One academic warns that it might and says we need to pay attention to it.
As machines learn to understand what the web means, what perspective will they understand it from? Who is teaching them? "Objective" descriptions of the world and the relationships in it can cause real problems, particularly for people with little power in those relationships. How will the emerging Semantic Web understand relationships and what will that mean for us as human users?
Austrian researcher Corinna Bath argues that there is a real risk that the semantic web of the future will be built with the perspectives and assumptions of male computer scientists baked-in unconsciously - at the expense of everyone else.
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Background
Corinna Bath is currently research fellow at the "Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technology and Society" in Graz, Austria. She's now working on engaging the several decades old study of gender and technology with the emerging world of the semantic web.
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What is the semantic web? We define it as a paradigm that makes the meaning of particular web pages understandable by machines - not just in full text searches or keyword categories, but in terms of which concepts are central to a given page and the relationships between them.
The semantic web is hot. World Wide Web founding father and W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee says all the pieces are now in place for a semantic web to emerge.
So is it a boy or a girl? 数据挖掘论坛
When You Assume, You Make an...
Corinna Bath did an interview last week for the Austrian Semantic Web Company where she articulates her concerns about gender and the semantic web. Unfortunately, the interview is extremely academic in language and tone - so we'll try to explain her arguments here.
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Her first argument is that the architects of the semantic web need to be very careful about the assumptions they carry into the creation of categories of relationships. Bath draws a historical parallel with the first phone books, where listings were organized by the names of the husband in each household. That appeared to the authors to be the logical way to do it at the time. It wasn't until after years of feminist political organizing led to general cultural change that the phone books changed. Why is this important? Because systems like the phone book help color our view of the world we live in and are the building blocks of basic inequalities. 数据挖掘工具
Too often, Bath argues, "binary assumptions about women and men are not reflected [upon] or the (gender) politics of [a particular] domain is ignored. Thus, the existing structural-symbolic gender order is inscribed into computational artifacts and will be reproduced by [their] use."
