Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Chapter 16

In this, the last chapter of Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist, the authors riff briefly on the history and context of data modeling for the web: how the processes and practices build on the "heritage of of knowledge modeling languages", but do so in an environment that "is so revolutionary that it is often compared in cultural significance to the invention of the printing press".

"The Semantic Web is the application of advanced technologies that have been used in the context of artificial intelligence, expert systems and business rules execution in the context of a World Wide Web of information. The Semantic Web… isn't on the web; it is the Web"

Where it's different from anything that precedes it is the way it brings "information from many sources … to one's fingertips". But then a library does that. Or, arguably, an encyclopaedia. What really differentiates the Web is that it brings the information a) sorted and b) on demand.

The reason that OWL seems – and is – pretty "primitive" compared "to the knowledge representation systems that were developed in the context of expert systems" is not entirely because it's at a much earlier stage of development, but because of what people want from the web: "typically people don't want machines to behave like experts, they want to have access to information so they can exhibit expert performance at just the right time." Hmmm… True for search engines: don't know about you, but I definitely want a satnav, for instance, to behave like an expert…

Where the Semantic Web goes "one step further" than the Web, is that while the "Web is effective at bringing any single resource" to our attention, "if the information the user needs is not represented in a single place, the job of integration rests with the user." However, the Semantic Web "uses expert system technology to gather information so an individual can have integrated access to the web of information." The Semantic Web, in other words, makes the connections for the user. Unlike a satnav app, it doesn't tell the user what to do with them.

So, the fact that OWL is comparatively primitive "is appropriate for a Web language", because "a primitive knowledge modeling language can yield impressive results when it uses information sources from around the world." Its power is in how it accesses and assimilates the huge amounts of content available across the web – and in how it enables newly available content to be added to the mix as and when it's added to the Web. Data models "on the Semantic Web play the role of the intermediaries that describe the relationships among information from various sources". And the web ontology language tools covered in this book "provide the framework for the pieces an engineer can use to build a model with dynamic behaviour … and … provide mechanisms for specifying how information flows through the model" and how different bits of information relate to each other.

Or as one, much more technically adept friend put it: it's conceptually difficult because you're modeling information about information. And that, in itself, is tough to get your head round.

So what have I learned from this book?

It's difficult to say at this stage, because, aside from using it for the design of my new MOO Cards…

This makes more sense when you know the job title on the reverse is "Person"

 … I've yet to put anything I've read into practice.

However:

1. over the next few weeks, I'm going to try and model the relationships between as many as possible of the people who appear in the zoeography
2. there's a helpful "Frequently asked questions" section at the end of the book that directs readers to specific pages with instructions on specific issues

I'll report back later. Not sure exactly when: next week I'm planning to write about Blast Theory's Karen. And after that, I'm hoping to have more progress to report on the technical and design development of the zoeography.

In the meantime, if you've been reading this – thank you very much for doing so.
If this is your first visit, my journey through Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist started here.

HayleyWorld: brief musings on content and design

If you're new to this blog, and aren't familiar with my zoeography project, you may want to read one or more of my introductory posts for context before getting stuck in here.

So, what's new about it? – what I'm trying to do
A "zoeography"? – why I've invented a new term for this form
Introducing William Hayley er, introduces my subject, William Hayley.

I've written three posts about thinking through the reader journey (one, two, three), and in this post I want to think through a couple of other elements of the project:

Firstly, content.

I've sorted and edited into the first person all the nuggets of text from Hayley's Memoirs that will form the backbone of the narrative. I've also keyworded and tagged them with their original Memoir volume and page numbers, dates, places and the people they refer to. Most of them will fit into the main HayleyWorld keyword topics, which, at the moment are scheduled to be (in alphabetical order)

• children
• death
• education
• friendship
• love
• madness
• marriage
• medicine
• poetry 
• politics
• theatre

These may change: it's possible that some subjects might have insufficient content, while others may need to be broken down into sub-topics. Some might overlap to such an extent that, having gone through one, a reader might be left with nothing substantial when they get to the other. This may turn out to be the case with, say love and marriage and/or children and education. There's also a possibility that madness may turn out to be a subset of medicine. This probably wouldn't be a problem for anyone reading madness before medicine, but would be if the order's reversed.

