and structural information and metadata Exploring and querying XML documents using interactive multimedia interfaces Topic Maps visualizations Visual modeling of XML/RDF/OWL ontologies and schemas Rendering and viewing of XML documents SVG/X3D as new visualization techniques for the Semantic Web

Semantic description of 3D environments: a proposal based on web standards
This work proposes an alternate approach for associating semantic information to 3D worlds based on the integration of two web standards: the X3D language and the semantic web. The approach is characterized also by the definition of scene-independent ontologies and by the definition of semantic zones that complement the role of semantic objects for giving a complete description of the environment.

X3D Books available via Amazon.

Using pluggable procedures and ontology to realize semantic virtual environments 2.0
Allowing users to design animation procedures and share their designs with other users is a crucial function for creating personalized 3D avatar behaviors on multi-user virtual environments (MUVE’s). By describing the ontology of the virtual objects in the environment to animation procedures, we allow these procedures to create customized animations for an avatar to interact with the environment or other avatars. In this paper, we attempt to realize a semantic virtual environment (SVE) in our MUVE system (called IMNET).

An Ontology-Driven Approach for Modeling Behavior in Virtual Environments
One promising application area for ontologies is Virtual Reality (VR). Developing a VR application is very time consuming and requires skilled people. Introducing ontologies in the development process can eliminate these barriers. We have developed an approach, VR-WISE, which uses ontologies for describing a Virtual Environment (VE) at a conceptual level. In this paper we will describe the Behavior Ontology, which defines the modeling concepts for object behavior. Such an ontology has several advantages. It improves the intuitiveness; facilitates cross-platform VR development; smoothens integration with other ontologies; enhances the interoperability of VR applications; and allows for more intelligent systems.

Intelligent modelling of virtual worlds using domain ontologies
In this paper, a new approach is introduced for designing and developing a VR application where the domain expertise is used for generating it more easily. This approach uses ontologies as a way of grasping the knowledge of a domain, expressing the virtual world much more in terms of the end-user domain, generating the virtual world more easily and performing intelligent reasoning. Furthermore, ontologies are also used as a conceptual modelling tool allowing a non-VR-skilled person to model his VR application using the concepts of Virtual Reality more intuitively and more oriented towards his domain expertise.

Owl-Blender takes a properly annotated OWL file as input and outputs a Blender file to create a 3D visualization of the ontology. [This project seems to have stalled but its a great idea.]

Translating SVG into X3D using Ontology Mapping
A simple translator between SVG and X3D using Ontology Mapping techniques. Two SVG object types (circle and rect) can be mapped to the “equivalents” in X3D (sphere and box). Note that a 2D to 3D translation is being performed.

Visualizing information using SVG and X3D
This is the first book devoted to both SVG and X3D as a new and universal means of visualizing information. It presents the state-of-the-art research emerging in this novel area and introduces SVG and X3D fundamentals and leading authoring tools. The key topics covered include: – The foundations of SVG and X3D – Data, information, knowledge and network visualization – Advanced and distributed user interfaces – Visualizing metadata and the Semantic Web – Visual interfaces to Web services – New trends and paradigms in publishing and Interactive TV – Displaying geographically referenced data and chemical structures – Advanced use of Adobe Illustrator and X3D-Edit authoring tools This book will be essential reading not only for researchers, Web developers and graduate students but also for undergraduates and everyone who is interested in using the next-generation computer graphics on their websites.

X3D for Enterprise Apps
Blog to summarize research, interviews, and any brainstorming, viewing, modeling, databasing, scripting, programming, networking and testing of X3D applications.

X3D: extensible 3D graphics for Web authors (google books)
The first book on the new way to present interactive 3D content over the Web, written by two of the designers of the standard * Plentiful illustrations and screen shots in the full color text * Website with extensive content, including the X3D specification, sample code and applications, content creation tools, and demos of compatible Web browsers.

Tags: 3D, diagram, modeling, ontology, OWL, RDF, semantic-application, SVG, visualization, VR, VRML, X3D

Read more | Comments (2) | September 6th, 2009

Exploring the Web of Data

Posted by john.ringland | Filed under Semantic Resources

This is a simple example to illustrate one way of manually exploring the web of data. We will use Openlink’s Virtuoso SPARQL end-point to query information related to Tim Berners-Lee’s FOAF file (FOAF = friend of a friend) and begin to explore the network of relations that extends from this point in the web of data. For details on what we are doing here see the turorial SPARQL by Example.

Exploring a large network of relations manually in this way would be very tedious however it is a process that can easily be automated and presented to the user via a graphical interface.

First lets see what relations are defined in TimBL’s FOAF file:

Go to the SPARQL end-point, clear the default graph URI (we will set this manually within the query), select “Retrieve remote RDF data for all missing source graphs” and enter the following query:

select distinct ?predicate
from <http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card>
where {?subject ?predicate ?object .}

See the results. This lists all defined relationships, such as foaf:knows, foaf:name, foaf:homepage, etc, that have been defined between concepts.

Next we look at what entities are mentioned and their type.

select distinct ?subject ?type
from <http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card>
where {
    ?subject ?predicate ?object .
    optional { ?subject a ?type .}
}

Note: ‘a’ is a shortcut for “rdf:type” and an ‘optional’ clause can fail without failing the entire query, this is required because not all entities have been given a defined type.

See the results.This tells us all the concepts that have been defined, such as TimBL himself (http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i) and other people that TimBL knows, which are of type “person”, however there are also concepts of type “PersonalProfileDocument” and “RSAPublicKey”. Also note that TimBL is defined to be of type ‘Male’.

Now lets explore the network of friends surrounding TimBL and retrieve the list of names of TimBL’s friends along with their URI’s.

prefix foaf:  <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>
prefix card: <http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#>
select distinct ?name ?object
from <http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card>
where {
    card:i foaf:knows ?object .
    ?object foaf:name ?name .
}

See the results.

Imagine a graph with a node for TimBL in the centre and a cloud of other nodes representing friends of TimBL connected to the central node by ‘knows’ relations. Each node also has sub-nodes such as name, homepage, etc. Now lets pick one of the friend nodes and expand it to see what friends surround it, lets pick Daniel Krech and see who he knows. From the results of the last query we see that he has the URI http://eikeon.com/foaf.rdf#eikeon.

prefix foaf:  <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>
prefix card: <http://eikeon.com/foaf.rdf#>
select distinct ?object
from <http://eikeon.com/foaf.rdf>
where {
    card:eikeon foaf:knows ?object .
}

See the results.

In this way we can move through the network / graph of relationships between people by querying the data in their FOAF files to identify who they know and the URI’s of their friend’s FOAF files, then querying those.

Given an application with a graphical interface it would be easy to visualise and explore networks of human relations. Furthermore, any network defined in terms of any concepts and relations can be explore in a similar manner by querying RDF data on the web. In this way the many scattered RDF fragments are linked together by URI’s thus forming a web of data that can be traversed and explored.

If you are interested in building such an application then the Sematic Web Client Library is a Java library that allows any Java application to perform these types of queries without the need for a third-party SPARQL end-point

Note: A useful way to browse the web of data is the Semantic Radar plugin for Firefox. E.g. just install the plugin and go to Tim Berners-Lee’s FOAF file. You will see all of the available data and be able to click on links to explore further into the network of relations.

Tags: end-point, FOAF, giant-global-graph, graph-database, linked-data, RDF, semantic-web, social-network, SPARQL, Virtuoso, web-of-data

Read more | Comments off | August 22nd, 2009

We Are the Web (Excerpts from a classic article)

Posted by john.ringland | Filed under Wider Context

Quotes from the article We Are the Web by Kevin Kelly in Wired Magazine 2005.

The revolution launched by Netscape’s IPO was only marginally about hypertext and human knowledge. At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing. And the ways of participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking – part human and part machine – found nowhere else on the planet or in history.

Not only did we fail to imagine what the Web would become, we still don’t see it today! We are blind to the miracle it has blossomed into. And as a result of ignoring what the Web really is, we are likely to miss what it will grow into over the next 10 years. Any hope of discerning the state of the Web in 2015 requires that we own up to how wrong we were 10 years ago.

In the coming decade, it will evolve into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies but our minds.

Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, while each Web page branches into dozens of hyperlinks. That adds up to a trillion “synapses” between the static pages on the Web. The human brain has about 100 times that number – but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The Machine is.

In total, it harnesses a quintillion transistors, expanding its complexity beyond that of a biological brain. It has already surpassed the 20-petahertz threshold for potential intelligence as calculated by Ray Kurzweil. For this reason some researchers pursuing artificial intelligence have switched their bets to the Net as the computer most likely to think first.

The system will contain hundreds of millions of miles of fiber-optic neurons linking the billions of ant-smart chips embedded into manufactured products, buried in environmental sensors, staring out from satellite cameras, guiding cars, and saturating our world with enough complexity to begin to learn. We will live inside this thing.

It won’t matter what device you use, as long as it runs on the Web OS. You will reach the same distributed computer whether you log on via phone, PDA, laptop, or HDTV.

Each device is a differently shaped window that peers into the global computer… The Machine is an unbounded thing that will take a billion windows to glimpse even part of. It is what you’ll see on the other side of any screen.

And who will write the software that makes this contraption useful and productive? We will. In fact, we’re already doing it, each of us, every day. When we post and then tag pictures on the community photo album Flickr, we are teaching the Machine to give names to images. The thickening links between caption and picture form a neural net that can learn. Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a Web page as a way of teaching the Machine what we think is important. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach it an idea. Wikipedia encourages its citizen authors to link each fact in an article to a reference citation. Over time, a Wikipedia article becomes totally underlined in blue as ideas are cross-referenced. That massive cross-referencing is how brains think and remember. It is how neural nets answer questions. It is how our global skin of neurons will adapt autonomously and acquire a higher level of knowledge.

The human brain has no department full of programming cells that configure the mind. Rather, brain cells program themselves simply by being used. Likewise, our questions program the Machine to answer questions. We think we are merely wasting time when we surf mindlessly or blog an item, but each time we click a link we strengthen a node somewhere in the Web OS, thereby programming the Machine by using it.

What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows – about us and about what we want to know. We already find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather than remember it ourselves. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity.

The birth of a machine that subsumes all other machines so that in effect there is only one Machine, which penetrates our lives to such a degree that it becomes essential to our identity – this will be full of surprises. Especially since it is only the beginning.

There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.

You and I are alive at this moment.

We should marvel, but people alive at such times usually don’t. Every few centuries, the steady march of change meets a discontinuity, and history hinges on that moment. We look back on those pivotal eras and wonder what it would have been like to be alive then. Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, and the latter Jewish patriarchs lived in the same historical era, an inflection point known as the axial age of religion. Few world religions were born after this time.

Three thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.

Tags: collective-intelligence, complex-adaptive-system, cybernetic-cultural, emergent-phenomena, global-brain, global-mind, mass-communication

Read more | Comments (9) | August 22nd, 2009

Collective Emergence Resources

Posted by john.ringland | Filed under Wider Context

This is a collection of quotes and links related to scientific research and philosophical theories regarding the emergence of a global collective consciousness. This is just a starting point from which to explore further. Some statements are highlighted because I feel that they are particularly relevant. The relevance of some of these quotes may not be obvious to some however the emergence of a global collective consciousness has far reaching ramifications.

Note: this material is borrowed from previous writings (mid 2007) hence some of the links may be broken.

