I was watching a documentary about the origins of the financial crisis the other day, and it reminded me of something I wrote in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. Back then, there weren't such things as blogs to put such musings and ramblings on. So since today is the 20th anniversary of that day, here it is:
THE PARTY
Once upon a time there was a party. It was a big party, and went on for a long, long time - longer than any party ever had. A great many people were invited, and there were more who just turned up anyway. There were so many people at the party that no-one ever got to meet all of them.
People ate, and drank, and danced at the party. It went on for so long that people got drunk, became sober and started drinking again. It wasn't just one of those parties where people sneak upstairs to make love: there were people actually born there.
In time there were people who had grown up at this party not knowing anything else. They had heard of the life their parents or grandparents lived before the party; they saw pictures of people in other places, and even went to visit them occasionally. But the party, to them, was the only reality. Many of them hoped that, eventually, everyone would be able to come.
As with most parties, very few people could actually remember what they were celebrating. There had been a fight earlier between some of the people there, and it seemed a good idea to have a big binge and forget everything. Many people had borrowed from their neighbours to be there, but this, too was soon forgotten.
Of course not everyone was invited to the party, and not everyone could come. To the East, a wicked witch cast a spell over all her lands to stop people going. When this didn't work she built a wall, and caused a great hedge to grow all around. Many risked their lives to climb across the wall and go to the party.
The people at the party said this was a terrible thing, of course, but secretly they were quite relieved. They were afraid in case the people from the East came over and forced them to share everything. Before long, they forgot all about the people behind the wall, the names of their lands, or the things they had done together in the past. They simply saw them as a vague threat, and blamed their own ignorance on the Wicked Witch.
Then there were those who were not invited at all. Occasionally one of them would turn up at the doorstep, in working clothes or in rags, and would quickly be turned away before he could spoil the fun.
One day, the Wicked Witch of the East died. Her spell was broken. The great gate which had been sealed up in the wall for many years was thrown open, so people could come and go as they pleased. Many of them wanted to join the party.
The party meanwhile had got to the stage most parties get to at about two or three in the morning: most of the beer cans contained cigarette ash. Soggy crisps were floating around in a pool of wine. A few people were still trying to dance, while someone fiddled drunkenly with the stereo system. Most people were content to sit groping in dark corners, or doze loudly in armchairs. There were no clean cups left.
There was also very little left to eat or drink. Everyone said that this was just a temporary lull while someone went to the shops to get some more drinks. It happened every so often, they said, but things always went back to normal. However, the hosts of the party were all still there, and while they were confidently insisting that there was still plenty more, no-one actually knew who had gone to the shops, or when they would be back.
And so, eventually, the party ended. This caused a lot of annoyance to the people from the East, who were just getting into it. There was also a lot of ill-feeling and resentment from those who couldn't make it, as well as from those who weren't invited.
As to what happens next, we do not know. The Brandenburg Gate, so long sealed up in the Berlin Wall, has indeed been flung open. Romanian gypsies there go up to western tourists and ask for money; hovering on the threshold of our world. By a pedestrian crossing in West Berlin a small boy with one leg stands on home-made crutches and holds out his hat to passers-by. As the neon lights of the Kurfuerstendamm flash behind him, he looks exactly like a Victorian engraving. For him, the twentieth century simply hasn't happened.
In Western cities, meanwhile, we frantically try to build our vision of the future before it's gone. As buildings reach the end of their allotted twenty or thirty years, they are replaced by cheaper ones with a thinner layer of marble, as we try to create a veneer of opulence in a world which no longer has it so good. We do not know if there will be much oil or gas left in twenty years from now, so we drive around as quickly as we can, in the hope that we might arrive before the petrol runs out.
One thing we will know, though, is that there will be a lot of resentment when people finally realise that they have missed out. To make matters worse, they will generally assume that it was a lot better than it was. At the moment we have Albanians and Romanians crowding the streets and railway stations of western cities; soon Russians and Ukrianians will be wanting to know why their economies can't give them the lifestyle that we enjoyed for so long. No-one will have an answer.