There will also be some extracts that fall outside the main topics. Given that the reader journey is partly driven by choices of these topics, how can I ensure these don't get lost? Do I need to ensure they don't get lost: if they don't fit in, are they superfluous? How will I know?

At the moment, I'm wondering about giving at least some of these another keyword – asides – and maybe treating them as comments and anecdotes for William Hayley to drop into the conversation, not quite randomly

I'm also thinking about the look of the app. Hayley's words, thoughts and feelings will take centre page: mine, and others' – with the exception of his first wife Eliza's – will, I hope, appear as marginalia. In addition, I'm planning pop-up content, which will include Hayley's poems, extracts of unpublished correspondence and the lik. Most, but not all, of this will be reader-controlled. 

A while back, one of Contentment's designers mocked up a few ideas. I particularly like this one, which allows for up to two voices (or subjects) in the margin.

 

It's challenging to adapt something like that for mobile, while keeping the 18th century feel. I'm wondering if exploring the art of the 18th century portrait miniature (or even the transient late eighteenth/early nineteenth century fashion for eye miniatures) might yield some ideas. But the main issue is how we can make the thing feel comfortable and enjoyable to read, whilst also keeping a sense of Hayley's time and place…

Will hopefully have more to report in a couple of weeks.

Next week: the final chapter of Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist.

Move along now: the reader journey gains momentum

If you've stumbled onto this blog about my digital biography/"zoeography" of William Hayley for the first time, you may want to read my initial post about the project – as well as the two I've linked to above – before going any further with this one, so it makes sense.


A few weeks since my last post on the HayleyWorld reader journey, and some of the questions I posed have been quietly answering themselves while I've been getting on a) with writing and b) other stuff. Lots of other stuff.


So, here's the latest version…

1. Reader journey design: phase 3

As you can see from comparing phase 3 (above) to phase 2 (below)

Reader journey design: phase 2

… I've moved on both conceptually and creatively, and also started using Omnigraffle - which is much more suitable (and fun) than Word for this sort of thing.

What's also interesting is the way a slight delay in technical implementation (down to my brilliant development partner Contentment's commercial commitments) has facilitated this surge forwards. Had we been further forward with the technical and visual development of the HayleyWorld app, I would have written more commentary on the edited extracts from Hayley's Memoirs that sit at the centre of the zoeography. But my thinking about how it all fits together, and the different ways in which the app will be personalised and function create the illusion of a relationship between Hayley and his readers wouldn't be anywhere near as advanced.

Next week - Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: chapter 14 (you can read my take on chapter 13 here).

In the meantime, hurrah for obstacles.

Next steps on the reader journey

When I last blogged about working out how readers will journey through my HayleyWorld zoeography, I was pondering how to:

• personalise a reader's journey while still retaining an element of authorial control
• make sure that readers can take different paths through the narrative and still read/experience something that feels like a coherent story
• enable readers to feel like they're getting to know William Hayley in a way that mimics encountering him in real life.

A few months on, I'm still thinking about those issues – and suspect I'll continue to do so until the work's complete, I've post-mortemed myself almost to death over it*, and am on to the next big project†.

I'm also thinking about my methodology of designing the reader journey in a step-by-step linear way.
Given that I'm trying to make the reading experience feel less linear, is designing it in a linear manner, well, wrong? One aspect that concerns me is that it increases the likelihood that  I'll end up losing something – a key aspect of William Hayley's story – en route. Or that I'll miss a vital left turn, one that would allow me and the reader to explore aspects of the tale that my let's-start-at-the-very-beginning approach obscures.

This is where I'm at:

Will need to do page set up: A3 if I want to travel any further…

As for content - I'm halfway through editing/writing the personalised letters Hayley will send to his readers, and am thinking through what and how he'll "ask" readers to provide the information required for Form 2: as I write I'm wondering if this might also be a good point to ask readers for their email address…

My suspicion is that, for now, step-by-step is the most practical way to proceed. It won't be for much longer, though. My guess is that when I'm one or two stages further into the journey, and these stages have been successfully (I hope) implanted into the next iteration of the HayleyWorld app, I'll need to sit down with several huge pieces of paper and map out the various relationships between the people, places, themes and chronologies of the story, and interrelate these to each other. Which will probably make my head pop open like this, but will also make me feel considerably less smiley…

And which is where everything I'm learning by blogging my way through Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist is likely to come in handy…


Very interested to hear others' thoughts on reader journey design…



* Yeah, I know. Am invoking the paradox defence.
† on the backburner are

• an anarchist musical
• a radio drama 
• a crowd-sourced online project exploring the limits of kindness.

