Two Myths of XML

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Two Myths of XML
By Kendall Clark


     A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will
     unleash a revolution of new possibilities -- Teaser of Tim
     Berners-Lee's Scientific America article, ``The Semantic Web,''
     May 2001
     
     ...[A]pplying XML to the process of crafting legislation [has]
     ... the potential at least of transforming the basic relationship
     between citizens and their elected representatives. -- Alan
     Kotok, ``[1]Can XML Help Write the Law?" May 9, 2001, XML.com
     
   One of my ongoing projects is to think and write clearly about the
   social implications of computer technology, especially the Internet,
   the Web, and free software. Each of these has been called
   revolutionary by proponents. I'm always skeptical when I hear
   ``revolution'' and ``revolutionary'', words that can be said far
   more easily than they can be meant.
   
   While computer technology might be used to aid radical social
   change, I have argued that it is always already embedded (because it
   doesn't fall, as if a gift of the gods, from the sky) in very
   particular social and historical contexts, most often ones in which
   radical social change isn't on the agenda. Except in extraordinary
   circumstances, computer technology is developed and deployed by
   corporations, i.e., institutions fundamentally opposed to radical
   social change and, so, fundamentally committed to maintaining the
   status quo.
   
   (The funding of computer technology development is often provided by
   the public, especially in the case of the Internet, the Web, and
   much free software. The costs and risks of development are borne by
   the public; the profits, payoffs, and control of the developed and
   deployed technology are reaped by corporations and investors -- neat
   trick, huh?)
   
   I have recently focused on two specific areas of computer
   technology: the [2]Semantic Web and, one of its enabling,
   constitutive technologies, [3]XML. In what follows I debunk some
   myths about XML and the Semantic Web by subjecting them to critical
   inquiry. I examine two such myths, give examples of each, and
   explain the truth behind the facade.
   
   1. XML Information is Open and Free
   
   The first XML myth is that information encoded in XML is necessarily
   open and free.
   
   Many people who have been exposed to XML are prone to forgetting
   and, hence, obscuring the most basic fact -- XML is a data format.
   In fact, I'm tempted to say it's just a data format, it's merely a
   data format. As the wider world goes, computer data formats aren't
   all that interesting or significant. Of course, it's a data format
   enmeshed in a range of assumptions, social practices, economic
   arrangements, and so on. But it's still just a data format.
   
   What words like ``open'' and ``free'' can mean when applied to a
   computer data format and what they can mean when applied to a
   social practice or political institution have very little in
   common. The intersection of these two ranges of meaning is,
   practically speaking, nil. But the first myth, that information
   encoded in XML is necessarily ``open'' and ``free'', arises
   precisely from the mistaken belief that the intersection is
   substantial and interesting.
   
   When XML advocates, like those at the [4]W3C, say that XML is
   ``open'' they mean, approximately, that it isn't a proprietary data
   format. Which means you can access XML created by Corporation A's
   tools with Corporation B, C, or D's tools. (In computer talk,
   entities that produce software tools are called ``vendors'', a term
   that almost always means, simply, corporation.) Or you can access
   your XML-encoded information with the tools written by, say, Lucy F.
   Hacker, an independent, free software developer who's written some
   nifty Perl XML libraries.
   
   In this limited, technical sense -- the sense in which XML is just
   one computer data format among many, and one nearly identical (in
   relevant parts) to SGML -- XML is ``open'' and ``free'' and rather a
   decent evolutionary step toward interoperable information systems
   (which are the only sort worth having).
   
   But calling public institutions, social practices, and economic
   arrangements ``open'' and ``free'' is akin to calling them
   democratic, egalitarian, and just. Whether or not any chunk of the
   world is democratic, egalitarian, and just can never be simply a
   matter of whether XML is used as a computer data format there. That
   is, adding the XML computer data format to an undemocratic,
   inegalitarian, or unjust chunk of the world will rarely, if ever,
   make the crucial difference.
   
   Thus to assume that because the government or some corporation uses
   XML -- an open, free data format -- to encode some of its data that
   government or corporation is (or is more) democratic, egalitarian,
   or just is to assume, mistakenly, that 1) ``open'' and ``free'' can
   mean the same thing when applied to social, political, and economic
   chunks of the world as they mean when applied to computer data
   formats; or 2) that the chief impediment to some government or
   corporation becoming (or becoming more) democratic, egalitarian, or
   just is that some of its data is encoded in a proprietary data
   format. The first assumption is a conceptual error; the second is or
   rests on a factual one.
   
