time is funny

I was in a bus, sweating, a bit nervous, late for a discussion about the future of Web, about formal semantics, ontologies, and knowledge representation in general (my friends and colleagues from the Good Old AI research group organised it) and not prepared for it at all. The night before, I was reading (again!) a wonderful travelogue from Central Asia and it just didn’t seem important to gather information about microformats and RDFs and Tim Berners-Lee viewpoints…

So, the only thing left for me was to take out a book – Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino – and at least try to enjoy my bus ride. Feeling several different skins touching my skin, I managed to get lost in stories about cities and cities about stories, imaginably told to Kublai Khan by Marco Polo; one of those cities was Zora.

Marco (or Calvino) told Kublai (or me) that „beyond six rivers and three mountain ranges rises Zora, a city no one, having seen it, can forget. (…) Zora’s secret lies in the way your gaze runs over patterns following one another as in a musical score where not a note can be altered or displaced. The man who knows by heart how Zora is made, if he is unable to sleep at night, can imagine he is walking along the streets and he remembers the order by which the copper clock follows the barber’s striped awning, then the fountain with the nine jets, the astronomer’s glass tower, the melon vendor’s kiosk, the statue of the hermit and the lion, the Turkish bath, the café at the corner, the alley that lead to the harbor. This city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech. Between each idea and each point of the itinerary infinity or a contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory. So the world’s most learned men are those who have memorized Zora.”

A small eyelid-like pattern of dust on the bus window overlapped the stone eye of Dimitrije Tucović’s statue at the Slavija square, spontaneously forming a meaningful new portrait, and I realized that Zora was nothing but a semantic network, an upper ontology, with rigidly defined structure between concepts – just like an armature or a honeycomb; an objective formal representation of the world which could be processed by a machine (e.g. an intelligent agent on the Semantic Web) and which would make the programme understand the meaning, which would, in a way, make it think. In other words: Zora’s map is a gigantic RDF graph.

The dream held by AI researchers was similar to the one of Zora; by seeing what happened to this town (“Forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her.”) one can ponder, as I did: Could it be that Tim Berners-Lee’s dream is just another Kublai Khan’s empire, tempting, yet evasive, ambiguous, impossible to posses, doomed to be forgotten?..

The bus, then, stopped.