Corporate biases in Linked Open Data standards
Bob Haugen
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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 Mon 22 Sep 2014 10:10AM
@bobhaugen let's schedule hangout about it for one of next days ? maybe over email to reduce traffic here ;)
and one last link: https://github.com/rvguha/schemaorg/issues/134#issuecomment-56262883
Bob Haugen Mon 22 Sep 2014 12:25PM
@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.
Kurt Laitner Mon 22 Sep 2014 2:51PM
Absolutely agree with the corporate/competitive bias in standards. the Value Network standard is another one plagued by the assumption of roles in a hierarchy.
Standards are great, that's why there are so many of them. I fully support making new ones for the new economy.
/kdl
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Kurt Laitner
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Jon Richter Mon 22 Sep 2014 4:35PM
Bob Haugen Mon 22 Sep 2014 4:40PM
@jonrichter - that is mind-boggling! My epiphany has arrived!
Mikey Mon 22 Sep 2014 6:13PM
@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 Mon 22 Sep 2014 6:29PM
@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 Thu 4 Dec 2014 6:32PM
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.
Bob Haugen · Mon 22 Sep 2014 9:45AM
@jonrichter - we are very interested in Transformaps. More to say after more study...