   1a. XML Information Systems are Democratic
   
   A variant on the first myth maintains that information systems that
   use XML are thereby more fitting in a democratic society or that
   they are thereby themselves democratic. In the best of cases, this
   myth arises from the conceptual or factual errors above. In the
   worst, it arises from intentional obfuscation.
   
   1b. XML means Universal Access
   
   Another variant is that XML's ``openness'' means that the
   information encoded by it is universally accessible in a socially
   helpful way. The only ways to be taken in by this myth are 1) to be
   ignorant of XML and computer technology generally, and 2) to forget
   that in the US, at least, the most serious impediments to universal
   access to information are a) the endless death march of
   privatization of the US's information infrastructure and b) the
   digital divide.
   
   Several of the variants of the first myth about XML come together in
   Alan Kotok's recent XML.com piece, ``Can XML Help Write the Law?''
   -- a report of a meeting which considered the use of XML in the
   information systems of the US Congress and the various information
   management agencies associated with Congress and the executive
   branch.
   
   According to the head of the [5]LegalXML effort,
   
     ...Before the Web the average citizen had little or no access to
     laws and legislation, now much of that information is available
     for free or low cost. Lawyers may still use the Lexis and WestLaw
     databases for legal research, but legal resource sites and forums
     provide citizens with more legal information than ever.
     Publishers like National Journal and Congressional Quarterly also
     provide low-cost clipping and bill-tracking services with
     information that used to be the monopoly of lobbyists.
     
   Thus we have fine examples of some myths about XML. For many,
   perhaps most, citizens, access to laws and legislation continues to
   be, even in the age of the Web, exactly what it's always been: a
   matter of a visit to the local library. XML can do nothing to change
   that since many, if not most, people still have as their most
   reliable point of access to the Web the same local public library.
   Putting legal information in XML cannot do a single thing to remedy
   the problems of digital access in the US (and around the world).
   
   What's most troubling about that quote, however, is the way
   privatization of the national information infrastructure is simply
   assumed as unobjectionable and unavoidable. (If you're interested
   in the history of information infrastructure privatization, which
   didn't gain real momentum until the 1960s or so, pick up Herbert
   Schiller's Information and the Crisis Economy or his Public Inc.) To
   be truly empowered, citizens do not need "low-cost" -- and the
   services of National Journal, Congressional Quarterly, and regular
   access to SGML versions of the Federal Register are anything but
   inexpensive -- access to congressional and executive branch
   information. They need and deserve ``free'' information, which is to
   say, information they don't have to pay for twice.
   
   One of the chief impediments to citizen empowerment vis-a-vis the
   information economy is privatization (including the total giveaway
   of the publicly-funded Internet infrastructure in the mid-90s), and
   there's simply nothing that any data format can do to prevent or
   ameliorate it. What's worse, given the present political climate,
   most government XML initiatives will just be avenues for the further
   privatization of public information systems; privatization which is
   as far from being politically neutral as possible and which is
   ruinous for the health of American democracy.
   
   2. Schemas are Magical
   
   XML and schemas, in particular, are often the subject of magical
   thinking, which is precisely what causes the second myth about XML"
   ``If we can just create the right XML vocabulary or schema, then a
   vast range of problems will be solved.'' (I have discussed the
   politics of XML schemas and the Semantic Web at length in an
   [6]essay for XML.com, and I invite interested readers to take a look
   at it.)
   
   Magical thinking about XML is rife, and comes in two flavors (first
   formulated in this way by my colleague Bijan Parsia, to whom I'm
   grateful):
   
   First. The use of XML per se imparts any number of wonderful, often
   unsayable, benefits.
   
   Second. The use of XML per se makes some things possible that
   otherwise cannot be done at all.
   
   Magical thinking about XML occurs oftenest in the brains of
   technical managers and marketers -- that is, people who need to
   understand something about XML, but who aren't really
   technically-inclined, and so don't really understand much, if
   anything, about XML. Thus they can often believe three absurd things
   before lunch about XML's capabilities and virtues.
   
   Examples
   
   Alan Kotok's reporting of Patrice McDermott's (who's head of [7]OMB
   Watch) interest in how the federal government might use XML gives a
   fine example of magical thinking about XML:
   
     McDermott ... envisioned a standard government-wide XML
     vocabulary that would link legislative activities with government
     databases. This XML vocabulary would enable the public to see the
     relationship between legislative actions on one hand, with the
     actual results of those actions as expressed in government
     records, an idea that generated more than a little nervous
     laughter among the meeting participants.
     ... McDermott said that a standard legislative vocabulary would
     enable the public to link these statistics to legislators'
     committee or floor votes, as well as election-campaign
     contribution databases. That kind of machine-readable information
     would give the public much more power and add accountability to
     the political process.
     
