This transcript is dictated by Peter Murray Rust and doesn't represent anyone else's views.
In a previous session, I showed that we do not own our knowledge, or at least a large part of it. So, what are we going to do about it?
I think the following things that are possible.
We can get the situation changed whereby, by law and by governmental action, in terms of funding and so on, we can transfer the ownership of our knowledge back to ourselves.
This is going to be difficult because we're facing a mega million or billion dollar industry. The value of taking our knowledge from us, preventing us using it, and using it for its own purposes exceeds the cost of maintaining this system.
To overturn a very large industry is difficult, given that the industry has many lobbyists. If you go to Brussels, there are permanent Elsevier lobbyists in Brussels. So it's going to take a lot of work to convince legislators and policymakers to change that.
Nevertheless, I think we should aim for that. And I think everybody involved in the creation and dissemination of scholarly knowledge should have this as part of their agenda, to try and change our process back to where we own our knowledge, and we can say what is done with the knowledge.
However, that's not going to happen in my lifetime. I've seen 30 years of effort trying to create open access for everybody, and with a very poor amount of access at the moment for many people in the world.
The other way to change things is to create something which is simply better than what we have at the moment.
Now, this again is going to be extremely difficult, but it's one of the main things that causes technical revolutions to take place. In the same way as the railways displaced the canals because they were better for almost everything, we need to create a new way of managing knowledge which is better than the current industry of publishers and legislation of control.
How are we going to do that? Well, it was going to be extremely difficult. However, we're now in an era where the tools that we've got are vastly more powerful than the ones that existed 10 years ago.
We have distributed networks. A very large number of the world is on networks. The group that I'm involved with in India and Germany and UK meets every day for 2 hours online and creates high-quality material and saves it in a way which would have been impossible to think of, probably 15 years ago, or even 10 years ago.
However the tools are much better now.
Knowledge is a richer format than it was before, and here I use the word semantic. If we can create semantic knowledge for the world, then it will be vastly superior to the current textual information that we have, which is, in many cases, extremely limiting.
I'll probably do another blog on why PDFs are so awful. And they're not just awful—objectively, they are seriously neocolonialist in terms of how they present knowledge to the world in general.
But if we move towards semantic knowledge, then we can make knowledge available for everybody.
The first thing that semantic knowledge does is it structures it in a way which isn't possible by using the current PDF print technology.
There are semantic systems, and by far the most widely known is Wikipedia, Wikidata, and other media wiki and Wikimedia tools.
This from the beginning created semantic information. It wasn't always very easy to create, because there were no tools. And it still doesn't cover a number of areas of semantics. But it's vastly better than what the publishing industry does.
The goal, I believe, is to create semantic knowledge and publish it as such. But to make sure that everyone who publishes semantic knowledge retains the control of that knowledge, and does not hand it over to a publisher.
Let us create knowledge now which is semantic and available to all the world, where the world can control it, and not some commercial organization.
As I said, that won't be easy to do. And it won't be accepted by rational or moral arguments. It will be accepted because it's better.
The goal of this particular set of workshops with NYIT and Semantic Climate is to show what semantics is, and to show how it's better.
We urge anyone who is listening in to this, or who reads it afterwards, to think about making their material semantic and making it available to the whole world.