It will be hard to explain that we did not know we were at a party, or that we somehow thought that there would always be more, simply because there always had been.
Meanwhile, whoever it was that went for more drinks will still be out looking, for we have drunk the planet dry.
Mike Bennett
November 1989
Monday 28 September 2009
Wednesday 20 May 2009
The Trough Fever Pandemic
Of all the historical precedents of the last few days here in London, my favourite is the Sun newspaper quoting Oliver Cromwell, verbatim, asking for the Speaker of Parliament to "In the name of God, go!" This was a tabloid newspaper that usually runs editorials of one syllable, writing in 300-year-old English.
There have been other historical precedents as well. Today for the first time since Cromwell, the Speaker did go. It's been a good week for the papers.
The British media machine follows a well-oiled production line, with various programmes such as the Today Programme in the morning on Radio 4 and Newsnight in the evening on BBC2 setting what insiders call the News Agenda. In a separate parallel world in this past week the popular tabloids have been running continuous front page news about somebody called Jordan whose name is not Jordan splitting up with someone whose name is Peter or Andre or something. Apparently they met on a game show where vaguely famous people eat insects, and one of them has abnormally large breasts.
At first the epidemic of trough fever that swept through the media looked like a re-run of the recent newspaper pandemic of Swine Flu. A couple of isolated cases of an apparently contagious condition usually more prevalent in developing countries. Although this particular illness was entirely home grown.
The first case was diagnosed when the Home Secretary accidentally claimed expenses for a dirty video rented by her husband. I'm a bit hazy about the fees office guidelines on these matters, but one could argue that this was a necessary expense incurred by the MP being away from home. However she was quick to send her unhappy husband in front of the news cameras to apologise for what was one letter away from state subsidised banking.
In retrospect that particular case seems like a mild sniffle.
Then the influential "This Week" programme (BBC1, Thursdays at 11:40 whenever Parliament is sitting) picked up the story that there were likely to be many more expenses revelations in the pipeline, with rumours of a detailed list being hawked around Fleet Street. Sure enough, the Daily Telegraph broadsheet started to publish just such a list, starting last week. The print media suddenly didn't look so outdated.
A mood of sudden indignation swept the nation. "We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality," as a chap called Thomas Macaulay wrote some 175 years ago. This periodical fit was very much on view at last week's Question Time (BBC1, Thursdays at 10:40) when a number of MPs, some of the quite respectable, found themselves on the panel and in front of an audience of grim looking Northern folk in the appropriately named town of Grimsby. Grim but by no means silent as each of the MPs in turn was booed and heckled as they tried to explain their actions and the features of "The System" that led them to trip up so badly.
What emerged, from this and other encounters, was a sorry tale of not one but several different strains of trough fever. There were people who had broken the law, people who had not broken the law but had transgressed the rather vague rules for Parliamentary expenses, and people who had transgressed neither but were seen to be morally wanting in the cold light of day. Was it really reasonable to claim expenses for light bulbs, lawn mowing, loo seats from the public purse (and that's just the letter L) when most of us have to buy our own? Even from just the first couple of days of expenses revelations there was enough weirdness that people were in no mood to distinguish between the toilet seats (quite reasonable if you've ever tried sitting without one) to mock Tudor beams (for the same unfortunate Mr Prescott). Perhaps the one expense claim that really captured the mood was the Conservative MP (conveniently local to Grimsby) who put in a claim for repairs to his moat. Well, an Englishman's second home is his castle, so who wouldn't want to patch up the drawbridge in between Viking raids? Suddenly Parliament appeared to be epochally out of touch.
So, was this story as significant as it seemed, or was it simply a perfect media storm (to switch metaphors mid-stream)? Was any of this new, or hadn't we known all along that Members of Parliament lived a different and altogether loftier life than the rest of us, even those of them who come from humble working class roots? Incidentally you need only compare the details of the expenses to work out what class the MPs are from in this otherwise classless society. Mock Tudor beams? Working class (with a flat a and a flat 'at); moat? Definitely a toff. The Liberal Democrats seem to have covered the middle ground with middle class misdemeanours where random receipts were bunged into the accounts department for fluffy dusters, lavatory rolls and chocolate HobNobs (cookies, for our American readers).