Sections:
Complexity Theory – The Theory of Complex Adaptive Systems
Cybernetics
System Science
Gaia and the Living Earth
Deep Ecology
Ecopsychology
Modern Sociology
Philosophy

Complexity Theory – The Theory of Complex Adaptive Systems

“Examples of complex systems include ant-hills, ants themselves, human economies, climate, nervous systems, cells and living things, including human beings, as well as modern energy or telecommunication infrastructures. Beyond the fact that these things are all networks of some kind, and that they are complex, it may appear that they have little in common, hence that the term “complex system” is vacuous. However, all complex systems are held to have behavioural and structural features in common, which at least to some degree unites them as phenomena. They are also united theoretically, because all these systems may, in principle, be modelled with varying degrees of success by a certain kind of mathematics. It is therefore possible to state clearly what it is that these systems are supposed to have in common with each other, in relatively formal terms.” [FR]

“The earliest precursor to modern complex systems theory can be found in the classical political economy of the Scottish Enlightenment, later developed by the Austrian school of economics, that order in market systems is spontaneous (or emergent) in that it is the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design. Upon this and from the 19th to the early 20th century, the Austrian school developed the economic calculation problem along with the concept of dispersed knowledge, which were to fuel debates against the then-dominant keynesian economics. This debate would notably lead economists, politicians and other parties to explore the question of computational complexity.” [FR]

“Complexity theory takes its roots into Chaos theory, which has its origins more than a century ago in the work of the French physicist Henri Poincaré. Chaos is sometimes viewed as extremely complicated information, rather than as an absence of order… The point is that chaos remains deterministic. With perfect knowledge of the initial conditions and of the context of an action, the course of this action can be predicted in chaos theory… Complexity is non-deterministic, and gives no way whatsoever to predict the future. The emergence of complexity theory shows a domain between deterministic order and randomness which is complex… This is referred as the ‘edge of chaos’…” [FR]

“Socio-cognitive systems are complex from their nature. They include humans, organizations and are intelligence-based systems. The study of socio-cognitive complexity is the new domain in systemics and has to cope with a meta-complexity on higher levels in the hierarchy of abstract systems.” [FR]

“Complex adaptive systems are special cases of complex systems. They are complex in that they are diverse and made up of multiple interconnected elements and adaptive in that they have the capacity to change and learn from experience. The term complex adaptive systems was coined at the interdisciplinary Santa Fe Institute (SFI), by John H. Holland, Murray Gell-Mann and others. The term complex adaptive systems (or complexity science) is often used to describe the loosely organized academic field that has grown up around the study of such systems. Complexity science is not a single theory— it encompasses more than one theoretical framework and is highly interdisciplinary, seeking the answers to some fundamental questions about living, adaptable, changeable systems.” [FR]

“Examples of complex adaptive systems include the stock market, social insect and ant colonies, the biosphere and the ecosystem, the brain and the immune system, the cell and the developing embryo, manufacturing businesses and any human social group-based endeavour in a cultural and social system such as political parties or communities. There are close relationships between the field of CAS and artificial life. In both areas the principles emergence and self-organization are very important.” [FR]

“A Complex Adaptive System (CAS) is a dynamic network of many agents (which may represent cells, species, individuals, firms, nations) acting in parallel, constantly acting and reacting to what the other agents are doing. The control of a CAS tends to be highly dispersed and decentralized. If there is to be any coherent behavior in the system, it has to arise from competition and cooperation among the agents themselves. The overall behavior of the system is the result of a huge number of decisions made every moment by many individual agents.” [FR]

“A CAS behaves/evolves according to three key principles: order is emergent as opposed to predetermined (c.f. Neural Networks), the system’s history is irreversible, and the system’s future is often unpredictable. The basic building blocks of the CAS are agents. Agents scan their environment and develop schema representing interpretive and action rules. These schema are subject to change and evolution. (source: K. Dooley, AZ State University)” [FR]

“Living organisms are complex adaptive systems. Although complexity is hard to quantify in biology, evolution has produced some remarkably complex organisms. This observation has led to the common idea of evolution being progressive and leading towards what are viewed as “higher organisms”. If this were generally true, evolution would possess an active trend towards complexity. As shown below, in this type of process the value of the most common amount of complexity would increase over time. Indeed, some artificial life simulations have suggested that the generation of CAS is an inescapable feature of evolution.” [FR]

“As a physician, I learned to think from a biological perspective,” notes Richard Weinberg, “When I went into management, traditional organizational theory seemed artificial, foreign to my experience. So when I started studying complexity theory… I was stunned. Here was a way of thinking about organizations that compared them to living things. That makes sense to me, intuitively.” Besides making sense, Weinberg finds that complexity theory is based on a more accurate model of how hospitals, and the economy in general, work. So, for example, it offers a valuable explanation of why business plans so often don’t come out the way managers expect.” [FR]

More Information:

• Self-Organizing Systems (SOS) FAQ [FR]
• Complexity & Artificial Life – What are they ? [FR]
• Chaos and Complexity Tutorial [FR]
• Complex Adaptive Systems (Principia Cybernetica) [FR]
• Center for the Study of Complex Systems [FR]
• Complexity Notebooks [FR]
• Search for (“Complexity Theory” living) [FR]
• Web Links on Complexity and Education Website [FR]

• CALResCo Complexity Writings [FR] (Selected articles below)
  • Global Civil Society v Totalitarianism [FR]
  • The Will to Power [FR]
  • The Corporate State [FR]
  • Complexity Theory: Actions for a Better World [FR]
  • Fourth World Thinking, Transcending the First Three [FR]
  • Metahuman Science [FR]
  • Freedom Beyond Control [FR]
  • Conflicts as Emergent Phenomena of Complexity [FR]
  • Politics and Rights – Social Ecology [FR]
  • Fighting Manipulation [FR]
  • Creation of a Global Life [FR]
  • Entering a New Millennium [FR]
  • Global Power Networks [FR]
  • Incentives and Disincentives – Organizational Dynamics [FR]
  • Strange Attractors and Society [FR]
  • Glimpsing Heaven, Oh So Close [FR]
  • Setting The Scene – Science, Humanity and Interaction [FR]
  • Synergy and Complexity Science [FR]
  • The Non-Linear Dynamics of War [FR]
  • The Ecosystemic Life Hypothesis [FR]
  • Quantifying Complexity Theory [FR]
  • Self-Organization & Entropy – The Terrible Twins [FR]
  • Evolutionary Psychology and Sociology [FR]

Cybernetics

“Cybernetics is the study of feedback and derived concepts such as communication and control in living organisms, machines and organisations. The term cybernetics stems from the Greek Κυβερνήτης (kybernetes, steersman, governor, pilot, or rudder — the same root as government). It is an earlier but still-used generic term for many of the subject matters that are increasingly subject to specialization under the headings of adaptive systems, artificial intelligence, complex systems, complexity theory, control systems, decision support systems, dynamical systems, information theory, learning organizations, mathematical systems theory, operations research, simulation, and systems engineering. A more philosophical definition, suggested in 1956 by Louis Couffignal, one of the pioneers of cybernetics, characterizes cybernetics as “the art of ensuring the efficacy of action“.” [FR]

“Norbert Wiener, a mathematician, engineer and social philosopher, coined the word “cybernetics”… He defined it as the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine… For philosopher Warren McCulloch, cybernetics was an experimental epistemology concerned with the communication within an observer and between the observer and his environment. Stafford Beer, a management consultant, defined cybernetics as the science of effective organization. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson noted that whereas previous sciences dealt with matter and energy, the new science of cybernetics focuses on form and pattern. For educational theorist Gordon Pask, cybernetics is the art of manipulating defensible metaphors, showing how they may be constructed and what can be inferred as a result of their existence.

Cybernetics takes as its domain the design or discovery and application of principles of regulation and communication. Cybernetics treats not things but ways of behaving. It does not ask “what is this thing?” but “what does it do?” and “what can it do?” Because numerous systems in the living, social and technological world may be understood in this way, cybernetics cuts across many traditional disciplinary boundaries. The concepts which cyberneticians develop thus form a metadisciplinary language by which we may better understand and modify our world.

Several traditions in cybernetics have existed side by side since its beginning. One is concerned with circular causality, manifest in technological developments–notably in the design of computers and automata–and finds its intellectual expression in theories of computation, regulation and control. Another tradition, which emerged from human and social concerns, emphasizes epistemology–how we come to know– and explores theories of self-reference to understand such phenomena as autonomy, identity, and purpose. Some cyberneticians seek to create a more humane world, while others seek merely to understand how people and their environment have co-evolved. Some are interested in systems as we observe them, others in systems that do the observing. Some seek to develop methods for modeling the relationships among measurable variables. Others aim to understand the dialogue that occurs between models or theories and social systems. Early work sought to define and apply principles by which systems may be controlled. More recent work has attempted to understand how systems describe themselves, control themselves, and organize themselves. Despite its short history, cybernetics has developed a concern with a wide range of processes involving people as active organizers, as sharing communicators, and as autonomous, responsible individuals.” [FR]

More definitions of cybernetics, taken from Definitions of Cybernetics [FR]:

“a science concerned with the study of systems of any nature which are capable of receiving, storing, and processing information so as to use it for control“-A.N. Kolmogorov

“Cybernetique= the art of growing“–A.M. Ampere

“the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine“-Norbert Wiener

“the art of securing efficient operation”-L. Couffignal

“the art of steersmanship”; “deals with all forms of behavior in so far as they are regular, or determinate, or reproducible”; “stands to the real machine-electronic, mechanical, neural, or economic-much as geometry stands to a real object in our terrestrial space“; “offers a method for the scientific treatment of the system in which complexity is outstanding and too important to be ignored“-W. Ross Ashby

“a branch of mathematics dealing with problems of control, recursiveness, and information“-Gregory Bateson

“the science of effective organization“-Stafford Beer

“the art and science of manipulating defensible metaphors“-Gordon Pask

“Should one name one central concept, a first principle, of cybernetics, it would be circularity.”-Heinz von Foerster

“a way of thinking”-Ernst von Glasersfeld

“the science and art of understanding“-Humberto Maturana

“the ability to cure all temporary truth of eternal triteness”-Herbert Brun

“a way of thinking about ways of thinking”; “offers a vocabulary for talking, and hence thinking, about the dynamics of relations and behavior“; hence the ‘cybernetician’: “a craftsperson in time”-Larry Richards [FR]

More information:

• Cybernetics (on Principia Cybernetica) [FR]
• What are Cybernetics and Systems Science? (on Principia Cybernetica) [FR]
• Search for (cybernetics living systems) [FR]
• CYBERNETICS — A Definition [FR]
• American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) [FR]
• Cybernetics (on FUSION Anomaly) [FR]
• Cybernetics and Systems Thinkers (Principia Cybernetica) [FR]
• Introduction to Cybernetics (Ashby – Online PDF Book) [FR]

Psycho Cybernetics

“Psycho-Cybernetics… means, “Steering your mind to a productive, useful goal …. so you can reach the greatest port in the world … peace of mind. With it, you’re somebody. Without it, you’re nothing.” Dr. Maxwell Maltz [FR]

Developed in the 1960′s it is the application of cybernetic principles to the domain of psychology, to help steer the mind away from the negatives that it often obsesses about and toward the positives that it often only dreams about. It helps structure the thought processes to optimise effective engagement with reality.

It has been described as “The Only Proven Way to De-hypnotize Yourself From False Beliefs, Build a Powerful Self-Image, Feel Great About Yourself and Live the Life You Really, Really WANT! Inside your forebrain is a Servo-Mechanism, a goal seeking device, that leads you toward whatever you’re thinking about. If you think about success or what can help you succeed, you’re led to success. If you think about failure – you’re led somewhere else.” [FR]

A similar approach can be applied to the global mind (human culture) to help steer it towards peace, harmony and vitality.

