ROME:
7-8 April 2012 --
Thanks for responses to yesterday's item. They have been
extremely
helpful to the Rector Major and his appointed technical
commission in
arriving at the ultimate formulation of the Chapter theme in
English.
Now, given that we are in a season of all things new, in the
spirit of
the Resurrection, you might wonder what I am about by asking
'How old
was Jesus Christ?' This is not a trick question, nor is it a
theological one this time, but I suggest you go to Google (in
English,
please, since I'm not sure this works in other languages for
now, and
the stress is on 'for now'). Also, go to the real Google, not
some
other adaptation of Google, and run the question as stated
above in the
search bar.
You should get, besides the usual list of Google responses (it
suggests
there are 491 million results!!) a 'Best
guess for Jesus Christ date of birth is 4 BC' and
reference to 2
websites.
So what, you ask? This is enormously
significant. You haven't seen this
sort of thing before! Google, over the past few weeks,
has been
producing these 'best guess' results above a whole range of
very direct
searches, and producing 'parsed' information from semi or
unstructured
data of the kind found on many websites, but not in the
subject-predicate-object form you find here (Jesus Christ
(subject)
has-date-of birth (predicate) 4 BC (object). The
significance is
that there is not a bunch of human beings sitting down doing
this kind
of reasoning for Google. It is being done by a machine without
human
intervention, a machine which is able to draw inferences from
scattered
items of data and come up with reasonable answers. Now you'll
have to
go to the biblical scholars and theologians to find out if the
inference in this instance is valid but that's not the point
for the
moment. Ask Google instead 'who
was
Pope Benedict's father?' and you get get a much more
precise
inference. And then note its only reference, freebase.com. Go
to
freebase.com and you will see it is described as 'an entity graph of people,
places and
things, built by a community that loves open data'.
Believe me, this is enormously significant. The
semantic web has
arrived if Google is creating and exposing structured data
where there
was none before, which seems to be exactly what it is doing.
Last year
Microsoft paid $100,000,000 to try to arrive at this point by
buying up
a semantic search engine called Powerset. Yahoo! too is
working on it.
Now go back to the Rector Major's prescient AGC 411 letter on
inculturation of the Salesian charism, and read the following
bit (and
maybe what comes after it):
"What, then, might it mean
to
'leaven' the digital continent all through? It is a homely
image but
one that strikes home right now at a time when the World
Wide Web, to
take one example, is moving from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, from a
Web which
has concentrated on linking people interactively to one
which now seeks
to link data meaningfully. This change is happening subtly
under our
very eyes, not unlike the secret activity of yeast in dough.
Which of
us has not clicked on a link to a major city to be then
presented with
a variety of options – lodgings to stay in, events to be
part of,
places to visit, and quite possibly according to our
personal
interests! Did the computer know those interests? Not as
such, but it
knew how to make a few meaningful connections. The answer
lies in
semantics, and only human beings can (and they do, and this
is what we
must not overlook) offer these semantics in ways that
machines can
interpret".
He draws a conclusion, ultimately, from this kind of thinking,
one that the latest efforts by Google only make more insistent
still:
Instead of
being
dragged unwillingly into the digital continent, we have a
duty to be
there effectively and efficiently. Today this means, amongst
other
things, taking care of meaningful structure, introducing
meaningful
connections into our documents and data. We can guide search
technologies, for example, with documents focused more on
semantic
structure than how 'pretty' they might need to look, and
especially
with semantically prepared data. The former task belongs to
every
Salesian who 'tweets', emails, or writes! The latter, to
those who have
responsibility for the thousands of Salesian websites around
the world.
Aldous Huxley told us in 1931 that is was a 'brave new world'.
He was
being somewhat cynical when he wrote that. The same Aldous
Huxley,
visiting the small Tuscan town of Sansepolcro, commented on
the late
Renaissance artist's 'Resurrection' (Piero della Francesca,
15th
century) as the "best picture (he) had ever seen", an athletic
Christ
ready to step vigorously out of the tomb.