Actually you should look at the conservative list in more detail - it reads like a copy of Home and Hound or whatever it is the upper classes read, with an astonishing number of swimming pool claims (in a country where almost no-one has one), the infamous moat and even repairs to a helipad. And horse manure, which appears to have captured the public imagination.
Stephen Fry, who is a national treasure, gave us a good alternative view of the relative importance of the whole affair, as you can see in the video on the following story:
BBC story with Stephen Fry interview
He has a point: who are the media to throw the first stone flowerpot? However the full list is well worth a read - it's here at the Daily Telegraph's site at:
Telegraph MPs expenses list
It's only part of the way through that you realise that this is not just the bad guys: this list also includes those who have not claimed or have only made small and reasonable claims. It's just that those are well hidden within this alphabetically ordered list.
The list reminds me of a wooden-hulled boat I had once which, when surveyed, had only two or three timbers that did not need to be replaced. All I really owned was the shape of a boat.
And that's what the UK feels like right now, at the end of an eventful week (also known of course as a lifetime) in politics. There is the shape of the Mother of all Parliaments, if we care to replace all the timbers with more exactly like them.
There has been no shortage of punditry on the subject of what to do, ideas and statements from party leaders, the prime minister and everyone else who hasn't been following the Jordan / Andre story, on how best to change the system.
But that's exactly the problem. We have got used to decades of a style of government in which the answer to everything is a system. Schools still the worst in the Western world? Make them do more paperwork. Crime rising on our streets? More forms for the Police to fill in. Whatever the problem bigger government will come up with bigger systems and bigger audit trails to deal with it. To a boy with an axe, everything is a tree; to a parliamentarian everything can be sorted out with a better system. It seems the tree they were sitting on was the only place they never thought to swing that particular axe.
Veteran politician Tony Benn got to the real point before anyone else, as he often does. He is in favour of the system of MPs' expenses for the simple reason that it allows poorer people to stand for office so that we don't just get the people with moats and helipads and plumbing that goes under their tennis courts.
But he also made a much more important point: all MP's expense returns ought to be made freely publicly available, even the light bulbs and fluffy dusters and individual scotch eggs. And their tax returns. Everything, in fact, starting from before they are even elected, so that people actually get to know everything there is to know about their prospective representatives.
And this really is the answer. Information is key to all of this. It was the Freedom of Information act that allowed the expenses details to come out in the first place, and it was the application of that Act that the now-outgoing Speaker had tried to block. Information lay at the heart of the Speaker's previous unforgivable lapse when he allowed Police to search the office of an MP at Westminster, an act as historic as today's ouster of the man himself, though apparently less obviously so to him. It was the sudden outpouring of information that gave the public an unprecedented and detailed view of what lay within our system of Parliament, and we didn't like it. And so it had to change.
And information is all we need to deal with it. Not systems, not thresholds or rules about who can flip what and when.
There has been a lot of talking-up of people abandoning the main parties to vote for fringe parties and independents as though it was the parties themselves that are to blame, when for once the political parties are blameless. It's individuals.
Which is fine because our system of democracy was always designed around individuals, not parties. All we need to do is vote out the ones who are having a free ride at our expense. It doesn't matter whether some system says that this or that thing is legal or not legal, within or without the spirit of the law or anything else. Either we approve of the new tennis court, fluffy duster, Tudor beams and hanging baskets, or we don't. Either we think the person is doing a good job on our behalf and is welcome to the odd chauffered ride, or we feel they can walk down to the corner store to buy their light bulbs like the rest of us. It's really up to us.
Information is power. Whether we use it or not is up to us. If we decide to wait for Westminster to take a lead, to design some new System so we can go back to reading about the girl with the unfeasibly large breasts, then we only have ourselves to blame if the same unsanitary conditions come back and there is another outbreak of trough fever.
There have been other historical precedents as well. Today for the first time since Cromwell, the Speaker did go. It's been a good week for the papers.