Reader journeys

One of the most difficult aspects of making HayleyWorld to get my head round has been imagining and designing the possible reader journeys through the text. How can we (my development partner & I)

• personalise a reader's journey while still retaining an element of control?
• make sure that readers can take different paths through the narrative and still read/experience something that feels like a coherent narrative?
• make readers feel like they're getting to know William Hayley in a away that mimics encountering him in real life?

I'm still near the start of the reader journey design process, but I have a start point that Contentment are in the process of implementing for our first prototype (which should be ready within the next couple of weeks).

At the moment, the idea looks like this:

As you can see, I still have questions about how much content to deliver before giving readers a chance to either choose more, or move on to another topic. But how will they get there in the first place?

It took me a while to work out how the app should start. But then I realised that it should begin in the way that William Hayley characteristically began his relationships with friends.

So, I embarked on my first element of semi-fictionalisation. I edited together – mostly from phrases/lines Hayley actually used, but with a few of my own (mostly obvious) tweaks  – a Hayleyan letter and sonnet, addressed to the reader…

"The past

Sussex

My dear Friend

Please allow me the liberty of addressing you thus as, I believe I have reason to hope, such you will soon become. Having some important Topics I wish to share with you, I have thrown them into here, and entreat your acceptance of the following history, that you may peruse at the greatest Ease to yourself.

Before you begin, I would beg you to look on my peculiarities with affectionate indulgence and I hope only that what follows may be thought worthy of you to whom I have taken the liberty of addressing it.

Ever your affectionate

WHayley

SONNET

Kind Friend! who reads in far off future years,

I pray thy generous heart will care to know,

A poet who lov’d to laugh yet oft shed tears

And wishes this – his story – to bestow.

Accept this volume:- through these pages flow

Sincere effusions of a long-passed mind!

Herein the untold truths my heart will shew,

Of artists, poets, friends and loves combin'd!

In this fair copy may thy eyes discern

The turns of mortal life herein outlin'd:

Whate'er the lessons from these words we learn

May all their blessings in you be entwin’d!

Thine be that joy which Friendship's bosom fills;

And thine eternal peace, devoid of ills!"

 That's the beginning that every reader will see. But then how to set each one off on their particular journey?

My initial plan was to give them a long form at the beginning. But my research into how people develop and sustain relationships led me to realise that this would be wrong. I need to create the illusion of conversation, which has two main implications.

• the reader needs to be asked for smaller tranches of information about themselves at various (but not too many) points in the app
• to have any chance of creating and sustaining the illusion that readers are getting to know William Hayley, they couldn't just be given a series of impersonal forms to complete. He would need to ask them questions. And would need to do so in an entirely Hayleyan manner…

So I wrote this. It is, I think, is more fun than an impersonal form, and has the advantage of allowing for "conversation" between Hayley and the reader without the reader being able to ask the sort of questions that an app will be unable to answer…

Also, given that the act of exploring HayleyWorld means readers are taking an interest in William Hayley, isn't it only right and proper that he should show an interest in them?

"a large & Complicated intellectual Machine, which I have invented"

"My keen sensations in perusing these heartpiercing Lines have been a painful Prelude to the following Ecstatic Vision", wrote William Hayley, in a letter to William Cowper, sent four days after he received Cowper's devastating note.

— I beheld the Throne of God, whose Splendor, tho in Excess, did not strike me blind, but left me power to discern,  on the steps of it, two kneeling angelic Forms.

A kind Seraph seemed to whisper to me, that these heavenly Petitioners were your lovely Mother, & my own; both enjoyed fervent Supplications for your Restoration to mental Serenity, & Comfort.— I sprang eagerly forward to enquire your Destiny of your Mother.—Turning towards me, with a look of Seraphic Benignity, she smiled upon me, & said: “Warmest of earthly Friends! Moderate the anxiety of thy Zeal, lest it distract they declining Faculties! & know, as a Reward for thy Kindness, that my Son shall be restored to Himself, & to Friendship.