System Science

“Our civilization seems to be suffering a second curse of Babel: Just as the human race builds a tower of knowledge that reaches to the heavens, we are stricken by a malady in which we find ourselves attempting to communicate with each other in countless tongues of scientific specialization… the only goal of science appeared to be analytical, i.e., the splitting up of reality into ever smaller units and the isolation of individual causal trains…We may state as characteristic of modern science that this scheme of isolable units acting in one-way causality has proven to be insufficient. Hence the appearance, in all fields of science, of notions like wholeness, holistic, organismic, gestalt, etc., which all signify that, in the last resort, we must think in terms of systems of elements in mutual interaction…” [FR]

“General Systems theory should be an important means of instigating the transfer of principles from one field to another (so that it would) no longer be necessary to duplicate the discovery of the same principles in different fields.” [FR]

“There is this hope, I cannot promise you whether or when it will be realized – that the mechanistic paradigm, with all its implications in science as well as in society and our own private life, will be replaced by an organismic or systems paradigm that will offer new pathways for our presently schizophrenic and self-destructive civilization.” [FR]

“The dramatic change in concepts and ideas that happened in physics during the first three decades of this century has been widely discussed by physicists and philosophers for more than fifty years…The intellectual crisis of quantum physicists in the 1920′s is mirrored today by a similar but much broader cultural crisis. The major problems of our time…are all different facets of one single crisis, which is essentially a crisis of perception…Like the crisis in quantum physics, it derives from the fact that most of us and especially our large social institutions, subscribe to the concepts of an outdated world view…At the same time researchers…are developing a new vision of reality…What we are seeing today is a shift of paradigms not only within science but also in the larger social arena…The social paradigm now receding had dominated our culture for several hundred years, during which it shaped our modern Western society and has significantly influenced the rest of the world…This paradigm consists of…the view of the world as a mechanical system, the view of the body as a machine…the view of life as a competitive struggle…the belief of unlimited progress achieved through economic and technological growth and the belief that the female is subsumed under the male…During recent decades all these assumptions have been severely limited and in need of radical revision. Indeed, such a revision is now taking place…In science, the language of systems theory and especially the theory of living systems, seems to provide the most appropriate formulation of the new ecological paradigm. I would like to now specify what is meant by the systems approach…I shall identify five criteria of systems approach…

1. Shift from the parts to the whole. The properties of the parts can be understood only from the dynamics of the whole. In fact, ultimately there are no parts at all
2. Shift from the structure to the process. In the new paradigm, every structure is seen as a manifestation of an underlying process.
3. Shift from objective to epistemic science. In the new paradigm, it is believed the epistemology – the understanding of the process of knowledge – has to be included explicitly in the description of natural phenomenon…
4. A shift from building to networks as a metaphor of knowledge. In the new paradigm, the metaphor of knowledge as a building is being replaced by that of the network.
5. Shift from truth to approximate descriptions. This insight is crucial to all modern science…in the new paradigm, it is recognized that all scientific concepts and theories are limited and approximate…

One of the most important insights of the new systems theory is that life and cognition are inseparable. The process of knowledge is also the process of self-organization, that is, the process of life. Our conventional model of knowledge is one of representation or an image of independently existing facts which is the model derived from classical physics. From, the new systems point of view, knowledge is a part of the process of life, of a dialogue between subject and object. I believe that the world view implied by modern physics is inconsistent with our present society, which does not reflect the interrelatedness we observe in nature. To achieve such a state of dynamic balance, a radically different social and economic structure will be needed; a cultural revolution in the true sense of the word. The survival of our whole civilization may depend on whether we can bring about such a change. It will depend ultimately, on our ability to…experience the wholeness of nature and the art of living with it in harmony.” [FR]

“[I]n our time, the age of information, it is systems science and cybernetics, as the general sciences of organization and communication, that can provide the basis for contemporary philosophy.” [FR]

“We in the systems sciences should be greatly concerned that we may be in a micro-Dark Age brought on by a faulty ontological assumption. True systems thinking, if it is to include natural systems, is a radical departure from the old atomistic thinking that has brought science this far. Systemics, insofar as it would be a mirror of reality, is not just about simply organizing separate entities into something we call a whole (as if it were merely a theory of organizations.) Indeed, the most significant difference between the old and the new is that the “old” fundamental concept of separateness i.e., “things,” is not a part of systemic ontology (basis of existence). The ontological basis of being, the object, is not the basis of being in systemics. Look at the black and white of this page, then look at what they are doing, that is how different the new system’s thinking is from the old.” [FR]

“A human being is part of the Whole…He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest…a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security” [FR]

“In contrast to the mechanistic Cartesian view of the world, the world-view emerging from modern physics can be characterized by words like organic, holistic, and ecological. It might also be called a systems view, in the sense of general systems theory. The universe is no longer seen as a machine, made up of a multitude of objects, but has to be pictured as one indivisible dynamic whole whose parts are essentially interrelated and can be understood only as patterns of a cosmic process” [FR]

More information:

• Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS) [FR]
• Search for (“system science”) at the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems EOLSS [FR]
• What are Cybernetics and Systems Science? [FR]
• International Society for the Systems Sciences [FR]
• International Institute for Systemic Inquiry and Integration [FR]
• Systems theory (Wikipedia) [FR]
• A Brief Explanation of General System Theory [FR]
• What is Systems Theory? (Principia Cybernetica) [FR]
• Journal of System Science and System Engineering [FR]
• Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science [FR]
• Self-organization (Principia Cybernetica) [FR]
• Understanding General Systems Theory [FR]
• Quotes From Ludwig von Bertalanffy [FR]
• Wholeness Seminar (ISSS) [FR]

• Search for (“system theory” living) [FR]
• Search for (“system science” living) [FR]
• Book: General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications (Ludwig Von Bertalanffy) [FR]
• Book: The Systems View of the World: A Holistic Vision for Our Time (Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences) (Ervin Laszlo) [FR]
• Book: An Introduction to General Systems Thinking (Gerald M. Weinberg) [FR]
• Book: Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences) (Gregory Bateson) [FR]
• Book: The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems (Fritjof Capra) [FR]

Gaia and the Living Earth

“Gaia is no mere formula–it is our own body, our flesh and our blood, the wind blowing past our ears and the hawks wheeling overhead.” [FR]

“The Gaia hypothesis is an ecological hypothesis that proposes that living and nonliving parts of the earth are viewed as a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism. Named after the Greek earth goddess, this hypothesis postulates that all living things have a regulatory effect on the Earth’s environment that promotes life overall.” [FR]

“The Gaia hypothesis, as formulated by geochemnist James Lovelock, represents a unique moment in scientific thought: the first glimpse, from within the domain of pure and precise science, that this planet might best be described as a coherent, living entity. The hypothesis itself arose in an attempt to make sense of certain anomalous aspects of the Earth’s atmosphere. It suggests that the actual stability of the atmosphere, given a chemical composition very far from equilibrium, can best be understood by assuming that the atmosphere is actively and sensitively maintained by the oceans, the soils, the plants, and the creatures–indeed, by the whole of the biosphere. In Lovelock’s own words, the hypothesis that “the entire range of living matter on Earth, from whales to viruses, and from oaks to algae, could be regarded as constituting a single living entity, capable of manipulating the Earth’s atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts.” [FR]

It is a “theory that the planet earth is one giant organism, and that we do not share its consciousness because of our scaling (like the idea that our individual cells might be conscious but they (nor us) are not aware of the other’s consciousness). we as humans, might be the equivalent of the individual neurons of our brain, forming a network of communication for the entire planet.” [FR]

“The planet has a kind of intelligence, it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being. The message that nature sends is, transform your language through a synergy between electronic culture and the psychedelic imagination, a synergy between dance and idea, a synergy between understanding and intuition, and dissolve the boundaries that your culture has sanctioned between you, to become part of this Gaian supermind.” [FR]

“One of the science fiction fantasies that haunts the collective unconscious is expressed in the phrase “a world run by machines”; in the 1950s this was first articulated in the notion, “perhaps the future will be a terrible place where the world is run by machines.” Well now, let’s think about machines for a moment. They are extremely impartial, very predictable, not subject to moral suasion, value neutral, and very long lived in their functioning. Now let’s think about what machines are made of, in the light of Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field theory. Machines are made of metal, glass, gold, silicon, plastic; they are made of what the earth is made of. Now wouldn’t it be strange if biology is a way for earth to alchemically transform itself into a self-reflecting thing. In which case then, what we’re headed for inevitably, what we are in fact creating is a world run by machines. And once these machines are in place, they can be expected to manage our economies, languages, social aspirations, and so forth, in such a way that we stop killing each other, stop starving each other, stop destroying land, and so forth. Actually the fear of being ruled by machines is the male ego’s fear of relinquishing control of the planet to the maternal matrix of Gaia.” [FR]

“Philip K. Dick has memorably suggested that we may share space-time with “Zebra,” a hypothetical gaian intelligence that we can’t see because it disguises itself as the whole environment.” [FR]

“A pair of coevolutionary creatures chasing each other in an escalating arms race can only seem to veer out of control. Likewise, a pair of cozy coevolutionary symbionts embracing each other can only seem to lead to stagnant solipsism. But Lovelock saw that if you had a vast network of coevolutionary impulses, such that no creatures could escape creating its own substrate and the substrate its own creatures, then the web of coevolution spread around until it closed a circuit of self-making and self-control… if Earth is reduced to the size of a bacteria, and inspected under high-powered optics, would it seem stranger than a virus? Gaia hovers there, a blue sphere under the stark light, inhaling energy, regulating its internal states, fending off disturbances, complexifying, and ready to transform another planet if given a chance.” [FR]

“I’ve come to the conclusion that the individual human body is no more, nor less than one of the billions of skin cells we lose every day. Each of those cells was once bursting with youth and health before it lived its allotted span, shriveled and then fell as dust. Now, if a skin cell became conscious and forgot that it was only a temporary and recyclable part of a much larger living body, it too would no doubt feel the same existential trauma experienced by all living, sentient creatures. It would fear its own demise as we do, because it would have forgotten its purpose and function within a larger context and become trapped in the illusory yet painful cage of individuality.

Like skin cells or perhaps more like immune cells, we as individuals are all part of one immense intelligent living creature which has its roots in the Cryptozoic era and its living tendrils – including us – probing forward through the untasted jelly of the 21st Century. The body of this vast and intelligent lifeform – the biota as it’s known – is still in its infancy and still at the stage in its life cycle where it must consume the planet’s resources like a caterpillar on a leaf. What looks like environmental destruction to us is, I believe, the natural acceleration of an impending metamorphosis; just as a caterpillar gorges itself to power its transformation into a butterfly, so too does the biota consume everything in its path, in preparation for its own imminent transformation into adult form.

Quite soon now, possibly within ten years even, the infant creature in the body of which we are all cells will awaken to its true nature, the concept of individuality will vanish overnight, as the imaginary walls separating our minds collapse, we will realise there is only one mind, and our mega-maggot will metamorphose, leaving the planetary cradle and the four dimensions of spacetime to be born at last as a fully-formed adult creature designed for existence in a higher dimension fluid continuum or informational supermembrane. As immune cells inside this gigantic, living, tree-like body that’s currently huffing and puffing its way towards maturity, it’s our job to do everything we can to keep the larva healthy and developing normally. That’s if we want to be born as adults into hyperspacetimelessness and quite frankly, I fancy the idea.