The British media machine follows a well-oiled production line, with various programmes such as the Today Programme in the morning on Radio 4 and Newsnight in the evening on BBC2 setting what insiders call the News Agenda. In a separate parallel world in this past week the popular tabloids have been running continuous front page news about somebody called Jordan whose name is not Jordan splitting up with someone whose name is Peter or Andre or something. Apparently they met on a game show where vaguely famous people eat insects, and one of them has abnormally large breasts.
At first the epidemic of trough fever that swept through the media looked like a re-run of the recent newspaper pandemic of Swine Flu. A couple of isolated cases of an apparently contagious condition usually more prevalent in developing countries. Although this particular illness was entirely home grown.
The first case was diagnosed when the Home Secretary accidentally claimed expenses for a dirty video rented by her husband. I'm a bit hazy about the fees office guidelines on these matters, but one could argue that this was a necessary expense incurred by the MP being away from home. However she was quick to send her unhappy husband in front of the news cameras to apologise for what was one letter away from state subsidised banking.
In retrospect that particular case seems like a mild sniffle.
Then the influential "This Week" programme (BBC1, Thursdays at 11:40 whenever Parliament is sitting) picked up the story that there were likely to be many more expenses revelations in the pipeline, with rumours of a detailed list being hawked around Fleet Street. Sure enough, the Daily Telegraph broadsheet started to publish just such a list, starting last week. The print media suddenly didn't look so outdated.
A mood of sudden indignation swept the nation. "We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality," as a chap called Thomas Macaulay wrote some 175 years ago. This periodical fit was very much on view at last week's Question Time (BBC1, Thursdays at 10:40) when a number of MPs, some of the quite respectable, found themselves on the panel and in front of an audience of grim looking Northern folk in the appropriately named town of Grimsby. Grim but by no means silent as each of the MPs in turn was booed and heckled as they tried to explain their actions and the features of "The System" that led them to trip up so badly.
What emerged, from this and other encounters, was a sorry tale of not one but several different strains of trough fever. There were people who had broken the law, people who had not broken the law but had transgressed the rather vague rules for Parliamentary expenses, and people who had transgressed neither but were seen to be morally wanting in the cold light of day. Was it really reasonable to claim expenses for light bulbs, lawn mowing, loo seats from the public purse (and that's just the letter L) when most of us have to buy our own? Even from just the first couple of days of expenses revelations there was enough weirdness that people were in no mood to distinguish between the toilet seats (quite reasonable if you've ever tried sitting without one) to mock Tudor beams (for the same unfortunate Mr Prescott). Perhaps the one expense claim that really captured the mood was the Conservative MP (conveniently local to Grimsby) who put in a claim for repairs to his moat. Well, an Englishman's second home is his castle, so who wouldn't want to patch up the drawbridge in between Viking raids? Suddenly Parliament appeared to be epochally out of touch.
So, was this story as significant as it seemed, or was it simply a perfect media storm (to switch metaphors mid-stream)? Was any of this new, or hadn't we known all along that Members of Parliament lived a different and altogether loftier life than the rest of us, even those of them who come from humble working class roots? Incidentally you need only compare the details of the expenses to work out what class the MPs are from in this otherwise classless society. Mock Tudor beams? Working class (with a flat a and a flat 'at); moat? Definitely a toff. The Liberal Democrats seem to have covered the middle ground with middle class misdemeanours where random receipts were bunged into the accounts department for fluffy dusters, lavatory rolls and chocolate HobNobs (cookies, for our American readers).
Actually you should look at the conservative list in more detail - it reads like a copy of Home and Hound or whatever it is the upper classes read, with an astonishing number of swimming pool claims (in a country where almost no-one has one), the infamous moat and even repairs to a helipad. And horse manure, which appears to have captured the public imagination.