   Let's set aside the almost unimaginable scope of the project
   McDermott implies when she suggests that one could use XML to link
   legislative activity to its subsequent results in federal government
   databases and information systems. I want to focus attention on the
   idea that there could be, as Kotok reports McDermott to have
   suggested, ``a standard government-wide XML vocabulary''. I am
   stunned that I should have to remind the head of OMB Watch that the
   US federal government may be the most staggeringly complex human
   institution in the history of staggeringly complex human
   institutions. Its scope and breadth and coverage is massive.
   
   The very idea that there could be a single XML schema covering every
   institutional information requirement of the US federal government
   is a perfect example of the second magical thinking about XML,
   namely, that XML makes possible things otherwise impossible. It does
   not or, properly speaking, it cannot and never will.
   
   (To understand why this is magical thinking, try to write in plain
   English prose -- or in any language of your choosing -- a
   nontrivial, interesting vocabulary for describing the information
   encoding requirements of the US federal government. Or, to make
   things easier, how about doing that for just the executive branch?
   Or, again easier, just the Justice Department. Take care that your
   head doesn't explode in the process.)
   
   In fact McDermott's only rival for being made the canonical instance
   of the myth that XML schemas are somehow magically powerful is the
   HumanML effort. (And McDermott's suggestion isn't really a rival
   since it's only a suggestion and not a full-blown project, as is the
   case with HumanML.) I cannot bring myself to call it an actual
   development effort, given its absurd set of goals. As its founders
   claim, HumanML
   
     ...has a goal of "enriching human communications and reducing
     human misunderstanding" through explicit mechanisms to represent
     paralinguistic features of human communication. The markup
     initiative would "provide a trusted means to markup the
     interpretive process. (1) Reduce miscommunication through a
     standard framework of referents to descriptions of emotional
     states (2) Enhance communication by enabling emotional states to
     be identified and used to query if requests and responses do not
     conform to predicted ranges for sequence and frequency within a
     genre. (3) Create communication through authoring tools that use
     genre-based schema to organize sequences and frequencies of
     emotional
     
   Which desperately bespeaks the ancient human dream, as old as the
   first stirrings of civilization, of the perfect language, now
   rebirthed of technophilic parents. I'd suggest a careful reading of
   Umberto Eco's The Search for the Perfect Language if I thought it
   would help.
   
   3. XML is the Dog, Not the Tail
   
     [M]achine-readable information would give the public much more
     power and add accountability to the political process. -- Alan
     Kotok, ``Can XML Help Write the Law?''
     
   The final point I want to make is less a myth and more a fallacy
   that lies behind various distortions about XML. Computer technology,
   including XML, reflects institutional and social structures far more
   often than it changes them. Technology is only possible within the
   context of social and political practices that create, maintain, and
   extend it. And the social and political practices that constitute
   social institutions are the limits within which technology can mean
   or be anything at all.
   
   Now the relationship is more reciprocal and dynamic than that,
   actually. Technology can give rise to new social practices; but only
   to those that the larger social framework can or will accommodate.
   Technology alone cannot make a revolution, though it could spark or
   aid or abet one.
   
   The other facet of taking technology to be independent of the social
   context within which it always already operates is to misjudge ts
   its alliance and use. In other words, the bad guys always have the
   newest, bestest, fastest, powerfulest stuff, and they always have
   more of it, and they seemingly always employ the people who created
   it. And, generally, any tool can be used to impede social change as
   well as to foster it. Hence, even if XML had some particularly
   useful change to empower the citizenry, those forces that oppose
   their empowerment are free to use it too. Technology often, at least
   in countries like the US, amounts to a draw. In short, like every
   other human tool, XML is not immune to abuse.
   
   Most enthusiastic proponents of (the beneficial social implications)
   XML have the cart before the horse or, to mix metaphors, they have
   the tail, XML, wagging the dog, society and social possibility.
   Whether or not ``machine-readable information'' can ever do anything
   to empower citizens, or to reform a wayward or corrupt political
   process, will always be less a matter of the technology in question
   and more a matter of the kind of hard, real-world political and
   social organizing that has always been the real engine of social
   change.
   
   Note: The next article in this two-part series will examine the
   tension between the Semantic Web's promise of perfect information
   filtering and the needs of democracy, by way of a review of Cass
   Sunstein's new book Republic.com.

References

   1. http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/05/09/legalxml.html
   2. http://www.sciam.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-lee.html
   3. http://www.xml.com/
   4. http://www.w3c.org/
   5. http://www.legalxml.org/
   6. http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/01/31/politics.html
   7. http://www.ombwatch.org/


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Posted on Monkeyfist at http://monkeyfist.com/articles/755