[T]he biota – does its thinking and its sensing through tiny, self-replicating cell-creatures like me and you and all the other examples of life on earth. All life is the same life. All thoughts are the same thought. No one dies at all, except in the way that a baby has to “die” for a child to be born and the child has to “die” for the adult to be born. That’s all death is at every stage – scary transformation. And, although individual “bodies” seem to wither, fall away, and be lost, consciousness remains as a function of the biota.” [FR]

“The cosmos is fundamentally and primarily living… Nothing seems to me more vital, from the point of view of human energy, than the appearance and eventually, the systematic cultivation of such a ‘cosmic sense’.” [FR]

“Teilhard and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Vernadsky inspired the renegade Gaia hypothesis (later set forth by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis): the global ecosystem is a superorganism with a whole much greater than the sum of its parts. This vision is clearly theological – suddenly everything, from rocks to people, takes on a holistic importance. As a Jesuit, Teilhard felt this deeply, and a handful of cyberphilosophers are now mining this ideological source as they search for the deeper implications of the Net. As Barlow says, “Teilhard’s work is about creating a consciousness so profound it will make good company for God itself.” Teilhard imagined a stage of evolution characterized by a complex membrane of information enveloping the globe and fueled by human consciousness. It sounds a little off-the-wall, until you think about the Net, that vast electronic web encircling the Earth, running point to point through a nervelike constellation of wires.” [FR]

“Is this not like some great body which is being born – with its limbs, its nervous system, its perceptive organs, its memory – the body in fact of that great living Thing which had to come to fulfill the ambitions aroused in the reflective being by the newly acquired consciousness?” [FR]

“The idea is that of the earth not only becoming covered by myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope so as to form, functionally, no more than a single vast grain of thoughtindividual reflections grouping themselves together and reinforcing one another in the act of a single unanimous reflection.” [FR] on the sidereal scale, the plurality of

“I would like you to come with me on a great adventure, an exploration of humanity’s potential as seen through the eyes of the planet, and to share with me a vision of our evolutionary future. The journey will take us beyond this place and time, allowing us to stand back and behold humanity afresh, to consider new ways of seeing ourselves in relation to the whole evolutionary process. We shall see that something miraculous may be taking place on this planet, on this blue pearl of ours. Humanity could be on the threshold of an evolutionary leap, a leap that could occur in a flash of evolutionary time, a leap such as occurs only once in a billion years… the changes leading to this leap are taking place right before our eyes– or rather right behind them, within our own minds.” [FR]

“We accept a vast range of systems as living organisms, from bacteria to blue whales, but when it comes to the whole planet we might find this concept a bit difficult to grasp. Yet until the development of the microscope less than four hundred years ago, few people realized that there are living organisms within us and around us, so small that they cannot be seen with the naked eye. Today we are viewing life from the other direction, through the “macroscope” of the Earth view, and we are beginning to surmise that something as vast as our planet could also be a living organism. This hypothesis is all the more difficult to accept because the living Earth is not an organism we can observe ordinarily outside ourselves; it is an organism of which we are an intimate part.Would a cell in our own bodies, seeing only its neighbouring cells for a short period, ever guess that the whole body is a living being in its own right?… This no longer seems so farfetched. On the contrary, an increasingly popular scientific hypothesis suggests that the most satisfactory way of understanding the planet’s chemistry, ecology, and biology is to view the planet as a single living system. The Gaia Hypothesis.” [FR] Only when we step into space can we begin to see it as a separate being…

Regarding “the similarities between aspects of society today and various phenomena in [the] sciences. In most cases these are not just analogies introduced to make a point clear; they illustrate a deeper, underlying pattern, what is technically called a homology. (The layout of bones in the forearm of a dog, elephant, seal, and bat, for example, are in each case similar to the layout in the human forearm. This is a homology revealing a more fundamental common pattern.) When we start finding consistent, underlying patterns running through the whole of evolution, they can give us a very strong reason for believing that society today may follow homologous developments.” [FR]

“self-organization is a property of the surrounding biosphere, Gaia shifts the locus of creativity from the human intellect to the enveloping world itself. The creation of meaning, value, and purpose is no longer accomplished by a ghostly subject hovering inside the human physiology [the Cartesian dualist mind and the ego]. For these things–value, purpose, meaning already abound in the surrounding landscape. The organic world is now [seen to be] filled with its own meanings, its own syntheses and creative transformations. The cacophony of weeds growing in an “empty” lot is now recognized for its essential, almost intelligent role in the planetary homeostasis, and now even a mudflat has its own mysteries akin to those of the human organism. We begin to glimpse something of the uncanny coherence of enveloping nature, a secret meaningfulness too often obscured by our abstractions. This wild proliferation is not a random chaos but a coherent community of forms, an expressive universe that moves according to a diverse logic very different from that logic we attempt to impose.” [FR]

“The consequences for our understanding of perception and the function of the human senses are important and far reaching. Traditionally perception has been taken to be a strictly one-way process whereby value-free data from the surrounding environment is collected and organized by the human organism. Just as biologists had until recently assumed, for simplicty’s sake, that life adapts to an essentially random environment, so psychologists have assumed that the senses are passive mechanisms adapted to an environment of random, chance events… But if, following the Gaia hypothesis, we can no longer define perceptions as the intake of disparate information from a mute and random environment, what then can we say that perception is?

The answer is surprisingly simple: Perception is communication. It is the constant, ongoing communication between this organism that I am and the vast organic entity of which I am apart. In more classical terms, perception is the experience of communication between the individual microcosm and the planetary macrocosm. Let us think about this for a moment. If the perceivable environment is not simply a collection of separable structures and accidental events; if, rather, the whole of this environment taken together with myself constitutes a coherent living Being “endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts,” then everything I see, everything I hear is bringing me information regarding the internal state of another living entity–the planet itself. Or rather about an entity that is both other and not-other, for as we have seen, I am entirely circumscribed by this entity, and am, indeed, one of its constituent parts… [Perception is] an exchange, no longer a one-way transfer of random data from an inert world into the human mind but a reciprocal interaction between two living presences–my own body and the vast body of the biosphere. Perhaps the term “communion” is more precise than “communication”… a deeper mode of communication, more corporeal than intellectual, a sort of sensuous immersion–a communication without words. Perception, then–the whole play of the senses–is a constant communion between ourselves and the living world that encompasses us.” [FR]

“The concept of a living biosphere enveloping the Earth provides a condition for the resolution of numerous theoretical dilemmas… the paradox engendered by the assumption that, within the physical world, awareness is an exclusively human attribute… in fact the external world is not devoid of awareness– that it is made up of numerous subjective experiences besides those of our single species–and furthermore that those myriad forms of biotic experience, human and non-human, may collectively constitute a coherent global experience, or life, that is not without its own creativity and sentience. If such is the case, as the evidence for Gaia attests, then perception is no longer a paradox, for there is not the total disjunction between “inside” and “outside” worldsJust as the interior world of our psychological experience has many qualities that are ambiguous and indeterminate, so the external world now discloses its own indeterminacy and subjectivity–its own interiority, so to speak. Perception, then, is simply the communion and deep communication between our own organic intelligence and the creativity that surrounds us.” [FR] that was previously assumed… But the reverse is also true.

“A recognition of the perceptual ramifications of the Gaia hypothesis is, I believe, essential to any genuine appraisal of the hypothesis. Without an awareness of Gaia as this very world, which we engage not only with our scientific instruments but with our eyes, our ears, our noses and our skin–without the subjective discovery of Gaia as a sensory, perceptual, and psychological power–we are apt to understand Lovelock’s discovery in exclusively bio-chemical terms, as yet another scientific abstraction, suitable for manipulating and engineering to fit our purposes. Lovelock himself, in his most recent speculations regarding the exportation of Gaia to the surface of Mars, seems oblivious to the psychological ramifications of Gaia. The idea that the living biosphere, once discovered, can be mechanically transferred, by and for humans, to another planet, overlooks the extent to which Gaia calls into question the instrumental relation which we currently maintain with our world. Recognizing Gaia from within, as a psychological presence, greatly constrains the extent to which we can consciously alter and manipulate the life of this planet for our own ends.” [FR]

More Information:

• Gaia hypothesis (Wikipedia) [FR]
• Gaia – the Living Earth [FR]
• The Gaia Hypothesis [FR]
• Various Interpretations of Gaia [FR]
• Book: Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Lovelock) [FR]
• Book: The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth (Lovelock) [FR]
• Book: Gaia’s Body: Toward a Physiology of Earth (Volk) [FR]
• Book: Chaos, Gaia, Eros: A Chaos Pioneer Uncovers the Three Great Streams of History (Abraham) [FR]
• Search for (Gaia living) [FR]
• Search for (living Earth system) [FR]
• Search for (living planet system) [FR]

Deep Ecology

“Deep ecology is a recent branch of ecological philosophy (ecosophy [FR, FR]) that considers humankind as an integral part of its environment. It places more value on other species, ecosystems and processes in nature than that in established environmental and green movements, and therefore leads to a new system of environmental ethics. The core principle of deep ecology as originally developed is Næss’s doctrine of biospheric egalitarianism — the claim that all living things have the same right to live and flourish. Deep ecology describes itself as “deep” because it is concerned with fundamental philosophical questions about the role of human life as one part of the ecosphere, rather than with a narrow view of ecology as a branch of biological science, and aims to avoid merely utilitarian environmentalism.” [FR]

“Ecological science, concerned with facts and logic alone, cannot answer ethical questions about how we should live. For this we need ecological wisdom. Deep ecology seeks to develop this by focusing on deep experience, deep questioning and deep commitment. These constitute an interconnected system. Each gives rise to and supports the other, whilst the entire system is, what Næss would call, an ecosophy: an evolving but consistent philosophy of being, thinking and acting in the world, that embodies ecological wisdom and harmony” [FR]

Deep ecology rejects “the idea that beings can be ranked according to their relative value. For example, judgements on whether an animal has an eternal soul, whether it uses reason or whether it has consciousness have all been used to justify the ranking of the human animal over other animals. Næss states that “the right of all forms (of life) to live is a universal right which cannot be quantified. No single species of living being has more of this particular right to live and unfold than any other species.” This metaphysical idea is elucidated in Warwick Fox’s claim that we and all other beings are “aspects of a single unfolding reality”. As such Deep Ecology would support the view of Aldo Leopold in his book, “A Sand County Almanac” that humans are ‘plain members of the biotic community’.” [FR]

“Scientific ecology directly implies the metaphysics of deep ecology, including its ideas about the self and further, that deep ecology finds scientific underpinnings in the fields of ecology and system dynamics. In their 1985 book Deep Ecology, Devall and Sessions describe a series of sources of deep ecology. They include the science of ecology itself, and cite its major contribution as the rediscovery in a modern context that “everything is connected to everything else“. They point out that some ecologists and natural historians, in addition to their scientific viewpoint, have developed a deep ecological consciousness, including a perspective beyond the strictly human viewpoint… A further scientific source for deep ecology adduced by Devall and Sessions is the “new physics”, which they describe as shattering Descartes’s and Newton’s vision of the universe as a machine explainable in terms of simple linear cause and effect, and instead providing a view of Nature in constant flux with the idea that observers are separate [is] an illusion. They refer to Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics and The Turning Point for their characterisation of how the new physics leads to metaphysical and ecological views of interrelatedness which according to Capra should make deep ecology a framework for future human societies.[FR] was also an influence on the development of deep ecology.” [FR] The scientific version of the Gaia hypothesis