Stephen Fry, who is a national treasure, gave us a good alternative view of the relative importance of the whole affair, as you can see in the video on the following story:
BBC story with Stephen Fry interview
He has a point: who are the media to throw the first stone flowerpot? However the full list is well worth a read - it's here at the Daily Telegraph's site at:
Telegraph MPs expenses list
It's only part of the way through that you realise that this is not just the bad guys: this list also includes those who have not claimed or have only made small and reasonable claims. It's just that those are well hidden within this alphabetically ordered list.
The list reminds me of a wooden-hulled boat I had once which, when surveyed, had only two or three timbers that did not need to be replaced. All I really owned was the shape of a boat.
And that's what the UK feels like right now, at the end of an eventful week (also known of course as a lifetime) in politics. There is the shape of the Mother of all Parliaments, if we care to replace all the timbers with more exactly like them.
There has been no shortage of punditry on the subject of what to do, ideas and statements from party leaders, the prime minister and everyone else who hasn't been following the Jordan / Andre story, on how best to change the system.
But that's exactly the problem. We have got used to decades of a style of government in which the answer to everything is a system. Schools still the worst in the Western world? Make them do more paperwork. Crime rising on our streets? More forms for the Police to fill in. Whatever the problem bigger government will come up with bigger systems and bigger audit trails to deal with it. To a boy with an axe, everything is a tree; to a parliamentarian everything can be sorted out with a better system. It seems the tree they were sitting on was the only place they never thought to swing that particular axe.
Veteran politician Tony Benn got to the real point before anyone else, as he often does. He is in favour of the system of MPs' expenses for the simple reason that it allows poorer people to stand for office so that we don't just get the people with moats and helipads and plumbing that goes under their tennis courts.
But he also made a much more important point: all MP's expense returns ought to be made freely publicly available, even the light bulbs and fluffy dusters and individual scotch eggs. And their tax returns. Everything, in fact, starting from before they are even elected, so that people actually get to know everything there is to know about their prospective representatives.
And this really is the answer. Information is key to all of this. It was the Freedom of Information act that allowed the expenses details to come out in the first place, and it was the application of that Act that the now-outgoing Speaker had tried to block. Information lay at the heart of the Speaker's previous unforgivable lapse when he allowed Police to search the office of an MP at Westminster, an act as historic as today's ouster of the man himself, though apparently less obviously so to him. It was the sudden outpouring of information that gave the public an unprecedented and detailed view of what lay within our system of Parliament, and we didn't like it. And so it had to change.
And information is all we need to deal with it. Not systems, not thresholds or rules about who can flip what and when.
There has been a lot of talking-up of people abandoning the main parties to vote for fringe parties and independents as though it was the parties themselves that are to blame, when for once the political parties are blameless. It's individuals.
Which is fine because our system of democracy was always designed around individuals, not parties. All we need to do is vote out the ones who are having a free ride at our expense. It doesn't matter whether some system says that this or that thing is legal or not legal, within or without the spirit of the law or anything else. Either we approve of the new tennis court, fluffy duster, Tudor beams and hanging baskets, or we don't. Either we think the person is doing a good job on our behalf and is welcome to the odd chauffered ride, or we feel they can walk down to the corner store to buy their light bulbs like the rest of us. It's really up to us.
Information is power. Whether we use it or not is up to us. If we decide to wait for Westminster to take a lead, to design some new System so we can go back to reading about the girl with the unfeasibly large breasts, then we only have ourselves to blame if the same unsanitary conditions come back and there is another outbreak of trough fever.
Thursday 7 May 2009
Night of the Long Spoons
This story concerns a store in northern England where someone went to buy some teaspoons and was required to provide proof that they were over 18. Here's the link:
http://nannyknowsbest.blogspot.com/2009/04/dangers-of-teaspoons.html
Now why would someone be expected to prove their age before purchasing a teaspoon? Bear in mind this was not some secret Ninja assassin's teaspoon or a giant spoon you could beat someone to death with. No, this was the humble little spoon we use to stir our tea.
To answer a question that someone in the US asked, this was not in response to some law. There's no law in England requiring proof of age for spoons, though there is one for knives.
