Daniel’s Blog

“The Semantic Web and Anglicanism” by Daniel Lewis

My version of “The World Wide Web and the ‘Web of Life’” by Tim Berners-Lee

I’ve been considering lately how my beliefs and religious practices have interacted with my work on the Semantic Web and Linked Data… and so this is my version of “The World Wide Web and the ‘Web of Life’” by Tim Berners-Lee. Interestingly I was in to the Semantic Web at least a year before I started to think about being an Anglican.

Where I’m coming from

Like many people of my generation from my origin (South-East London / North-West Kent), we were taught about religions at primary school, and was also taught that Jesus was a real person who was born in 0AD. However I wasn’t too sure of this at the time, and my parents have never been particularly religious either. I was never baptised (or confirmed) during my youth. During secondary school I was interested in Religious Education, but classes only seemed to cover Christianity, Judaism and Sikhism… I didn’t take RE as a GCSE, probably because it didn’t seem to be a “cool” subject amongst the rest of my classmates.

When I started Further Education College I suddenly got an urge to read up on Philosophy and Psychology, and my interest in religion started to grow, especially as one of my classmates was a Satanist, another few were Sikh, another Hindi, a few Muslim, a couple Pentecostal Christian. My main interests at that time were neo-paganism and buddhism.

I then went to University, and met my girlfriend Beki in my final year. She is Traditional Broad Anglican, and introduced me to going to Church. I then Graduated from University, stayed in Oxford, went to a Liberal Catholic Anglican Church and got Baptised and Confirmed by the Church of England Bishop of Oxford in October 2007.

Anglicanism is a very big Christian denomination, and is sometimes called the Episcopal Church in other countries (e.g. USA). Churches and Christians within the Anglican denomination can vary greatly in terms of liberalism/conservativism, traditionalism, catholicism and evangelicalism… unfortunately because of the conservativeness of the culture in the U.K. and because conservative Christians are so conservative, the liberal side of the COfE gets hidden away from the public face.

Anyway, because Anglicanism is full of all kinds of different people from all over the world, but working towards the same kind of target I feel that it matches the the Semantic Web. In the SemWeb community, so many people all over the world are working towards semantic data, and different people have different ways of doing things (e.g. Microformats vs RDFa vs RDF Endpoints).

Comparing the Semantic Web with Anglicanism

Just as Tim Berners-Lee compared the World-Wide-Web with Unitarian Universalism, I’ll try to compare the cores of the Semantic Web and Anglicanism.

The Trinity

Lets start with the toughest one, the Trinity! OK, so basically, Trinity theory says that God is one whole entity made up of three parts: Father, Son and Holy Spirit/Ghost. The web and its culture is one whole entity, it just seems to work autonomously thanks to its decentralisation. This decentralisation has come through into the Semantic Web in the form of Linked Data where one object is related to another in a different subject. So thats the wholeness of it, but where does the split into three come in? How about these three: Ontology (e.g. OWL), Structure (e.g. RDF) and Syntax (e.g. n3, turtle or XML)… its hard to have one without the others:

• An Ontology is itself defined using a Structure which will have a particular syntax.
• A Structure of instances cannot be built without an Ontology… and is built with a particular Syntax.
• A Syntax is meaningless without instances and a schema.

This interdependence drives the Trinitarian belief, and it also drives the Semantic Web.

The Eucharist (aka Holy Communion)

The Eucharist is a ritual which symbolises the act of community, sharing and remembrance. It is the breaking of bread, and drinking of wine. Every Christian around the world (from all sorts of denominations) does this on the Sabbath day (Sunday for some, and Saturday for others) to remember that we are all in the same boat.

This one has two parts. First the Semantic Web has a community of people (i.e. the Semantic Web Interest Group), and that extends slightly further out to the community of people interested in Microformats. We come together to talk about the Semantic Web, we share ideas and think about the past and future of the web.

Secondly, the Eucharist is something done regularly. The Semantic Web community seems to get into a ritual of evangelising the Semantic Web and/or Linking Open Data Project, and there are conferences every year.

The Liberal & Conservative Gradient

Anglicanism (and other Christian denominations) have a gradient of liberal and conservative believers. For example, I am Liberal, Joe Bloggs could be Conservative and John Smith could be right in the middle. A liberal tends to understand a wider variety of stuff outside his/her own beliefs, whereas a conservative will stick with his/her own beliefs thinking that its the right way. (More on the different types of Christians/Churches in my recent blog post titled “The difference between Christian Churches“)

This is the same in the Semantic Web world. There are lots of OWL Ontologies and RDF Schemas on the web which Semantically define data structures, a conservative Semantic Web service might take one particular schema and only use that one making extensions when they really need something, a liberal Semantic Web service will use multiple OWL Ontologies and RDF Schemas and link their data across knowledge bases. For example webservice T has its own knowledge base with its own schema, this would be classed as a conservative service. Another example; webservice O has a knowledge base which reuses schemas and will link to various other knowledge bases on the Linking Open Data Graph. Another example might be the use of Microformats only, when you could get a lot more Semantics from an RDF endpoint or even RDFa. Different developers have different thoughts, and will sit on the liberal-conservative gradient somewhere.

Organisational Hierarchy

The Church of England has a hierarchy of organisation. For example:

• Rowan Williams is (currently) the Archbishop of Canterbury; the principal leader of the Church of England.
  • John Pritchard is (currently) the Bishop of Oxford
    • Andrew Bunch is (currently) the Vicar of the St Margaret’s and St Giles Churches in Oxford.

This hierarchy doesn’t mean that one is holier than the other, all three are Ordained Anglican Christians and so are on the same level in that respect… its just that they have organisational differences.

The Semantic Web cannot exist without hierarchy. A really simple hierarchy might be:

• Cheese
  • Mozzarella
    • Buffalo Mozzarella

This is quite a simple one. Hierarchy is in place to establish a specialism… e.g. Andrew bunch specialises in St Margaret’s Church Oxford, but Roward Williams might not ever come to the Church. e.g. Cheese is made from milk, but not always buffalo milk as in Buffalo Mozzarella.

Hope and Love

Hope is something that Tim highlighted as well. I’m adding Love to this too.

Anglicans (and other Christians) always hope for a better world, and love is said to be the way to achieve that.

Semantic Web enthusiasts want a better web and hope that other people will realise that, and I do think that Semantic Web developers really do love semantics

Creeds

The Church of England uses three Creeds: The Apostles’ Creed, The Nicene Creed and The Athanasian Creed. Which could be seen as standards/recommendations of the Anglican belief system.

The Semantic Web also has various standards/recommendations, e.g: RDF, OWL and RDFa. Which are used so that we can understand each other implicitly.

Summary

Most of the above is a bit of a stretch, but I hope that you can see where I am coming from. The Semantic Web has a lot of philosophical ideas to contemplate, and I think by comparing it to your own thoughts and beliefs you can truly get a grasp on what some of the Semantic Web means… the complex will become simple… its all about putting it in the right words for the individual.

Plus I also think its a bit weird that Evangelism is usually done for a particular religion (e.g. Evangelical Christians will stand on the Street talking about their particular view of Christianity), and I have Evangelist in my job title appended to the word Technology in order to promote the Semantic Web, Linked Data and in particular how to use them on top of OpenLink Softwares products.

Feel free to comment or send me an email if you agree, disagree or see where I am coming from

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