“The central spiritual tenet of deep ecology is that the human species is a part of the Earth and not separate from it. A process of self-realisation or “re-earthing” is used for an individual to intuitively gain an ecocentric perspective. The notion is based on the idea that the more we expand the self to identify with “others” (people, animals, ecosystems), the more we realise ourselves. Transpersonal psychology has been used by Warwick Fox to support this idea. Other traditions which have influenced deep ecology include Taoism, Buddhism and Jainism primarily because they have a non-dualistic approach to subject and object. In relation to the Judeo-Christian tradition, Næss offers the following criticism: “The arrogance of stewardship [as found in the Bible] consists in the idea of superiority which underlies the thought that we exist to watch over nature like a highly respected middleman between the Creator and Creation.” This theme had been expounded in Lynn Townsend White, Jr.’s 1967 article “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis”, in which however he also offered as an alternative Christian view of man’s relation to nature that of Saint Francis of Assisi, who he says spoke for the equality of all creatures, in place of the idea of man’s domination over creation.” [FR]

“In practice, deep ecologists support decentralization, the creation of ecoregions, the breakdown of industrialism in its current form, and an end to authoritarianism… Deep ecologists welcome the labels “Gaian” and “Green” (including the broader political implications of this term, e.g. commitment to peace). Deep ecology has had a broad general influence on the green movement by providing an independent ethical platform for Green parties, political ecologists and environmentalists. The philosophy of deep ecology helped differentiate the modern ecology movement by pointing out the anthropocentric bias of the term “environment”, and rejecting the idea of humans as authoritarian guardians of the environment.” [FR]

I would question the ability of deep ecologists to know the deeper interests and ‘agenda’ of nature. They seem to have an understanding that is based primarily on the maintenance of the pre-human status quo, however the history of life on earth has shown that it does undergo systemic leaps of higher level organisation. The transition from single cells to organisms (Cambrian Explosion) is one such leap and the transition from organisms to civilisation is another (second Cambrian Explosion). Humans are a natural leap of nature and our growth is in the deepest sense ‘natural’. However our egoic obsession and destructive tendencies are unbalanced and it would also be natural to curb these in order to create more harmoniously, but our creative tendency is entirely natural. Any attempt to stop the current process of systemic evolution would most likely be applying narrow human understanding and going against the longer term interests of nature, which is to create systems of ever greater complexity and integration. Civilisation is in essence a flowering of evolution and not an abomination, but this flowering should be sensitive to the rest of nature and not be needlessly destructive.

Thus I accept most of what they say and their general understanding but some of their specific points I feel are based on a non-systemic understanding of the process of evolution. It is not possible to stop human development in order to preserve the pre-human world, which was just a passing phase along the way to future passing phases. When the first Cambrian explosion occurred the previous single cellular ecosystem was largely destroyed and gave rise to a multi-cellular ecosystem. We are now transforming into a multi-organism ecosystem and this too is natural, but we should also work in harmony with the prior ecosystem and not needlessly destroy it. The future evolution must build upon past evolution and not solely on egoic human delusions because that would bring the entire process into conflict with reality and billions of years of evolution would come crashing to an ignominious demise. But if the new cycle preserves as much as possible of the old cycle and extends it and augments it this could give rise to great abundance and the unleashing of latent potentials within the old cycle that have yet to be fully realised.

More information:

• Search for “Deep Ecology” [FR]
• The Foundation for Deep Ecology [FR]
• Deep Ecology on EnviroLink [FR]
• Articles by Stephen Harding [FR]
• The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy [FR]
• Ecofeminism [FR]
• The EarthLight Library [FR]
• Resurgence [FR]
• Earth Island Institute [FR]
• GreenSpirit [FR]
• ReligionandNature [FR]
• Sacred Earth Network [FR]

The concept of “social ecology” [FR] is also closely related: “What literally defines social ecology as “social” is its recognition of the often overlooked fact that nearly all our present ecological problems arise from deep-seated social problems. Conversely, present ecological problems cannot be clearly understood, much less resolved, without resolutely dealing with problems within society… the real battleground on which the ecological future of the planet will be decided is clearly a social one… Indeed, to separate ecological problems from social problems–or even to play down or give token recognition to this crucial relationship– would be to grossly misconstrue the sources of the growing environmental crisis. The way human beings deal with each other as social beings is crucial to addressing the ecological crisis. Unless we clearly recognize this, we will surely fail to see that the hierarchical mentality and class relationships that so thoroughly permeate society give rise to the very idea of dominating the natural world.” [FR]

Ecopsychology

“Ecopsychology [FR] connects psychology and ecology in a new scientific paradigm. The political and practical implications are to show humans ways of healing alienation and to build a sane society and a sustainable culture. Theodore Roszak is credited with coining the term in his 1992 book, The Voice of the Earth. This was a call for the development of a field in which Psychology would go out of the built environment to examine why people continue to behave in “crazy” ways that damage the environment, and the environmental movement would find new ways to motivate people to action, ways more positive than protest... there are a variety of other names used to describe this field: Psychoecology [FR], ecotherapy [FR], environmental psychology [FR], global therapy [FR], green therapy [FR], Earth-centered therapy [FR], reearthing [FR], nature-based psychotherapy [FR], shamanic counselling [FR], sylvan therapy [FR].” [FR]

“Writing in the early 1980s, Hillman conjectured that the environmental degradation we see around us in the external world might be studied by psychiatrists in much the same way that they examine disturbed dreams or sexual fantasies–as projections of psychopathic symptoms. He urged that “asbestos and food additives, acid rain and tampons, insecticides and pharmaceuticals, car exhausts and sweeteners, televisions and ions” be brought within the province of therapeutic analysis: “Psychology always advances its consciousness by means of pathologized revelations, through the underworld of our anxiety. Our ecological fears announce that things are where the soul now claims psychological attention.” But old orthodoxies die hard. In a recent interview with John O’Neil, president of the California School of Professional Psychology, I asked what part our relations with the natural environment play in mainstream psychiatric training and practice. “That’s an easy one,” O’Neil answered. “None.”… [However] a number of adventurous psychologists are at last seeking to create ecologically relevant forms of therapy… psychologists are (however belatedly) responding to the influence of the environmental movement… the goal is… to expand the framework of psychiatric thought to include the natural environment. The history of psychiatry might be told as just such an ongoing effort to broaden the context of analysis: from the individual to the family to the workplace to the society and culture at large. Each of these extensions has brought with it new insights for diagnosis and treatment; each has also deepened the public’s understanding of human nature. Ecopsychologists believe that the time has come to define sanity within a biospheric context.

During the 1960s a growing number of psychologists came to realize that there were sources of anxiety and forms of neurotic behavior that could be treated only if the entire family were brought into analysis… Similarly, ecopsychologists suspect that there are forms of neurosis, perhaps including the most emotionally corrosive kind, that trace back to our entrenched alienation from the natural environment. The crowded industrial city, with its killing pace and compulsive habits of consumption, may disseminate an “urban madness” that exacts a heavy toll upon both the person and the planet.” [FR]

“A conference titled “Psychology as if the Whole World Mattered” was held in 1990 at the Harvard-based Center for Psychology and Social Change. There a gathering of ecopsychologists concluded that “if the self is expanded to include the natural world, behavior leading to destruction of the world will be experienced as self-destruction.” One speaker, Walter Christie, assistant chief of psychiatry at the Maine Medical Center, observed that the illusion of separateness we create in order to utter the words “I am” is part of our problem in the modern world. We have always been far more a part of great patterns on the globe than our fearful egos can tolerate knowing …. To preserve nature is to preserve the matrix through which we can experience our souls and the soul of the planet Earth.” [FR]

It is vital for humanity to remember that human civilisation is not beyond the bounds of ‘nature’, that it is a naturally arising complex adaptive system and that a leaf was once a new technology much like a solar panel is now, the only difference is our obsession with human egos and our erroneous belief that egos are outside of nature, but they are not. This human civilisation is a living system much like an organism where we ourselves are the cells, hence when the field of psychoanalysis is expanded to encompass the ecosystem it should be recognised that human civilisation is an important part of the global ecosystem. In this respect this analysis converges with that of deep ecology. I do not define ‘ecosystem’ in narrow traditional terms that are based on erroneous egoic beliefs but simply as the overall living system that permeates this planet, and human civilisation is one of the most influential and by far the most destructive part of that ecosystem. It is civilisation that is most unbalanced and most in need of macro-psychoanalysis especially due to its egoic obsession which makes it vulnerable to delusion and dysfunction. But this doesn’t just happen on a macro-scale, all levels are interlinked, the macro-scale is an emergent phenomenon that is determined by the micro-interactions.

Hence “we each need to change ourselves (substantially) first to be able to make fundamental and lasting changes to the system (and the world) that we have created, as these systems are reflections of the developmental stages of ourselves (see Taylor, 1991). A few commentators assert that there is a cultural crisis in Western society that requires attention, a soul sickness creeping into Western society (Hickman, 2000). This view fits with another that argues for the transformation of society, advocating systemic changes based on a different ethical worldview. Ecopsychologists, environmental philosophers, new agers and indigenous leaders describe the disease of our society, and offer a value-laden approach that they espouse as necessary to address the systemic problems of Western, modern society. Structuralism proponents theorise that we are subject to the social and institutional structures that we operate within; a structuration viewpoint counters this deterministic approach by noting that human agency also creates these structures (see Giddens, 1979). By harnessing the agency within each of us and tying it to a cause that has moral weight, structures could change as part of a cultural imperative. The worldwide ecotastrophe is becoming more severe in its dimensions of late, including a wide array of social problems evidenced by increasing numbers of people succumbing to stress, depression, drug and alcohol abuse, and even suicide, while many others develop lifestyle diseases (e.g. diabetes and heart disease). The drive for sustainability is developing into a powerful global movement that cannot be ignored, but this drive still largely relies on experts and the government for doing most of the hard work for the rest of society. The personal contribution that each of us can make to sustainability is mentioned, but without a program to tap into this resource, there is little advancement in this arena.” [FR]

“The condition of modern, Western society is examined… the root causes of our society’s unsustainable condition are considered through a new approach, becoming ecosynchronous… the unfolding of self (becoming) and being aware of events that are meaningfully related (synchronicity)… The limitations of a shallow ecology approach are discussed and juxtaposed with philosophical and psychological root causes of systemic failure. This includes reviews of the long-term cycles of civilizations, the decline of a sacred relationship with nature, the Western view of reality, ecopsychology, ecofeminism, sense of place and consumerism/busyness. A shift to an ecocentric position is advocated, as is an emphasis on personal development, with direction offered toward becoming more sustainable…” [FR]

“The cosmology of the late 20th century has come to see the universe as an evolving hierarchy of physical and biological systems that reach back to the initial conditions that followed the Big Bang. With that perception, we reverse Freud’s worldview and all the psychology based upon it. In place of the inevitable heat death, we have the astonishing ordered complexity of natural systems holding out indefinitely against entropic exhaustion. In place of cosmic alienation, we have life and mind as fully at home in the universe as any of the countless systems from which they evolve. More hypothetically we have the possibility that the self-regulating biosphere continues in some sense to “speak” through the human unconscious, making its voice heard even within the framework of modern urban culture… [The book] The Voice of the Earth [FR], suggests that an “ecological unconscious” lies at the core of the psyche, there to be drawn upon as a means for restoring us to environmental harmony. The idea is speculative-but then, psychological theories never set out to prove, only to persuade. They are best seen as commitments to understanding people in certain ways. Under the influence of the environmental movement, ecopsychology commits itself to understanding people as actors on a planetary stage who shape and are shaped by the biospheric system. Even if that commitment never qualifies as more than a hypothesis, it can make a significant political difference.

