Loomio

Corporate biases in Linked Open Data standards

Bob Haugen PublicSeen by 115

I am uncomfortable with the bias of a lot of the LOD standards on capitalist business as usual.

E.g. schema.org/Product. I'll pick on them in this intro, but they are not the only ones. There's also the various organizational models, that seem not only corporate in bias but also way behind the state of organizational models in software since about 1994.

schema.org/Product describes a product type (not an instance) that is offered for sale by a corporation. E.g. has attributes like "brand", "manufacturer", etc. It is equivalent to a GTIN. (An instance, to contrast, might have a serial number, creation date, current location, etc...)

Once upon a time (2012) there was this lovely initiative started I think by Chacha Sikes called open-food. Seems to be dead now.
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/open-food
https://github.com/Open-Food/Open-Food-Standard

They wanted global definitions of food regardless of "manufacturer" or "brand", with relationships where farmer Alice could assert that she grew food Lacinato Kale. And lots of other people could also assert that they grew Lacinato Kale. And I could assert that I wanted some Lacinato Kale. And we could find each other. Etc.

I hope you get the idea. It's a different way to think about the topic of economic resources and resource types.

My job for a few years was representing my employer in standards orgs, including OASIS, UN/CEFACT, W3C and ISO. All of those standards groups are corporate competitive battlegrounds. Many of the actual participants are sincerely trying to do the right thing, but many of their jobs depend on getting their employer's interests into the standard.

How do we deal with this? Or, what do you think about this? Must we accept biased standards? Can we propose and promote standards that work for a different economy?

elf Pavlik

see:

TL;DR I agree with you but don't see that situation hopeless! Also Linked Data provides a lot of flexibility to use all kind of vocabularies together. No one needs to limit onself to use single vocab for the whole dataset. More on that in recent conversation: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2014Sep/0216.html

Bob Haugen

@elfpavlik - thanks a lot. I'm glad other people "in the loop" are looking at this issue.

P.S. I don't think it's hopeless, or I would not have kicked off this discussion. But what do you think will be the best way to do it? The tweet you cited said, "start with what you have and improve it". Is that even possible with the Product standard? I mean, it is appropriate for some cases. In others, so far from fitting that I don't see how it could be tweaked.

Bob Haugen

Just so it's clear I am not complaining about all these other people, I'll tell a tale on myself. One of the standards I worked on had a lot of the same problems. The ISO Accounting and Economic Ontology.

We still base everything we do about economic networks on that ontology, and I think it is still the best model I know of for transitional economic networks of all kinds, but we have had to fix a number of biases. Short version, two main false assumptions:
* assuming that economic resources are scarce and under the control of an enterprise: leads to artificial scarcity ("intellectual property"), commodifying nature, and destruction of "externalities".
* assuming competitive business relationships.

Here's the long and tedious version.

We've worked that out over several years and several experiments with living networks. (And some false assumptions probably still exist that we have not seen ourselves yet. This is not a quest for purity, by the way. It is a quest for what works for whom.)

Jon Richter

Dear @bobhaugen, the MMM project started as an idea for an OpenStreetMap Taxonomy describing locations of collective modes of production. It was called Mapping All Alternatives in the earlier days and eventually evolved to MMM (Mapping Meeting Munich, Mapa Mundi Multitudinorum, Many Many Maps (thanks @elf-pavlik), Meta-Mapping of Mappings, etc.) and now finally TransforMap.

There is a draft over at the OpenStreetMap wiki:

It seems to cover some aspects of counter-narrative economies, but suffers from OSMs tagging limitations. Why we have been keen on keeping the Linked Open Data flag high.

Interestingly our community of practitioners (of collective modes) doesn't map onto a community of information designers, why everything is quite improvised and only by time gaining professional attraction.

Which actually helps, as professional communicators in the field tend to find clearer explanations to "sell the story".

I see much value (sic!) in the SENSORICA/mikorizal work for the Mapping of Mappings/Networking the Networks/Movement of Movements thingy we're trying to accomplish there. Understandably, work focus has been on the OSM taxonomy which lacks the complexities of a graph.

With raising interest in our approach, we hope to moderate a community process that facilitates the interoperability and maybe even portability of (geospatial) data on alternative projects. Feel free to explore:

Any help appreciated and needed.

Personally the whole meta-state of our approach is already building an informational, algorithmic counter-narrative on classical economics.

Mikey

in my opinion, i'd rather we work as many open teams that experiment with mad science and coordinate where we overlap. standards bodies are one great way to get people to agree on interoperable systems, but they aren't the only way, as recently shown by Docker.