But the all-Merciful & almighty ordains, that his Restoration shall be gradual; & that his Peace with Heaven shall be preceded by the following extraordinary Circumstances of signal Honour on Earth.— He shall receive Letters from Members of Parliament, from Judges, & from Bishops, to thank Him for the service that He has rendered to the Christian World by his devotional Poetry. These shall be followed by a Letter from the Prime Minister to the same effect; & this by Thanks expressed to Him on the same account, in the Hand of the King Himself.— Tell Him, when these Events take place, he may confide in his celestial Emancipation from despair, granted to the Prayer of his Mother; & He may rest satisfied with this assurance from Her, that his Peace is perfectly made with Heaven.—Hasten to impart these blessed Tidings to your fav’rite Friend! said the Maternal Spirit; & let your Thanksgiving to God be an Increase of reciprocal Kindness to each other!—

In classic direct marketing style, Hayley added a call-to-action PS:

if any of these Incidents speedily take place, which your angelic Mother announced to me in this Vision, as certain signs of your Recovery, I conjure you in her Name, my dear Cowper, to communicate them to me, with all the kind dispatch, that is due to the tender anxiety of sympathetic affection!— Heaven grant that I may hear from you again very soon!— adieu!

He then tried to kickstart his "large & Complicated intellectual Machine" by persuading politicians and church men to write to Cowper. He was careful, however, to keep his overall plot a secret: one he shared only with Cowper's relations/carers, the Reverend John Johnson and Lady Harriot Hesketh.

Third person, first person?

The New York Times asked Salman Rushdie why he wrote Joseph Anton, his account of life under the fatwa, in the third person. He responded that he felt using the first person hampered his progress.

Each time I tried [to write the book], it didn’t work and so I put it aside. And then I realized that one of the things I was really disliking was the first person, this endless “I,” things happening to “me,” and “I felt” and “I did” and “people said about me” and “I worried.” It was just absurdly narcissistic. So at a certain point I thought, “Let me just see what happens if I write it novelistically, in the third person.” And the moment I started doing it was like the kind of “open sesame” that gave me the book.

Meanwhile James Camp wrote, in The New York Observer, that the third person voice would be the first thing readers would notice. He remarked, pointedly, that it “is not a perspective often associated with self-awareness.”

While the author of Joseph Anton – a book that’s fascinating, thought-provoking and irritating in about equal measure – doesn’t always show himself to be the most dispassionate of self-observers, I don’t think this is either down to, or responsible for, his choice of the third person. 

I suspect it’s more accurate – and consistent with Rushdie’s professed reasons for choosing the perspective – to say that the third person is not a perspective often associated with self-exposure. It’s helpful in evading the confessional, and useful to self-aware memoirists and autobiographers who wish to avoid revealing themselves in their work.

Almost two hundred years before Rushdie, William Hayley – having published biographies of Milton, his friends William Cowper and George Romney, and a memoir of his son, Thomas Alphonso Hayley – wrote his own life in the third person. Somewhat lazily edited by Cowper’s relative/carer Rev. John Johnson, it’s a long book, generally honest and egalitarian to the extent that its publisher complained that Hayley seemed to think that “unknown personages connected with him merely by family ties or juvenile affection” and “his literary career and his intercourse with persons of talent and celebrity” would be of “equal interest” to his readers.*

One of my first steps towards creating the zoeography app was to take around 440 shortish extracts from Hayley’s memoir, and ‘translate’ them into the first person. Finicky and – as I’m sure you can imagine – time-intensive, it still proved a fascinating exercise. There is, I suspect, no better way to explore what’s gained and lost by writing about oneself as ‘he’ or ‘she’ rather than ‘I’.

High on the list of benefits has to be status delineation. Hayley often dubs himself “the poet”, as in “The poet of Eartham having finished his life of Milton, in the autumn, took it with him, when he set forth on his second visit to Cowper.” And “The tender gloom which the sudden loss of this memorable man (so long endeared to the poet) had thrown over his mind, prepared him to sympathize in the recent domestic affliction of his noble friend, Lord Egremont”. Using the third person enables Hayley to position himself within his profession and within society much more easily than he could have done using the first person. It’s a significant advantage for someone as concerned with controlling his image, and with posterity, as Hayley was.

But the downside is the loss of intimacy. We may be better placed to perceive the writer’s position within his networks but, there’s a corresponding distancing and dilution of his/her emotions and experiences. Which makes it a slightly odd choice for one of Sensibility's leading votaries.

I’ll be thinking and writing about this more as my research and development progress, and would be interested to read any comments…

* quote from an unpublished letter from Henry Colburn to Rev Johnson.