[How does one effectively communicate these ideas?] “Call someone’s entire way of life into question– as environmental activists are prone to do–and what you are apt to produce is defensive rigidity… If psychology needs ecology in order to find an adequate image of human nature, ecology also needs psychology in order to find more sensitive ways to address the public it wishes to persuade. In this effort, the environmental movement has other means to draw upon besides shock and shame. Ecopsychology holds that there is a sympathetic bond between our species and the planet that is every bit as tenacious as the sexual and aggressive instincts Freud found in the depths of the psyche. The “greening of psychology” begins with matters as familiar to all of us as the empathic rapport with the natural world that is reborn in every child… the result is spontaneous loyalty. Even some militant environmental activists are coming to see the importance of integrating that instinctive “call of the wild” into the basic psychology of the movement. Dave Foreman, one of the country’s most prominent “ecowarriors,” reminds his colleagues that the greater goal of all they do is to “open our souls to love this glorious, luxuriant, animated planet.”To forget that is “counterproductive, and . . . damaging to our personal mental health.” [FR]

More information:

• Overview of Ecopsychology [FR]
• Ecopsychology On-line [FR]
• International Community for Ecopsychology [FR]

• Project NatureConnect: Ecopsychology in Action [FR]

• Search for ‘ecopsychology’ [FR]

• Book: The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Roszak) [FR]
• Search for “Theodore Roszak” [FR]
• eBook: Ecopsychology: A Combination of Ecology, Psychology and Religion [FR]

Modern Sociology

“In the now dated lexicon of cold war ideology, the term totalitarianism symbolized the maximal authoritarianism of a politically organized state, designed to control both the outer and inner dimensions of human existence… [it] artificially divided the world into falsely fixed and immutable dichotomies – of command and market economies, of powerless masses and democracy, of state domination and the countervailing forces of civil society… Alternative conceptions… were and continue to be, dismissed by ideological fiat…”

We must “advance the discourse of hegemony beyond the epistemological limitations of (1) political conceptions of totalitarian state coercion and (2) …class based ideological domination realized through the well-known institutions of civil society… the structural and ideological forces of globalization have transformed and weakened the institutions of both state and civil society… these constructs are fitted for an earlier era and are thus the premises of yesterday’s debate… above and beyond what Habermas would explain as the legitimation crisis of Western states – is a systemic crisis on a world scale… the critique of hegemony in the twenty-first century cannot be restricted by Western state prototypical assumptions… A new quality of mind, a new imagination, is necessary to grasp the essence of hegemonic crisis at the global/systemic level.“

“In contemporary sociology, the conception of international relations and state-based geopolitics, has been transcended by the concept of a global system. The processes of globalization cannot be explained by recourse to paradigms rooted in conceptions of nations, states and societies. The fundamental process is economic/financial as exemplified in the world integrated structure of transnational corporations, banks and stock markets…”

“…Transnational media and telecommunications corporations, wire services and the explosion of the world wide web, together signal the modernization of ideological hegemony. The interrelated doctrines of growth, free trade, an international division of labor and markets, and hyperconsumption permeate national cultures and psychological consciousness… the inner world of consciousness, beliefs and values, is shaped by the global media of distraction and distortion. The development and diffusion of technology with marketing, advertising and consumption applications, is of particular concern. Such forces strike at the core of traditional cultures and alternative values, seeking in their place a new metaphorical paradise; one resembling a homogeneous, global, electronic shopping mall.“

“Thus at the cultural/ideological level, the coming integration of television programming, on-line consumption and technical forms of education by means of the world wide web compel social scientists and philosophers to attempt the reconstruction of ideological hegemony… the global system is producing and reproducing a transnational managerial elite… Whatever the hemisphere or stage of development, and whatever the economic, financial or political sector, the social relations of the new global elite are founded in a shared commitment to growth based modernization…” [FR]

More Information:

• Philosophical Aspects of Globalization: Basic Theses on the Interrelation of Economics, Politics, Morals and Metaphysics in a Globalized World [FR]
• Globalization: A Multidisciplinary Perspective [FR]
• Globalisation and the Status of the Territorial State [FR]
• The War on Terror, its Impact on the Sovereignty of Nations, and its Implications for Human Rights and Civil Liberties [FR]
• The Use of Force in International Relations Challenges to Collective Security [FR]
• Globalization and its Challenges to National Cultures and Values: A Perspective from Sub-Saharan Africa [FR]
• Philosophical Foundations of Civilizational Dialogue: The Hermeneutics of Cultural Self-Comprehension versus the Paradigm of Civilizational Conflict [FR]
• Search for (sociology totalitarianism OR globalization OR civilisation) [FR]

Philosophy

“While each scientific theory selects out and abstracts from the world’s complexity a peculiar set of relations, philosophy cannot favor any particular region of human enterprise. Through conceptual experimentation it must construct a consistency that can accommodate all dimensions of experience, whether they belong to physics, physiology, psychology, biology, ethics, etc..” [FR]

“Creativity is the principle of novelty. Creativity introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the universe disjunctively. The creative advance is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates. The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds and also it is one among the disjunctive ‘ many’ which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesises. The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively ‘many’ in process of passage into conjunctive unity… Thus the ‘production of novel togetherness’ is the ultimate notion embodied in the term concrescence. These ultimate notions of ‘production of novelty’ and ‘concrete togetherness’ are inexplicable either in terms of higher universals or in terms of the components participating in the concrescence. The analysis of the components abstracts from the concrescence. The sole appeal is to intuition.” [FR]

“Alfred North Whitehead… said that history grows toward what he called a “nexus of completion.” And these nexuses of completion themselves grow together into what he called the “concrescence.” A concrescence exerts a kind of attraction, which can be thought of as the temporal equivalent of gravity, except all objects in the universe are drawn toward it through time, not space. As we approach the lip of this cascade into concrescence, novelty, and completion, time seems to speed up and boundaries begin to dissolve. The more boundaries that dissolve, the closer to the concrescence we are. When we finally reach it, there will be no boundaries, only eternity as we become all space and time, alive and dead, here and there, before and after. Because this singularity can simultaneously co-exist in states that are contradictory, it is something which transcends rational apprehension. But it gives the universe meaning, because all processes can be seen to be seeking and moving in an effort to approximate, connect with, and append to this transcendental object at the end of time.” [FR]

“Process metaphysics, in general, seeks to elucidate the developmental nature of reality, emphasizing becoming rather than static existence or being. It also stresses the inter-relatedness of all entities. Process describes reality as ultimately made up of experiential events rather than enduring inert substances.” [FR]

“The self…is always located at ‘nodal points’ of specific communications circuits.…No one, not even the least privileged among us, is ever entirely powerless over the messages that traverse and position him at the post of sender, addressee, or referent.” [FR]

“This sense of secret sharing helps explain the growing desire to transcode the real, as when one signal source (Web traffic, a trumpet, the rate of rainforest loss) is translated into data that mutates into another form (3D models, machine rhythms, articulations of a robot arm). What exactly happens in these events? Are the patterns and affects suggested by such processes part of the world, or simply artifacts of the criteria of translation? This ancient problem–is the form in the world or the eye?–suspends itself in the new operations of the transcoding mix, which makes the phenomena it describes. The nodes around us – the nodes that we are – are not passive switches, but grow in strength and insight through their range of materials, the nature and novelty of their connections and mutual exchanges. Cosmic eros is not exhausted, and implosion may only be a media-induced hallucination of an emerging nest of integration.” [FR]

More information:

• Search for (philosophy Whitehead) [FR]
• Search for (“process philosophy”) [FR]
• Search for (philosophy Lyotard) [FR]
• Search for (philosophy Foucault) [FR]
• Search for (philosophy Derrida) [FR]
• Search for (philosophy Habermas) [FR]
• Search for (philosophy postmodern environment) [FR]
• Search for (philosophy postmodern environment OR ecosystem OR ecology) [FR]

Tags: collective-intelligence, complex-adaptive-system, complexity, cybernetic-cultural, cybernetics, ecology, emergent-phenomena, Gaia, global-brain, global-mind, mass-communication, philosophy, psychology, sociology, system-theory

Read more | Comments off | August 22nd, 2009

Collective Intelligence

Posted by john.ringland | Filed under Wider Context

In a sense, creating a semantic web application is like incubating a cybernetic/memetic entity that will live and function within both the semantic web and the network of socio-cultural relations within the emerging global culture. Thus it is useful to consider the state of the cybernetic / cultural environment within which such an entity will live and hopefully thrive for the benefit of us all.

The following are some notes on the emergent systemic phenomena that arise when millions of people get together on the web, and how a semantic web application may fit in. The text is largely borrowed from my previous writings on the subject.

Collective Mind

In a simplistic sense it could be said that civilisation is the collective brain and culture is the collective mind of the planet. Just as the holistic resonance between neurons creates the emergent phenomena of an individual mind, so too our culture is a resonance between individual minds. It is a memeplex [FR] that has its roots in our individual minds but it stretches out, via communication, through the many social networks and binds minds together into a collective resonance. Our minds come to resonate together and we lose some of our individuality but gain from the collective value, which arises from our interconnectivity. We become drawn into culturally conditioned ways of being and interacting, but these can either augment our lives or diminish them, depending on the health and sanity of the collective.

In a sense civilisation itself is the growth of a global brain and history itself is the cultural memories held by the global mind. We as neurons within the brain cannot discern the states of the whole mind but we each experience the information that is channelled through us and from this we can learn much about the overall state of the whole mind. The process has been building momentum for a long time and has been accelerating towards full consciousness and self-awareness. In recent times, since the development of a global telecommunications network and computer technology the process has accelerated enormously.

Semantic Social Applications

Semantic social applications will be amongst the most active denizens of the cybernetic / cultural ecosystem of the near future. They draw upon people’s innate desire and need to connect with people and through that with a vast culture of groups, ideas, events and movements.

I believe that the greatest potential of semantic social web applications is playing a part in providing the emerging collective entity with low-level self awareness by giving each person awareness of the collective entity at various resolutions and from various perspectives. The internet allows us to communicate but a global semantic-social-web would give insight into the networks of interactions and self-organising structures that are emerging, thus providing a feedback loop that helps those structures to self-organise.

What we call ‘culture’ is the emergent conscious mind of the collective entity, and the semantic web is central to its emergence. The low-level conscious self-awareness provided by a global-semantic-social-web could eventually help the collective to evolve towards full sentience.

This is perhaps the main reason why I’m interested in such applications and would like to see them thrive and multiple as an open, globally distributed platform that is integrated into the semantic web and maintained by vibrant and active open source communities.

This is of course a long term vision but regardless of which particular applications evolve to fill that niche in the emerging collective psyche, that niche is there to be filled.

Tags: collective-intelligence, cybernetic-cultural, emergent-phenomena, global-brain, global-mind, mass-communication, meme, ontology, open-source, semantic-web, social-network, social-web

Read more | Comments off | August 18th, 2009

Some Semantic Resources

Posted by john.ringland | Filed under Semantic Resources

Links to this information and much more can be found on the twine, however here is a selection along with a little information about each.

