The Politics of Schemas: Part 2
by Kendall Grant Clark | Pages: 1, 2

What can be done?

First. Schemas are either reconcilable or not. When not reconcilable, we must know how to respond justly and equitably; that is, how to deal with multiple irreconcilable schemas, both technically and in terms of policy (which is better when attuned to technical realities than when not). When reconcilable, some form of provisional accommodation will either be practical or not. Attention must be given to the ways in which such accommodation is possible. We need to know, in short, what accommodations are technically feasible before technically impossible or impractical accommodations are established by courts or legislatures. Where a schema concerns competing interests and weakly contested concepts, there may be rational hope that an equitable, just resolution is possible; where it concerns strongly or essentially contested concepts, and so there is little or no possibility of resolution, we must find ways to proceed justly and equitably.

Second. Schema making should be made vastly more open to all those parties whose interests are at stake. "Open" means in this context open to democratic participation, that is, participation by democratic institutions and their representatives. There is every reason for the institutions that create schemas to invite technically competent representatives of all interested parties to participate in appropriate ways. Judging from my informal (but not cursory) surveys of schema projects over the past two years this happens infrequently and piecemeal. (But it can often be very difficult to judge how significantly open a schema project is from publicly available information.)

Democratic, public participation will tend to make schemas more responsive to multiple interests, more equitable as to whether or how contested concepts are handled. It won't make them less political; it may tend to make them more just. But the present situation, in which schemas are said to be open but aren't in fact very open to input from others, is intolerable, a point that cannot be overstressed. (In one sense there being a fissure between what is said about schema-making and what is true of schema-making is worse than if no one ever claimed schemas were open at all.) The social and institutional process by which public schemas are made must become more democratic and egalitarian than it presently is. Leaving schema-making to the suspect vagaries of the market is no substitute for serious democratic participation in the process itself.

Third. Democratic and civil institutions need to give serious attention to funding interdisciplinary research in this area. Computer experts need experts from other domains to join them in collaborative work on these issues. Such research is best funded by institutions whose purpose is to serve the public interest, broadly conceived: universities, NGOs, institutes of public policy, governmental research funding bodies like the National Science Foundation, etc. For example, one project that needs to be funded is a comprehensive survey of public schema projects. Having empirical data in hand about the degrees to which public schemas are significantly open would be a valuable baseline.

Fourth. Computer experts should begin educating non-corporate institutions -- watchdogs, public interest groups, think tanks, oversight and regulatory commissions and bodies, international standards bodies -- so they too may discuss and work on the issues around politics and the future of the Web. A minimal requirement of professional responsibility is to inform the relevant parties of the extent to which their interests may be in play in schema creation and use. I am convinced that most of these institutions are blissfully unaware of the political ramifications of schemas and the Semantic Web. We need to be willing, not only to work for free to build free software tools like XML parsers or web servers, but to work for free to educate others about the political implications of schemas and of XML technology generally.

Fifth. Schema registries and repositories must be made, and must always remain, completely open to all schemas. One way to disempower the use of alternative schemas is to make them difficult to find. The apparatus and infrastructure around the use of schemas may be just as political as schemas themselves. The same may be said for resource discovery mechanisms. Controlled vocabularies and topic sets, often crucial to properly extensible schemas, are, as proper parts of schemas, subject to the constraints already discussed. Often topic sets and controlled vocabularies most overtly reflect the interests and understandings of the institution(s) of production. Schema extension mechanisms are intended to avoid chaotic, uncontrolled schema change, which is well and good. But we must consider how to make schemas extensible for alternative interests and contested understanding as well. In the fullest social context that kind of extensibility is as vital as more purely technical kinds.

Sixth. It may be possible to develop a heuristic for classifying public schema projects. Such a heuristic, if reliable, could save time and effort by focusing research. One might begin by distinguishing, as a matter of degree, between politically vulnerable and politically resistant schema projects. One next needs a list of simple questions to ask about a schema, questions like these:

1. Is the schema's world-chunk politically disputed ordinarily (that is, in the real world)?
2. To what extent is the controlling institution obligated, inclined, or resistant to include public participation in the schema's creation, use, or extension?
3. What is the "size, ownership, and profit orientation" (Herman and Chomsky 1988, p. 3) of the schema's controlling institution? (Institutional analysis and the historical development of modern media suggest that "size, ownership, and profit orientation" may indicate clusters of contested understandings and competing or conflicting interests.)
4. Is the schema's world-chunk one over which government has some regulatory interest?
5. Does the schema formalize part of the socio-cultural world or the internal state of a machine?
6. Are the interests reflected in the schema the only relevant interests there are? Are there other interests not so reflected?
7. In whose employ were the experts that created the schema? Were any of them working actively to represent the interests and understandings of relevant parties other than the controlling institution? (Cf. Herman and Chomsky 1998, p. 18).
8. What is the schema's scope? (A narrow scope may indicate fewer competing interests and understandings, while a broader scope may indicate more.)

Schemas and Justice

I assume that some form of standard schema regulation is likely in the future. Most regulation of the sort rests on at least two grounds: conceptual work about the technology in question and a theory of justice (even if only vestigial). Public policy is interested in the creation and maintenance of a just and fair society. Do we know how to think about schemas, or XML technology generally, in terms of justice, fairness, equity, and public policy? How does one go about relating a theory of justice to a schema?

