(2022-03-16) Taylor Radical Interoperability Is A Political Agenda

Dorian Taylor: Radical Interoperability is a Political Agenda. I have been thinking about data again recently, as I had been helping a client with some “personal training” sessions on gaining proficiency with linked data, a set of technical standards I have been using to represent computable information for over a decade and a half. After our first session he asked me what the main challenges were

The big thing linked data does well is something the big tech firms don’t actually want: independence from them.

Radical portability and interoperability of data is an issue of values, and ultimately a political agenda.

So I Made a Video... 27 minutes long (2022-02-11-TaylorLinkedDataPresentation)

A revelatory moment came when trying to answer my client’s question about the frustrations of linked data, and aside from the generally poor (albeit steadily improving) available tooling, perhaps the most frustrating thing about it is its neglect from the one constituency you’d think would have been all over it: mainstream Web development.

Linked data makes it possible to completely decouple computable information from the system that ordinarily houses it. Longitudinal evidence suggests typical Web-based product companies don’t actually want that.

I, however, anticipate that as people get more sophisticated, there will at least be a niche market who will be loyal because they can access—and remove—100% of their data. And that’s saying nothing about all these other domains:
Governments
universities

Scraping the Pool

On Thursday I got boned because there was a swim meet going on that you wouldn’t have known about if you hadn’t dug into a page buried into one of the half-dozen U of T athletics department websites to see an ad-hoc oh-by-the-way message tacked to the top of the regular schedule, the latter hidden by an “accordion”-style click-to-reveal webpage feature. (heh see (2007-01-31) Udell Sharing Calendars Across Silos)

Why so stingy with that data? Why not publish it in a format that people will actually use?

This information is not very useful on some random, deep-linked webpage, but it is useful in my calendar, you know, where I schedule all of my other activities.

This mundane example gives us a hint toward valuating the development of this particular information resource. In order to avoid being disappointed by sporadic changes to the schedule, every user of the pool (hundreds? thousands?) has to check every day they intend to swim (up to 7 days a week but realistically less), which means they need to find (or bookmark) the page, and probably set up some kind of reminder to do so.

Scraping, which is what I did, is almost always possible, with enough effort, enough of an appetite for itinerant failure, and enough of a willingness to leave certain features or capabilities on the table

When I say “computers could be doing way more work than they currently do”, I’m actually referring to certain patterns of design decisions in computer systems that inhibit—or prohibit—certain outcomes. You can’t anticipate every use case for an information system over an arbitrarily long time horizon, but you can choose systems that expose their data semantics as a matter of course.

The irony is that so much software, enterprise and otherwise, boils down to CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations, and the user interfaces to perform those operations. There tend to be very few verbs besides. So the menu of things the software “lets” you do can really be framed as the complement of what it actively prevents you from doing. Software that fully exposes its data “lets” you do anything, because it’s the data that matters.