Assembly - Re-thinking the Digital

Tonight I went to a talk by Charlie Gere, called Assembly - Re-thinking the Digital within which he was promoting his forthcoming book "Community without Community in Digital Culture" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012). Not really sure what to think about it, his point was something that i agree with completely, that the digital should not be separated out from the 'hand crafted', technos and the body develop in sync, not as separate and unrelated entities, we have always been digital, technology is part of our 'culture', and plurality, or difference is essential to the functioning of self. He plotted this argument via a host of premier league thinkers, Derrida, Nancy, Aristotle, Steigler.

And whilst I agree with all this, particularly notions of difference and violence as essential to maintaining self against the techno fantasy of the mind melding type, I am not sure what more he adds to the argument. He cited live coder Alex Mclean, and Jodi, but again I am not sure to what end, beside a reference to plasticity and destruction, as in Mcleans 'fork' code and Jodi's encoded 'instructions' to make a bomb.

There does seem to be - with academics who are embedded in institutions - a desire to use images in powerpoint presentations which 'look' like what they are talking about. The source material is often adverts etc, but from this audience members pov this is a really silly distraction, especially when, as was the case tonight, the image is the Apple Mac logo, yes its got a bite out of it, yes its the fall of man, yes its religious in connotation and yes its a bit lame, cliched and redundant. 

I have been a fan of Charlie Gere's writing but have to say I was really disappointed by the talk, its seemed really unfocused, with lots of irreverent jokes about hating contemporary art etc, his work is much better than this  - be interesting to see the reaction when his book comes out. 

Vocabulary or Ontology ?

I was wondering what the difference between an ontology, thesuari and a vocabulary within the parameters of LOD might be:

A vocabulary is a set of terms (words, codes, etc.) that are used in a specific community. Vocabularies provide a mechanism for communication- be it written, oral or electronic- because the meaning of the terms are known and agreed upon by the community members.

 An ontology is a representation of knowledge, generally of a particular domain, written with a standardized, structured syntax that describes the relationship between concepts, also called resources, that serve to characterize the domain.

Thesauri are similar to ontologies in that they can describe hierarchical and associative relationships between terms. However, they are generally used to facilitate indexing and retrieval of written and recorded items. (source)


Which got me thinking whilst I was in the pub waiting for a friend:

Might be interesting to build an app which just displayed the 'description data' for different concepts and ideas, for example public art, community art etc. This ties in with the idea of publishing the outcome of my PHD, the speculations, as LOD data, via a carefully crafted ontology.

Overall i may also be an idea to published an ontology that lists all the modifications to a particular term, for example community art, each update would be listed and would feature a disjoint with the previous version. So Kwon's  definition would relate to previous definitions, other classes  would also be defined such as collaborator, participant, public. Each would feature a revision history. There might also be a description of methods and properties.

This process of building an vocabulary has also presented the idea of producing a vocabulary for single concepts, for example 'happiness' 'ecstasy' 'epiphany' and listing existing and invited descriptions. It would be easy to build these using something like protege and using ontology search engines such as Swoggle.

Which leads onto the thought of data modelling as a kind of creative practice. And the possibility that data modelling should not conform to some inherent 'logic' rather that it might not be constrained in this way, and the production of vocabularies and ontologies might allow some other  subjectivities to come to influence production. In this way the passage from data to information and onto knowledge maybe rendered across a range of forms, rather than just that indicated by formal data models, for data modeling is if nothing else, spatial; i fact I cannot believe there have not been examples of artists and theorists design ontologies and vocabularies, perhaps there are and i haven't found them.

RDF files and ontologies

All the files for Landscape-Portrait as well as the cultural projects ontology have been uploaded to here:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0244jlz3ds3f64x/C19BAgnL0V/LOD

Back to the writing next week.

Submitting and registering.

Today is spent registering and submitting the ontology to several sites and search engines. Seems there is no really obvious registry ? so i put it here:

http://mmisw.org/orr/#http://mmisw.org/ont/culproj/owl

although it seems a little flaky.

I've also uploaded the rdf description of some of the Landscape-Portrait elements here:

http://thedatahub.org/dataset/landscape-portrait/resource/0d66d9c9-bc7c-4de3-8279-aa58df881748

after making sure they passed the syntax test here:


http://demo.semantic-web.at:8080/SkosServices/check/82

I've also submitted the URL of the Landscape-Portrait RDF files to Swoggle:

http://swoogle.umbc.edu/index.php?option=com_swoogle_service&service=submit

And submitted the vocabulary to:


http://labs.mondeca.com

Ontology Up

Finally the first version of my 'cultural projects' ontology is live:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16463134/LOD/cultural-project.rdf

I've used the ontology to describe Landscape-portrait using this rdf file:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16463134/LOD/lp-rbl.rdf

the participants:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16463134/LOD/participant.rdf

and the videos the participants created:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16463134/LOD/video_1.rdf

So far I have only included one participant and one set of videos, but I'll update this over the next weeks to include a selection of participants from Bournemouth. Within the ontology as well as a 'participant' class or concept there is also class's of collaborators, which are defined differently to participants, or to use LOD semantic are a disjoint with 'participant', that is one person cannot be both. I'll add the collaborators over the next few weeks.

It was really important that the concepts or classes tally with the written research, so we have a class 'project' of which 'Community_Art_Project' is a subclass, and each project has a property of 'hasResource' and participant and collaborator class has the property of 'IsParticipantIn' and 'IsCollaboratorIn' respectively.

In terms of tools I have been using Protege which was recommended by Richard Light, who has been a massive help in guiding me in this work. Also been using http://swoogle.umbc.edu/
to locate existing ontologies.