Words You Can Use: The BAVC BLOG

by Alicia Schmidt, BAVC Marketing Strategist

Okay, to be honest, this blog is going to be all over the place. That’s cause truthfully I can’t really wrap my head around all of this just yet, but here goes . . .

NPR recently reported that the world’s largest database on reproductive health (POPLINE, run by Johns Hopkins School of Public Health), has been blocking searches using the term “abortion” since late February.

Apparently a medical librarian at UCSF discovered the fact and contacted POPLINE. The folks at POPLINE told her that they had indeed turned “abortion” into a “stop” word – a word that is ignored by search engines – because they are funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (hello George Bush?) and they cannot by law support “abortion activities.”

The UCSF librarian then complained to the POPLINE administrators AND sent out warning messages to her colleagues through a mighty librarian list-serv. After word spread, the administrators quickly restored the search term.

This story was interesting to me on several fronts (least of which is the sneaky ways in which the Bush Administration is working to restrict abortion), but also in terms of conversations we have been having here at BAVC around the idea of the “Semantic Web.”

The Semantic Web is a term coined by godfather of the Internet Tim Berners-Lee. In 1999, he described his vision,

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines.

Right now when you do an Internet search, you might get 3-4 relevant results and then a whole page of results that don’t really apply to your specific needs. The web at this moment is basically designed to present information to humans. The Semantic Web is focused on presenting information to machines, which can then interpret that information so that we can find what we’re looking for on the web more quickly and with more precision. Essentially, the Semantic Web proposes an evolution of the current web using new ways of tagging and publishing information so that it can be processed by “intelligent” computers in ways that that will make data gathering much more efficient.

Google (god bless ‘em) has posted A Semantic Web Primer, by Grigoris Antoniou and Frank Van, online. You can read nearly the entire book online if you have some time to kill (like if you’re waiting for someone to get voted off American Idol).

The Semantic Web is an important concept for media makers in that it will dramatically affect how your media gets tagged, distributed and interpreted.

So what does all this have to do with the NPR story on the restriction of “abortion” as a search term? Well, to me it represents one of the concerns often raised about the Semantic Web. Along with its enormous potential to revolutionize knowledge sharing (particularly research and development) in a positive and productive way, it also represents the potential for increased censorship and invasion of privacy. The Semantic Web would make it much easier for governments to control the viewing and creation of online information, for instance, as this information would be much easier for an automated content-blocking machine to understand. And if the new meta-data tagging is implemented, it will make it much more difficult to have any sense of anonymity on the web, for good and bad.

As these new technologies move forward, it is vital that we pay careful attention to not only how the technologies are implemented, but also how our government (and other world governments – think Richard Gere running after the Olympic Torch today in San Francisco) manage and regulate these technologies.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to be a downer. Innovation is key to the growth of our society and with innovation comes great possibility. With it also comes great responsibility, and the more we (nonprofit and civic-minded users) know about these emerging technologies, the more we can contribute to their application (or reapplication). The more we can ensure the fairness and openness of our shared information.

One UCSF librarian did it. Why can’t we?