William Hayley & William Cowper's pension - part I

William Hayley went to visit the poet William Cowper at his home in Weston for the first time in April 1792 and…

"I was grieved to the soul in hearing, that the Income of such a Man as Cowper arose partly by pitiful & precarious Contribution from Relations & Friends.– it immediately became the first wish of my Heart to procure for him a becoming Independance." [sic]
This became "the darling project" of Hayley's "sanguine Spirit", despite the fact that

"An austere Critic might here tell me, that it would have been more Prudent, & more fashionable to have rather regarded as my first object the Improvement of my own shrinking Finances, which were not, I must confess, at the time I speak of, nor are they at present in a very flourishing Condition."
Still, there was no austere critic to hand - or if there was, Hayley ignored him or her, and determined to lobby the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Thurlow - an old friend of Cowper's from his law student days.

Beforehand, he persuaded another friend, Thomas Carwardine, who'd sent a copy of Cowper's poems to Thurlow's daughter Catherine to get Catherine to forward the book on to him. She did, and he then inserted the following encouraging verses:

To Miss Catherine Thurlow
with Cowper’s Poems.

Sweet Nymph! accept a Bard, for whom
Rich amaranths with Roses bloom
  To deck his moral Lyre;
Dear, doubly dear, must wit & Truth
Be deemed by you, from one whose youth
  Was social with your sire.
apart by different stars impelled
Their course, as Mortals, both have held
  To suffer, & to drudge:
But Genius kept them both in view,
and to the Heights of Honor drew
  The Poet, & the judge.

Ingenuous Girl! while here you see
How their fraternal Hearts agree
  In Energy & Truth
May you restore, & teach to blaze
With double Glory’s blended rays
  The Friendship of their youth!

Despite being both "overwhelmed with Business" and "splenetic", the Chancellor found a time slot for Hayley to plead Cowper's case.

And he did so, he tells us, in an extraordinary, unpublished document written in 1794, with "vehemence & intrepidity"

"I appealed to the Chancellor, if it would not singularly become the King to bestow his munificence on Cowper, not only as a proper Compliment to a Man of Genius & virtue … but as an act of personal thanksgiving & Gratitude towards Heaven, for having restored his Majesty from that mental Malady, by which this wonderful & most interesting poet has been periodically afflicted:—"

So, what's new about it?

Although reading a book about someone can be an excellent way of getting to know about them, it’s not like getting to know them. The ways we impart and receive information during interpersonal contact are radically different from the ways we absorb stories from books. The order of information sharing, what is given and withheld at any particular moment, how much the sharer reveals about any particular event, what happened, how they feel, their degree of honesty, and so on, vary, depending on all kinds of factors, including why and how people meet, how much time they spend together, how much they like each other – and in which kind of way. If people were books, they would be a different book for each individual they formed a relationship with.

And that's how I want to make HayleyWorld. As a different experience for every reader, based on their individual interests and interactions with the app. This means that I need to break down each story/event in William Hayley's life into a "nugget" of information, write each significant nugget in tow or three ways, with varying levels of detail and emotional content, so that Hayley "tells you" the story in a way that's appropriate to how well you've got to know each other.

So, yes, readers will be asked to enter some information about themselves. Their journey through William Hayley's life and storyworld will be determined partly by their choices and partly by other triggers including chronological date, the amount of time they've spent in his company and what William Hayley "wants" to tell them about…

Making that work isn't going to be easy. There are certain aspects of the process – particularly ensuring that the various nuggets link up every which way into different, but equally satisfying, narratives – that will be exceptionally challenging

HayleyWorld will be built as an app for tablets and smartphones, using Padify, and – thanks to Michael Kowalski – with help from Contentment's team of developers.

Hello & welcome

… to Making HayleyWorld, which will feature

• snippets from my research into William Hayley (1745-1820)
• info on my progress transforming my research into a new kind of biography, or zoeography
• related stuff
• unrelated stuff when I'm distracted by other things I have – or want – to do.

Expect 18th century gossip, comedy, tragedy, marital discord, madness, dubious medical interventions and some mediocre poetry alongside the occasional disquisition on creative and technological choices and processes.

Hope you enjoy it - and please talk to me through Twitter or via my website.

Incidentally, you may also like William Hayley's tweets (I help him with those).