Semantic Web in a Nutshell

“The Semantic Web is a web of data. There is lots of data we all use every day, and its not part of the [semanitc] web. I can see my bank statements on the [internet], and my photographs, and I can see my appointments in a calendar. But can I see my photos in a calendar to see what I was doing when I took them? Can I see bank statement lines in a calendar?

Why not? Because we don’t have a web of data. Because data is controlled by applications, and each application keeps it to itself.

The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where… the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.” (W3C Semantic Web Activity)

“For the World Wide Web, the level of granularity is the retrievable file. For the Web of Data, it is the information in that file. Moreover, this information is not necessarily contained in a file. There existence is predicated on their URI. Their meaning is predicated on their relationship to other URIs. The web of URIs is the Web of Data…

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is the standard for representing the relationship between URIs and literals (e.g. float, string, date time, etc.)…   RDF is a data model. As such, there exists many serializations (encoding formats) of that model. RDF/XML is not RDF. It is a serialization of RDF. It is smart to, at all costs, avoid learning RDF/XML as it is an unintuitive standard. Other serializations include: N-TRIPLE, N3, TRIX, TRIG…

The Web of Data is a distributed database….   Web of Data graph databases maintain public access points called SPARQL end-points. Web of Data graph databases tend to reuse and extend public schemas called ontologies.” (Graph Databases and the Future of Large-Scale Knowledge Management)

For a broad overview  see the 8min video Tim Berners Lee on the Semantic Web .

Ontologies

Rather than create a separate ontology for each application domain it is best to consider what other ontologies already provide the required concepts and relations. It is generally best to integrate with standard ontologies rather than have a proliferation of overlapping ontologies. For social oriented applications some useful ontologies are:

• FOAF
  Describes online social network entities such as person, name, knows (acquaintance of some kind), user account, homepage, etc, etc.
• vCard
  Describes virtual business card info. Describes person, address, organisation, mobile_number, location, etc, etc.
• RELATIONSHIP
  An ontology for describing relationships between people such as, acquaintance_of, child_of, employed_by, colleague_of, enemy_of, etc, etc.
• SIOC
  “The SIOC initiative (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) aims to enable the integration of online community information. SIOC provides a Semantic Web ontology for representing rich data from the Social Web in RDF. It has recently achieved significant adoption through its usage in a variety of commercial and open-source software applications, and is commonly used in conjunction with the FOAF vocabulary for expressing personal profile and social networking information. By becoming a standard way for expressing user-generated contentfrom such sites, SIOC enables new kinds of usage scenarios for online community site data, and allows innovative semantic applications to be built on top of the existing Social Web.”
• SemSNA (Semantic Social Network Analysis Ontology)
  A social network analysis ontology as RDF vocabulary. Defines concepts usefrom the field of social network analysis.

Ontologies are extensible so you can mix several ontologies together, pick the bits you want to use, extend them and add extra elements if you want. Here is a very simple people ontology using the FOAF, SIOC and RELATIONSHIP ontologies to describe some facts about four people and a project.

The instance diagram below shows the overall model and the class hierarchy that follows it shows the classes that can be instantiated and also extended. Most of the possible properties (relations) are not shown. Look at the owl file to see the full details.

Note: the ontology was created using the Topbraid Composer Eclipse plugin and was visualised using CytoscapeRDFScape. So far this is the best combination of OWL composition tools that I have come across (if you know of better ones then PLEASE let me know. with

What is the Linked Data Cloud?

“It’s the moniker for the growing collection of Linked Data sources being injected into the Web by the Linking Open Data Community. As Kingsley Idehen stated in his recent blog post, “Semantic Web: Travails to Harmony Illustrated”, harmonious intersections of instance data, data dictionaries (schemas, ontologies, rules etc.) provide a powerful substrate (smart data) for the development and deployment of “People” and/or “Machine” oriented solutions.” (The OpenLink Data Explorer Extension)

The semantic web is a distributed web of data within which each resource is self documenting and linked into a web of resources. See this virtuoso region map and this DBpedia region map.

“By providing bridges between areas of interest and knowledge, the Linked Data Web can reveal relationships where information might otherwise be seen as unrelated. For instance, one might explore which industry and government leaders had previously been classmates or were somehow connected by family.

The OpenLink Data Explorer enables a user to browse from one “thing” to another just as easily as they would click from one page to another with standard hyperlinked document browsing, but with greater understanding and comprehension from the first click.” (The OpenLink Data Explorer Extension)

This cloud is a distributed semantically linked knowledge space from which a semantic application’s data can be queried. By utilising a framework such as this there would be no need for the application itself to crawl and index and store information from the web.

This would simplify the design of the application’s backend, from being a distributed network of data servers to an interface into the linked data cloud and other freely available semantic data sources.

Here are the major points paraphrased from Creating, Deploying and Exploiting Linked Data (view the slides for details and graphics):

The linked data cloud is a Giant Global Graph of Named Data Sources where Hyperdata Links provide the Link Tapestry. It is an evolution of the Web where the Description of anything is discernible via it’s Data Source Name (URI). It provides an Open Data Access & Connectivity mechanism for the Web. It delivers a powerful mechanism for meshing disparate and heterogeneous structured data sources. Structured Data enables natural Joining (Meshing) via Data Links, which deliver Transparency and Concept visibility on the Web via Linked Data.

User Generated Content is Growing Exponentially. Enterprise & Individual Connectivity is Growing. Everything we do in IT ultimately comes down to Access, Manipulation, and Dissemination of Data across a spectrum of Context vectors. Simply “Peel-Back” the containment of Applications by integrating Linked Data Source Names.

Linked data gives global access to “Data” using:

• Data Source Names (Identifiers).
• Data Portability across current Data Silos
• HTTP based Open Database Connectivity – Platform Independent Data & Information Access
• Linked Data Spaces – The New Distributed Data Containers for the Web
• Real Collective Intelligence – Intelligent Network Traversal

Thus providing Conceptual interaction with Heterogeneous Data Sources that transcends:

• DBMS engine models
• DBMS engine vendors APIs
• SOA Web Services
• Host Operating Systems

How to use it?

• Give Names to things you describe so that they become uniquely Identifiable Resources (Data Sources)
• Incorporate HTTP into your naming scheme so that you expand data access scope across your internal and external networks.
• Use the RDF Data Model to describe your Resources.
• Use HTTP-based Resource Names (URIs) when creating RDF Data Model records (Triples).

Thus we create:

• A World Wide Web of Named Data Sources (Compound Documents and Entities are distinctly named).
• A web without data silos and fragmented knowledge spaces.
• Here Context [as opposed to Content] becomes King!
• Meshing (natural data linking) will replace Mashing (brute-force data linking).
• “Crystallization of Information at Your Fingertips” vision without platform comprises

Construction & Deconstruction of Social-Networks will become a loose function of data links exposed via:

• Our Tags
• Our Interests
• Our Realms of Discourse (comments associated with Blogs, Wikis, and other Data Spaces on the Web)

It facilitates:

• Broadening our perspectives (pivoting on data behind documents)
• Serendipitous Discovery of relevant things via the Web
• Exploitation of collective intelligence via Discourse, Discovery and Participation

Useful Applications / Tools

• Jena – A Semantic Web Framework for Java
  Jena is an open source Java framework for building Semantic Web applications. It provides a programmatic environment for RDF, RDFS and OWL, SPARQL and includes a rule-based inference engine. See the Jena RDF Tutorial.
• Semweb4j
  Java libraries for semantic application development.
• OWL API
  a Java interface and implementation for OWL.
• Pellet
  Pellet is an open source reasoner for OWL 2 DL in Java. It provides standard and cutting-edge reasoning services for OWL ontologies.
• Foaf-A-Matic
  This is a site that provides a simple interface to construct Semantic Web data according to the FOAF ontology.[1]
• Linked Data Web
  “By providing bridges between areas of interest and knowledge, the Linked Data Web can reveal relationships where information might otherwise be seen as unrelated. For instance, one might explore which industry and government leaders had previously been classmates or were somehow connected by family.

The OpenLink Data Explorer enables a user to browse from one “thing” to another just as easily as they would click from one page to another with standard hyperlinked document browsing, but with greater understanding and comprehension from the first click.”(Info + Firefox Plugin)

Web 2.0 API’s

See this general list of API’s as well as this list of over 70 social API’s. A few API’s worth noting here are:

• OpenSocial
  OpenSocial is an API standard used by many API providers, not just Google. For all compatible APIs listed on ProgrammableWeb, use the opensocial tag. OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social networks friends and update feeds. There are two ways to access the OpenSocial API: client-side using the JavaScript API and server-side using RESTful data APIs. More info.
• Opensosius
  Use the API to access both the social data that links people, networks and groups, and the data stored by users within their workspaces. The API uses OAuth authentication. Build online and desktop applications such as a Google map mash-up of your networks, make desktop widgets, or provide powerful syncing tools with full permissions and version controls. Sosius has support for the XHTML Friends Network (XFN) standard and for the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) standard.
• Virtuoso Sponger
  The Virtuoso Server provides an RDF proxy service that takes as argument a target URL and may return content as-is or will try to transform with SPARQL sponger and return RDF data representing the target. In case of transformation to RDF the serialization of the output can be forced by a URL parameter of by content negotiation. (ref)Virtuoso is an open source high-performance object-relational SQL database. As a database, it provides transactions, a smart SQL compiler, powerful stored-procedure language with optional Java and .Net server-side hosting, hot backup, SQL-99 support and more. It has all major data-access interfaces, such as ODBC, JDBC, ADO .Net and OLE/DB.Virtuoso has a built-in web server which can serve dynamic web pages written in Virtuoso’s web language (VSP) as well as PHP, ASP .net,  and others. This same web server provides SOAP and REST access to Virtuoso stored procedures, supporting a broad set of WS protocols such as WS-Security, WS-Reliable Messaging and others. A BPEL4WS run time is also available as part of Virtuoso’s SOA suite.Virtuoso provides automatic metadata extraction and full text searching for supported content types. A single SQL statement, whether executed by a SQL client, storedprocedure or dynamic web page can transparently mix data across local and remote tables spread across any number of data sources. Virtuoso’s  data access interfaces are all industry standards compliant (XML, Web Services, ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, and OLE DB) thereby broadening the number of applications, tools, and application development environments capable of exploiting this Virtual Database functionality.

  OpenLink Virtuoso supports SPARQL embedded into SQL for querying RDF data stored in Virtuoso’s database. SPARQL benefits from low-level support in the engine itself, such as SPARQL-aware type-casting rules and a dedicated IRI data type. This is the newest and fastest developing area in Virtuoso.

  Framework hosting describes how Virtuoso delivers Virtual Web Application Server functionality by supporting a variety of  Web Application scripting and programming environments -which may or may not accompany one of the hosted runtimes. The supported environments include: ASP.NET for  Microsoft .NET/Mono, Java Server Pages for Java, and PHP. The implications are that you can deploy any Web Application to Virtuoso that has been developed using any of these environments. You do not have to re-write your web applications in order to take advantage of the benefits offered by Virtuoso.

  Does that mention of Java mean it could run JRuby on Rails? If not there is the OpenLink Rails ODBC Adapter that gives ActiveRecord (Rails) transparent access to data in virtuoso databases, so they could interact.

  See the Virtuoso Universal Server web service platform faq and the Virtuoso’s Universal Server Architecture (Conceptual & Technical), which gives an overview of what it ‘is’ and ‘does’ in two diagrams.

