Methali
(proverb)
Ukuukuu
wa kamba si upya wa ukambaa.
Translation:
the aging/wearing-out of a processed dry rope is not newness of a rudimentary
wet cord.
Ukambaa – rudimentary cord of plaited wet bark-strips
of some trees or the leaf-strips of banana trunk. (single-use)
Kamba – processed plaited dry rope, cord,
string. (reusable)
When
a person goes into a forest and finds a good cache of firewood but was probably
unprepared by not carrying a dry rope, he may look for a tree with supple bark
or a banana trunk from which to cut strips and plait a rudimentary cord to tie
and carry the cache of firewood home. This cord is not sturdy enough to become
a common-everyday tool, but it can serve a single-use purpose of taking the
firewood home, after which it will be discarded. This is the Ukambaa.
Kamba on the other hand is manufactured rope
made out of single or composite materials passed through a process for durability,
flexibility and strength; and also plaited for structure. Single materials may
be sisal fiber or coconut fiber while composite materials may be polyethylenes.
These cords are durable and reusable many times hence can be common-everyday
tools.
Therefore,
when kamba (processed rope) wears out, that does not make it a new ukambaa
(rudimentary rope). It can’t serve the same purpose because the circumstances
of acquisition and use of each are usually different, as well as the essential nature
of each. While ukambaa can be easily discarded since it rots right away, the
same does not apply for a processed rope. These two might therefore seem to
look alike and function alike to some degree but they aren’t the same thing in
terms of source, structure, purpose, essence and circumstance. Therefore, one
can never mutate or evolve into the other.
Semantic
web/ai chat is not an evolution.
The
Semantic Web is an extension/addition to the World Wide Web through standards
set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to
make Internet data machine-readable. For comparison, the usual retrieval web (search
engines) work by retrieving internet data to be read by human users for further
work. It is therefore an intermediary. The semantic web utilizes markup
language like RDF (Resource Description Framework) to index various web pages
and use this to “read” and infer by the software and produce “final work/end
product”. This bypasses the further work done by human users after reading the
search engine intermediary. This might appear like a sort of evolution without
looking further into details.
The
most prevalent and profitable section of the internet is social networks, and
the main product bought and sold is the human users in the form of their data.
The sellers are mainly social networks owners, internet service providers,
telecommunication companies, while the customers are mainly advertisers and
governments.
To
use online social networks, users profile themselves by input of their names,
address, contacts, profession and even as far as hobbies and regular updates of
daily activities in the form of posts. These profiles are very compelling to
advertisers for behavioral targeting to market products and governments for
behavioral targeting to spread propaganda/taqiyya and doing mass and targeted
surveillance according to their own conjured profile categories. Even when a
profile doesn’t explicitly state the user’s “likes”, the interests of their connections
are considered good indicators of that user’s interests. To entice users into
profiling themselves as much as possible, online social networks are designed
to be compelling, fun and entertaining by providing useful services like
messaging, online chat, photo sharing and so forth. This need for more
extensive profiling of individuals especially by governments provides huge
impetus for development of semantic web which would machine-read all available
online data of a person and integrate it into their profile so as to bring up “final
answers” to every query rather than retrieving numerous webpages containing whole
or part of the query phrase but varied information that requires sifting and cross-referencing
by people who may be stationed in different departments. The semantic web would
therefore be more efficient and cost-effective for ID purposes.
By
its very nature of producing “final answers/products”, the semantic web can
only function satisfactorily in domains where information is static and
controlled. These domains include government registration services, library
catalogues, financial ledgers and other forms of general record-keeping. Many
other domains of activity are usually dynamic and flexible hence cannot be
enclosed into fully reliable datasets. In these majority dynamic domains, for
the semantic web, whose whole system would get built resting on the empirical
truth of a single data source, and without a way of saying that the source
might be dodgy, the whole exercise would inevitably be terminally flawed. For
example, a query like “list all music listened to in past week by people
friends with Tom Crocker, by artists born in Malawi” has no way to encode
doubt or mistrust in the data provided by the said friends and the said artists.
This would breed a proliferation of dubious answers masquerading as “facts”.
On
the other hand, the well-known search engine retrieval web system provides
opportunity for scrutiny of source and cross-referencing of information to develop
more reliable conclusions.
Apart
from the static and controlled domain of record-keeping, the semantic web can
only be useful in a utopian world where power relations are equal, where
political interests are uniform, where everyone trusts the source of
information, where sociolinguistics are static and where definitions of
vocabularies are uniform and agreed upon by everyone.
The
illustration below shows the oppositional nature of the retrieval web versus
the semantic web. On surface description, they may look similar and seem like
semantic web is an evolution of retrieval web, but more details reveal the
opposite nature of their functionality and appropriate-use circumstances.
The nature of the retrieval web makes it more appropriate for referencing, investigation and decision-making, while the nature of the semantic web makes it more appropriate for ID identification, coding, and other forms of general record-keeping.
References
Hammersley, B. (2012). 64
Things You Need to Know Now for Then
https://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/
TUKI (2001), Kamusi Ya Kiswahili-Kiingereza; Swahili-English Dictionary. Published by Taasisi ya Uchunguzi wa Kiswahili (TUKI), Chuo Kikuu cha Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
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