“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 cons