@bobhaugen, i think you should do what you think is best, even if it is radical. schema.org is one experiment in shared vocabulary, there's plenty of room for more.

elf Pavlik

@bobhaugen I had chance to only scan over pdf with Accounting and Economic Ontology. First concern Goods > Funds which suggests them as tangible resources. I really like to draw strong distinction between Product/Service which happens in physical reality and has to obey laws of physics. And Currency which happens in human imagination, often acts juts as Promise and has limitations based on man made algorithms and our wild fantasies. While I see big chance to find common way of describing Product/Service, thanks to solid grounding in natural environment and physical reality. For Currency(ies) we need a lot of diversity and accommodate various different world views and perspectives http://polyeconomy.info/

Bob Haugen

@elfpavlik - was my message above clear, about how we had made significant changes to that ontology? We may need to make more. That's part of what I want to explore in conversations like this.

But as it is, even in that ISO version, it can support any currencies, and barter. Just might not be obvious from that ISO document.

In our current version, it can also support timeshare (although we have not done that yet) or gifts. We want to support "to each according to need", but we don't have a living network that can do that yet, and we only work with living networks, not our own good ideas. (This is from around the year 2000 when I had participated in developing a couple of ambitious systems that nobody ever used in real life.)

However, re Currency(ies), I am skeptical that different forms of money will get us into the desired future. I could always be wrong, but Bitcoin is an illustrative example of what can go wrong.

I'll be delighted if we can find common ways of describing tangible Products/Services, but also want to include designs, code, recipes, etc. I'm so far just observing the ferment in currencies, and possibly just being an old fogy.

P.S. re polyeconomy: I think we will need to intertwingle many different variations, even in the same network.

Bob Haugen

@ahdinosaur - thanks, I agree on mad science.

As for doing what I think best, that's what I am trying to figure out in a bunch of these overlapping conversations, here and elsewhere. Exciting, and confusing.

Bob Haugen

@jonrichter - we are very interested in Transformaps. More to say after more study...

Bob Haugen

@ahdinosaur - watching that Docker video. He says, we are about to build something bigger than all of us, bigger than Google. Yeah! I think it's coming. But it might not be what he has in mind...or maybe it is, I don't know Solomon.

Lotta people inside the corpocracy have bigger ideas than their containers. But "run my apps" is not my dream, my apps are only stepping stones to something I can only vaguely imagine today.

Solomon's thinking deeply about the technical dimension, which is great, I can't go that deep at all, I can only marvel and try to follow. But what do we want it all to do for all of us?

Enuf filosofy. This is sorta a side issue, but can we trust Docker? Anymore? Does it matter if we can fork the code? (But it does matter to me, because I can't code on that level, so I gotta trust somebody. Would prefer to trust a network that I am a part of.)

I remember one venture-capital financed startup I worked for. Dead now. Killed by too much money. Really. But I still trust some of the people I worked with there.

Can we trust Google? I know some people at Google that I trust, at least within some boundaries. So Google and RedHat are now collaborating with Docker. Or some people are. I know a guy at RedHat that I used to argue with in a standards group where our employers (different employers back in the day) had different agendas and now we agree on a lot of stuff that we used to disagree on. These are economic networks, by the way, built out of people, where their corporations occasionally support them and other times get in the way.

Sorry to ramble, I am searching for an epiphany. Today.

Bob Haugen

@jonrichter - that is mind-boggling! My epiphany has arrived!

Mikey

@bobhaugen, i only meant to suggest Docker is bringing standards without being a standards body. you're right that Docker is likely to be infected by money, as is an inevitable result for any for-profit. better examples would be the various module ecosystems in node.js land: ndarray, leveldb, stackgl, etc, that have organic merit-based adoption.

Bob Haugen

@ahdinosaur - I actually liked the Docker guy's speech and ideas, and was grateful that you pointed me to it. But then I am also an old Alan Kay fan...except I don't think Alan ever really groked the Web.

P.S. I guess part of what I was musing about when I live-commented on Solomon's speech was that there are these people in corpocracy who will come over to something new, once it exists in some critical mass. Some to co-opt, but some to sincerely come on board and help. But we gotta make the new critical mass first.

Jon Richter

There's a new container runtime in the making that tries to overcome some of Docker's current drawbacks; also the governance ones regarding a definition of a standard container that vanished from the D repos. It's called Rocket and comes out of CoreOS land.