QuestionHierarchy_LP


 * How do competing epistemologies/worldviews become embedded in information infrastructures? **
 * How do legacy thought styles from artificial intelligence, cybernetics, information studies, linguistics, and computer science shape the way Semantic Web engineers approach the Web’s design?
 * How did you get involved in conversations around the Semantic Web? What was your background prior to this that prepared you to participate in these discussions?
 * How do competing thought styles get negotiated (or do they) in the development of controlled vocabularies and ontologies? Is it more a trick? Or a hypertension?
 * How do disagreements in the design of your ontologies get worked out?
 * How do the shapes and affordances of the Web’s data structures reflect (or better refract) legacy thought styles?
 * What sort of conceptual work do your data structures/ontologies/controlled vocabularies (depending on audience) do for you? Do you think they could be designed differently or better?
 * How has development and growth of the Web since the early 90s changed the possibilities in the field of artificial intelligence (and thus reshaped the affordances of the Web’s data structures)? How has the opening of data?
 * How have your approaches to your research changed since the early 1990s? Do you have new aims? Do you find it to be a more opportunistic or constraining space?
 * What macro-structures (DARPA, the W3C and discourse around openness, singulatarians) shape the world views/epistemologies/thought styles that become embedded in the Semantic Web?
 * What contexts is your work embedded within? Which institutions fund your work, and what are their guiding missions? Do you feel connected to that mission? Do you find that your work supports that mission?
 * How do those building the semantic Web distinguish which "differences make a difference"? What modes of thinking get them there?
 * How do semantic Web engineers understand meaning? Semantics? Information? Knowledge?
 * Why is the Semantic Web called the 'Semantic' Web?

** How does the design of information infrastructure shape what is permitted to become knowledge/a politics of knowledge representation? **
 * Whose knowledge is represented on the Web? Whose is eclipsed?
 * Where is the structure in information infrastructure? What work does it do? What limits does it produce?
 * How do the affordances of the Web - from hypertext to controlled vocabularies - influence what information becomes discoverable?
 * What cultural or scientific impact will semantifying the Web have?
 * How do the Web (and AI’s) data structures - such as frames - produce information margins?
 * [What is my question if I'm asking this of data structures? Am I interviewing the data structure here? Can I?]
 * What “experimental systems” exist on the Web? What data structures or ontologies remain open to differential reproduction or radical transformation?
 * How do your systems anticipate change? How do they respond to new or unexpected knowledge?
 * What systems on the Web capture diverse situated knowledges?
 * How do your information systems (depending on audience) respond to disagreement?


 * V2**


 * 1) ** How have different ways of thinking about the structure and function of digital information infrastructure (largely stemming from different traditions of AI, information science, computer science, philosophy, and linguistics) shaped what the digital information infrastructure has become? **
 * 2) ** What data challenges do information infrastructures respond to? What makes environmental justice data so difficult to recognize? **
 * 3) ** How does the design of the Semantic Web shape what is permitted to become knowledge? **