  Download it for linux 5.0.11 or mac 5.0.5 – released under a GPL license. According to this press releaseAmazon EC2. commercial hosting is available on

  Sponger is built-in RDF middleware for transforming non-RDF data into RDF “on the fly”. Its goal is to use non-RDF Web data sources as input, e.g. (X)HTML Web Pages, (X)HTML Web pages hosting microformats, and even Web services such as those from Google, Del.icio.us, Flickr etc., and create RDF as output. The implication of this facility is that you can use non-RDF data sources as Linked Data Web data sources.

  Also see these slides Extracting RDF Structured Data from Non-RDF Sources.

  Below is a diagram from Creating, Deploying and Exploiting Linked Data (which is a good introduction)

• Twine
  Is a semantic web API that may be useful to semantic applications. See the twine overview for an example web interface implemented using it. The API is not yet public but it is useful to know it is coming.Quotes from Nova Spivack on twine:“The social graph connects people and twine connects everything. It’s a semantic graph–connecting people, places, companies, products, Web pages, videos, photos and turning it into semantic Web content…

  Twine uses natural language processing and statistical, link and graph analysis, as well as Web crawling, data mining and machine learning to figure out what information users put into the system is about, what it means and what is should be related to. Then Twine connects it and organizes it for you automatically…

  Twine platform hides much of the complexity from developers. “If you know how to write code in Java or Javascript, you can use our system. We support the standards but we don’t force users to use them, and we have a more efficient way of storing data than just raw RDF… We have APIs, REST and SPARQL to get data in and out of Twine…

  As Twine learns, it helps you to search better. Social search is based on the semantic graph. It ranks information in a couple of different ways—by relevance, time and relative to me, meaning the social distance from me in the semantic graph,” Spivack said. “We also have a new way to rank information based probability analysis of the semantic graph and how you are connected to the information, showing you stuff that is likely to be from sources you trust or is things you would be interested in. Basically it combines social and semantic search—the more you put it, the more it learns about you.”

Example Applications

• The OpenLink Data Explorer
  browse the linked data cloud.
• Semantic Discovery System (video and webstart demo)
  SDS is a semantic application that lets the user ask and answer any question that spans diverse data sources such as spreadsheets, databases and web services. This mean a much faster time to answer any one question or generate a report. It opens up new ways of exploring large volumes of data in real time. (ref)
• Zoetrope Interacting with the Ephemeral Web
  Zoetrope is a system that enables interaction with the historical Web (pages, links, and embedded data) that would otherwise be lost to time. Using a number of novel interactions, the temporal Web can be manipulated, queried, and analyzed from the context of familar pages. Zoetrope is based on a set of operators for manipulating content streams. We describe these primitives and the associated indexing strategies for handling temporal Web data. They form the basis of Zoetrope and enable our construction of new temporal interactions and visualizations.
• Flink
  Semantic Web Technology for the Extraction and Analysis of Social Networks
  
• Ontology Based Knowledge Discovery in Social Networks
  Describes a social network analysis application used for intelligence purposes.
• InFlow 3.1
  Performs network analysis and network visualization in one integrated product
• TrackingTheThreat
  Anti-terrorist social network analysis tools such as network navigator and Sentinel .
• Nexus (FaceBook app)
  Creates a graph of your social network and finds commonalities between your friends.
• tools and visualizations for your social network
  List of links to tools.

General Info

Graph Data

• Graph Databases and the Future of Large-Scale Knowledge Management (slides)
  Graph databases can store on the order of 1-10 billion relationships. Making them practical for applications that require large-scale knowledge structures. Moreover, with the Web of Data standards set forth by the Linked Data community, it is possible to interlink graph databases across the web into a giant global knowledge structure. This talk discusses graph databases, their underlying data model, their querying mechanisms, and the benefits of the graph data structure for modeling and analysis.
• Neo Database Introduction (article)
  An introduction to the Neo database, a next­ generation database… an overview of what Neo does and
  the benefits and drawbacks of using Neo in your application development. It will also try to give a glimpse of how Neo works and how developing with Neo is different from developing with a relational database.
• Analyzing and adapting graph algorithms for large persistent graphs (using neo4j)
  Examines implementing common graph algorithms on top of Neo4j. Examples of such algorithms are presented together with their theoretical backgrounds. These are mainly algorithms for finding shortest paths and algorithms for different graph measures such as centrality measures. The implementations that have been made are presented, as well as complexity analysis and the performance measures performed on them. The conclusions include that Neo4j is well suited for these types of implementations.

Semantic Web Application Development

Semantic Web Programming Webinar (finished but learning material still available)
A step-by-step, code-based approach to enable you to quickly master the fundamentals in building a Semantic Web application. We quickly establish the key Semantic Web Programming impacts and concepts such as RDF, OWL, SPARQL, and SWRL along with programming tools such as the Jena Semantic Web Framework and the Pellet Reasoner. We dynamically build a social network knowledge model based on OWL. We navigate through the model to show friend networks and attributes. We then query the model for specific friend characteristics such as friends that have related interests or similar locations. Next, we integrate and align social network ontologies and instance data. This alignment information guides the semantic reasoner to infer relationships across the entire integrated model. We then query the unified model with concepts that extend our social network seamlessly across the multiple information ontologies – our friends are our friends regardless of origin. Along the way we export the unified model in various formats for discovery, sharing, and integration such as RDF/XML and Turtle along with other formats such as RDFa/HTML for others to use.I downloaded the slides and code – it looks detailed and comprehensive. To download it (108M) click here and login with:
username: j1hol09-test
password: j1holtest

Social Network Analysis

• Network Analysis of Semantic Connections in Heterogeneous Social Spaces (article)
  “The traditional idea of a social network as a set of individuals and relationships is deficient in that it does not consider the shared objects which bring people together. By taking into account the role of external objects in social relations, we can glean a more thorough understanding of the factors which influence the formation of interpersonal links. We investigate an object-centred social network extracted from the Semantic Web. We analyse the patterns of connectivity that exist among objects and people, and examine the role of objects in creating social ties.”
• Current issues with Social Network Representations (article)
  General issues related to data representation.
• Social Interaction Ontology (slides)
• Social Network Analysis on the Semantic Web – Techniques and Challenges for Visualizing FOAF (article)
• Social networks and the Semantic Web (book)
  The first case study shows the possibilities of tracking a research community over the Web, combining the information obtained from the Web with other data sources, and analyzing the results.
• Articles on Social Network Analysis (at I-Know blog)
• A State of the Art on Social Network Analysis and its Applications on a Semantic Web (slides)
• semantic social network analysis (slides)
• Leveraging Social data with Semantics (article)
  Image from the article:

Tags: application-development, Cytoscape, diagram, giant-global-graph, linked-data, links-and-descriptions, ontology, open-source, OWL, RDFScape, semantic-application, semantic-web, social-network, Topbraid-composer, web-application, web-of-data

Read more | Comments off | August 18th, 2009

Initial Overview

Posted by john.ringland | Filed under Semantic Resources

Firstly, I am accumulating links from my research on this twine.

Below is a brief overview of the architectural vision for a semantic web application, which is forming in my mind. This is just a first draft and I am no expert on the subject but I believe it illustrates some basic components of a generic semantic web application. If you see anything amiss on this blog then please leave a comment – I’m keen to learn more…

Semantic Web Application

A semantic web application operates as a client to semantic services, a simple semantic crawler and a graph database manager to provide application specific functionality to the user via a web based UI.

I’ll briefly mention each component in ascending order.

Giant Global Graph or Linked Data Cloud

The web holds a vast store of structured and unstructured data in many different formats (HTML, XML, RDF, OWL, RDFs, microformat, tags, natural language, encylopedias, dictionaries, etc, etc). With hyperlinking and metadata these form a vast interconnected web of data. It is not just documents that can be uniquely addressed but also arbitrary resources within documents or databases. Every entity can be assigned a unique URI. These URI’s can be connected together into RDF graph structures and reasoned with within OWL ontologies. Thus not only the documents on the web are interconnected, but every meaningful entity and relation can be explicitly expressed, thus forming a global distributed graph database.

Data Aggregation Services

There are data aggregators that are crawling the web transforming unstructured data into structured data or just discovering structured data, then indexing this into vast databases (e.g. virtuoso sponger, Linked Open Data, Dbpedia, etc, etc).

Whilst the data may be linked throughout the semantic web, whilst the data is undiscovered it cannot be used, for instance I may publish an ontology declaring that “John likes Ice-cream”, whilst someone else may declare “Mary likes Ice-cream”. In this distributed form it cannot be queried. However if these facts are discovered and integrated into a single graph we can then query “who likes Ice-cream?” and get the response “John, Mary, …”.

These aggregators provide web services via API’s where applications can query these collective graph databases using, for instance, SPARQL. These return results in the form of small graph data structures in XML/RDF format.

Direct Access

There are API’s such as the Semantic Web Client Library whereby a Java app can retrieve structured data from the web, analyse it and follow links to explore the graph structure of the semantic web directly. This is direct access without the use of crawlers, indexers and open databases. Of course it can be used in conjunction with the aggregators, to access data that is not covered by the public databases when a direct URI is known. There are also API’s that can translate unstructured data into structured data, for example, parsing email messages and extracting information about people, email addresses, topics of conversation and so on.

Data Acquisition

Structured data can be acquired either from local files, direct access or via data aggregator services. This data comes in the form of XML / RDF / OWL data of various kinds that define graph structures.

Data Storage

The application will store the retrieved data and user generated in an internal graph database. This is a sample of what can be known about certain concepts or entities, based upon what could be retrieved from the semantic web and what has been added by the user. This data can be stored locally or inserted into the web to extend the global graph database by defining new entities or relationships between existing entities.

Data Persistence

For persistent storage structured data can be stored locally or injected into the semantic web. This can then be accessed again directly or it can be aggregated so that future calls to the semantic API’s will include the stored data when performing queries.

Graph Analysis / Visualisation

The locally stored data can be analysed using various standard graph algorithms for clustering, nearest neighbour, shortest path, Max-Flow/Min-Cut, etc. This can extract meaningful information that can be used by the application logic and visualised in the UI and navigated by the user.

Application Logic

This defines the application specific aspects, which determine what kind of data is retrieved, how the data is analysed and displayed, what UI actions are bound to what database interactions, and so on.

Web UI

This is a rich content UI that can be accessed via any standards compliant browser. The application may be running locally or on a remote webserver.

Tags: application-development, diagram, giant-global-graph, graph-database, linked-data, semantic-application, semantic-web, web-application

Read more | Comments off | August 17th, 2009

Semantic Web Applications – Intro

Posted by john.ringland | Filed under Semantic Resources

I am currently doing a lot of thinking around the subject of open source projects to design semantic web applications to help people explore the semantic web.

What these applications require is a rich content web interface, semantic middleware and intelligent access to the vast store of semantically structured and linked data that permeates the web.

They can be quite light weight because they use the semantic web as a giant searchable graph database that they can query using SPARQL and web 2.0 API’s. They then store the query results in an internal graph database, apply graph analysis and visualisation algorithms, then present the result via an interactive rich content web interface.

The user can explore semantically linked data and augment this by adding metadata or creating links between data. The space of connectivity between people, organisations, discourses, events and topics can be explored, searched, visualised as graphs or timelines and analysed using graph analysis algorithms.

Such web applications could provide specialised windows into aspects of the semantic web. By intelligently leveraging the web of data, relatively light weight web interfaces can provide useful functionality to the web population, which can facilitate communication and self-organisation.

Thus the emerging web of data is an ecosystem where a niche exists for semantic web applications of all kinds.

Tags: open-source, semantic-web, social-network, web-application, web-of-data

Read more | Comments (1) | August 14th, 2009

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