Societies always had structures to gather, retain, maintain, and process knowledge: fables, stories, ceremonies, books, drawings, paintings, architecture … indeed, many if not most cultural products in some way assist knowledge evolution. Research on the Semantic Web was founded on the vision of building an environment where "machines can comprehend documents and data" and "to assist the evolution of knowledge" (Bernes-Lee et al., 2001). Hence, at its core, it pursues the goal of building societal knowledge structures with the help of machines.
As we evolved the technology over the past twenty years, we have made incredible advances. Data is almost available in abundance – sometimes even marked up. Some agents with extraordinary capabilities – not necessarily the ones we had imagined all those years ago – live in our pockets. As our research results are increasingly used, they are both informed and infused by societal rules and norms as well as shape society by providing meaning and perpetuating norms. But what does it mean for us as scientists contributing to the endeavor of "assisting the evolution of knowledge" and our discipline?
Using examples from both the Semantic Web and Recommender Systems, we will explore the implications of this coming of age of the Semantic Web – both as a set of technologies and discipline. Specifically, in a Math or Engineering tradition, our community was largely driven by the goal of developing solutions for problems and understanding their underlying governing principles. Given that we investigate means to assist the societal process of knowledge evolution and its societal rules, the talk will highlight how we should increasingly use the descriptive methods of behavioral sciences. Pushing this thought even further, given that our research results perpetuate societal structures, it will illustrate how we need to increasingly address some of the normative challenges that they contain. Hence, these steps will require us to master many scientific traditions and embrace cultural differences in our research, producing a new understanding of our discipline.
