The time is right: Organizing against the surveillance-industrial complex in the ATmosphere and the fediverses

If we organize, we can have a big impact in the fight against the surveillance-industrial complex.

A budding discipline around how science gets read and judged - Aris

Scholarly publishing spent thirty years arguing about access. It has barely begun arguing about what readers do with the paper once they have it. At Aris we call that second argument scholarly interface design. Mike Morrison's community calls it ScienceUX. Either way it is becoming a field, and here is why it is worth your attention.

Holdfast 0: Situating

This post introduces the written version of some optimistic and constructive thinking on knowledge in networks that I’ve been wrestling with since the end of last year.

A Robust Decentralized Infrastructure for Trust-Aware Open Knowledge Sharing [DRAFT]

Semantic technologies and models have matured and become very powerful tools to increase the power and accuracy of recent AI approaches. However, we currently lack channels where semantically structured knowledge can be reliably published and queried, both by humans as well as AI agents. Here we show how this gap can be filled by a global ecosystem that aligns with the original Semantic Web vision with respect to openness, decentralization, and formal semantics, but also targets trust and redundancy. Our approach is based on the concept and technology of nanopublications with content-addressed identifiers and a layered peer-to-peer network of publishing services, query services, and user applications. It applies a trust algorithm from links that are published as nanopublications themselves. We present a novel trust propagation algorithm IDEBT and prove its properties of being robust, efficient to compute, and reproducible. We evaluate the ecosystem on a multi-node test deployment running a synthetic publish/query workload under two coverage configurations, complemented by a descriptive analysis of the live deployed trust network. Our positive results show that a such a decentralized network of services based on nanopublications has the capacity and potential to serve as a universal and globally integrated knowledge sharing platform.