We may begin by finding an analogue to schemas, one about which theories of justice and public policy already know. Schemas are understandings of the world that affect more than the institutions that create or control them. They are shared and imposed understandings. A schema is shared in that it's the system's operative understanding, a part of the logic of the system's mediation between the world and the system's users. The understanding at work in the system is perforce shared by each and all of its users: their interactions with the system are indirect interactions with the world according to the understanding of the world formalized by the schema. But this operative understanding may be at odds with the understanding of the world preferred or professed by users of the system. In this sense it is imposed on them inasmuch as they use it (absent considerations of consent, which are too complicated to raise here but important nonetheless). This dichotomy between the shared and imposed senses of schemas is analogous to law, which has the same dichotomous structure. Public policy experts and theorists of justice know better how to think about law than about schemas or the Semantic Web.

The linchpin of the analogy is whether law has the same dichotomous structure. Just like schemas, laws necessarily reflect interests and understandings of world-chunks. Law does not fall out of the heavens but is an artifact of human sociality. As citizens we share, at least abstractly, the understandings of the world embedded in law. Each citizen is obliged prima facie to conduct her or his interactions with the world in ways consonant with the framework established by law. Whether we agree with the interests or understandings reflected in laws, we are obliged not to transgress them (at least the just ones). But, as is the case with schemas, what about those cases where the interests or understandings embedded in the shared legal framework are ones we find inimical to our interests and understandings? While citizens are prima facie subject to law, which is in that sense shared, they may find themselves deeply at odds with an understanding of the world that some law(s) reflect.

While the analogy holds up to initial testing, it, like any tool, has a context of usefulness, one which is narrow in this case. It will break if pushed beyond that context. But as a way to begin thinking, the analogy is sound enough. Unlike laws, which in democratic societies are created by institutions that are formally democratic, schemas are often created by institutions that are neither formally nor informally democratic. Like laws, schemas are rarely interest neutral and may formalize contested understandings of the world. As with laws, we should set as our goal the creation of procedurally and substantively just schemas. One might proceed by adapting parts of John Rawls' theory of justice, including his work on just and unjust law, deliberative rationality, the original position, and so on. One might also do well to attend to practical moral traditions of procedural equity embedded in the rules of democratic legislative institutions.

I have tried in this essay to say something about the politics of schemas in order to say something about politics and the future of the Web. The social impact of schemas and the Semantic Web is yet a field of open-ended possibility. If the present Web evolves into anything like the Semantic Web, and perhaps even if it doesn't, political schemas will shape the way its users interact with the world. Despite uncertainty about just what the Semantic Web is, we can be certain that whatever else happens with the Web in the next ten years, schemas will remain central to it.

Political schemas may limit what we notice, what we can say or think about what we notice, and to whom we can say it, especially inasmuch as we use machines to mediate parts of the world to us. The Semantic Web vision means, if anything at all, creating software systems that mediate the world to some of us in useful and, one hopes, fair, just, and good ways. What XML technologists say and think and do about the politics of schemas, the Semantic Web, and the social benefits of the technology they create will go a long way to determining the Web's future, and maybe something of society's future too. I hope I at least have said enough to encourage the wide-ranging and free conversation it is the responsibility of XML technologists, along with others, to have.

Works Cited or Recommended

Walter Baranger, "NITF and NewsML," <http://www.egroups.com/message/newsml/55>, 2000.
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility Bylaws, <http://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/bylaws.html>, 2000.
William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, Princeton University Press, 1993.
Donald Davidson, "On the Very Idea of A Conceptual Scheme," Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford University Press, 1984.
Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory, The Crossing Press, 1983.
W. B. Gallie, " Essentially Contested Concepts," in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 56(n.s.), 1956.
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of The Mass Media, Pantheon, 1998.
IPTC, Documentation for NITF, < http://www.nitf.org/nitf-documentation/nitf-documentation.html>, 2000.
Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance, MIT Press, 1993.
John Mallery, "Hermeneutics: From Textual Explication to Computer Understanding?," < http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/jcma/papers/1986-ai-memo-871/memo.html>, 1986.
Erik T. Mueller, "Making news understandable to computers," <http://www.signiform.com/newsextract/newsund.htm>, 2000.
Erik T. Mueller, "NewsForms: XML-based forms for representing the content of news events," <http://www.signiform.com/newsextract/newsforms.html>, 1999.
Erik T. Mueller, "NewsForm XML DTD, " <http://www.signiform.com/newsextract/newsform.dtd>, 1999.
William J. Mitchell, e-topia, MIT Press, 1999.
David Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism, Oxford University Press, 1979.
--------, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation, Oxford University Press, 1986.
Michael Perelman, Class Warfare in the Information Age, St. Martin's Press, 1998.
John Rawls, Political Liberalism, Columbia University Press, 1995.
--------, Theory of Justice, Belknap Press, 1971.
Celia T. Romm and Nava Pliskin, "Electronic Mail as a Coalition-Building Information Technology," ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 16(1), 1998.
Herbert Schiller, Information Inequality: The Deepening Social Crisis in America, Routledge, 1996.
--------, Culture Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression, Oxford University Press, 1991.
John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, Free Press, 1995.
Paul Strassmann, The Politics of Information Management: Policy Guidelines, Information Economics Press, 1994.
Elaine Svenonius, The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization, MIT Press, 2000.
Katia Sycara, "Dispute Mediation: A Computer Model," Operation Research and Artificial Intelligence: The Integration of Problem Solving Strategies, Kluwer, 1990.

Want to comment on this article? Email the author.

---