The Socratic Web — Quick Note

The Socratic Web is like the Semantic Web, but it is only one single ‘semant’ — if that’s a word. It is one type of semantic connection. Specifically: ‘Critiques’

What really separates my efforts in advocating for the creation of the Socratic Web vs the efforts going into developing the Semantic Web is that the Semantic web is about standardising nomenclature, classifications, language and things like that.

My objective with promoting The Socratic Web is all about building support for the real world application of the concept. My goal is to make it permanently possible to access the best critiques of any given piece of content, from all webpages, all platforms, and all communities. With buy in from the major platforms and browsers (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Mozilla, etc) the creators of critiques (fact checkers, critics, skeptics, etc) will be strongly motivated to participate in adding their content to the Socratic Web database of critiques, connected to the targets of their criticism (see rbutr for an example of what I mean here).

This visions solves the problems of Facebook and Google with regards to the public outcry about Fake News (without all of the problems of all of the other approaches, as I touched upon briefly here), and drives traffic to high quality investigative journalism, fact checkers and debunkers from the low value (but frequently viral) junk articles that they critique.

The Socratic web is an idea about the application of a particular semantic relationship between webpages. It is also, arguably, a form of annotation. But making it happen really has nothing to do with working within those frameworks, but instead is all about making the use-case happen so that we can generate the database, which can then be exported to those structured data types.

I will write more about this shortly — I am aware that I haven’t put together any simple succinct explanation of the Socratic Web, and even this quick note is just touching on the surface. I apologise for that. I hope to publish a “white paper” of some sort very shortly which will help explain everything.

For now, here is our roadmap. Feel free to join the movement and help us build The Socratic Web.