I don't for a moment buy the story given by the store that someone somewhere was killed with a teaspoon or that this would be a reason to require proof of age. I think that's just an employee making something up rather than saying "I don't know". Quite apart from the improbability of anyone other than Humpty Dumpty being done in with a teaspoon, any store that asked for proof age for anything that someone, somewhere had managed to get killed with, would soon be out of business. Where would we buy candlesticks, lead piping, rope. So I think this is pretty unlikely.
So there are really two possibilities, neither of them very impressive. Either the store is being over-zealous in their application of the law, as often happens in these things, or there has been some programming error. However, As a technical friend of mine pointed out:
Since the message is automatically provided by a computerized checkout system,
there is absolutely no chance that it is associated with that item by error.
This is right of course: computers never, ever commit errors. I'm not being facetious; it's really in the nature of a computer not to make mistakes. What they do do, more often than not, is do things wrong. It's not the computer that makes the mistake, it's whoever set it up to do whatever it was supposed to be doing. The system that asked for proof of age for a teaspoon may not have been making an error, but most likely a mistake was made, perhaps due to inadequate modeling of the data. Maybe for instance the store system was programmed to flag up all shiny metal things as knives, or perhaps all cutlery. Whichever way we look at it, this has the hallmarks of some ghastly ontological mishap.
So what is ontology anyway? Contrary to what some might think, it is not some new buzzword, some Web 3.0 technology. In fact, every computer system has an ontology anyway, whether or not anyone knows what it is or whether it was thought about very clearly when the programming was going on. Every system manipulates data about things in the real world, and so there is some implied view of the real world itself, underpinning the data in the system. That's all it is - there's no magic to it.
The ontology of a given system may be muddled or it may be clearly thought out, but either way it's there. For example, here is a suggested ontology for spoons:
More accurately this is a taxonomy (like the famous taxonomy of species) since we have not shown any detailed facts about our knives, forks and spoons. If we added facts about the shapes of our pieces of cutlery or the purposes they were designed for, then this would be an ontology.
Each level in the diagram shows a kind of real world thing, with facts about it that make it what it is. At the level below, each thing "inherits" characteristics from the thing above it (notice for instance the runcible spoon, which is a long spoon with prongs, for getting pickles out of jars). This is the model of reality that may or may not be faithfully reflected in a computer system.
Now there is a law in England that requires anyone who buys a knife to show some proof that they are over the age of 18. So if you were to create a point of sales system that could flag up when the teller should ask for some proof of age, where would you put that requirement in the above? Against cutlery or against knives? In fact we could extend our ontology sideways to include camping equipment, kitchen utensils and so on, some of which are also knives. Then you could individually identify each of the things for which the law requires proof of age. Or you could simply define a logical union of all the things identified the relevant law, and apply the proof-of-age thing to that.
It may seem that I am being picky here. Why can't the anonymous programmer of some store be a bit vague about how they program their stuff?
The shop that held itself up to such ridicule is no small country store but one of the most mature and well managed of the UK's major supermarket chains. If they can't get it right, what will happen when we start to trust someone less sophisticated, a government for example, with more sensitive data than the meaning of spoons. We are seeing more and more intrusions into our lives by increasingly zealous governments, determined to protect us at every turn, and while few would argue about the dangers of knife crime, we need to insist on a lot more thought about computer systems and data before things continue in this vein. Otherwise we will probably see mistakes of greater impact than someone having to show their age to buy a teaspoon.
Meanwhile the least we can do is laugh at firms when they make these sorts of blunders, whether these blunders are a result of overzealous officialdom or wooly ontological thinking. If laughing at them doesn't work, we may find ourselves march on Westminster bearing the apparently deadly spoons.
Night of the Long Spoons anyone?
http://nannyknowsbest.blogspot.com/2009/04/dangers-of-teaspoons.html
Now why would someone be expected to prove their age before purchasing a teaspoon? Bear in mind this was not some secret Ninja assassin's teaspoon or a giant spoon you could beat someone to death with. No, this was the humble little spoon we use to stir our tea.
To answer a question that someone in the US asked, this was not in response to some law. There's no law in England requiring proof of age for spoons, though there is one for knives.
I don't for a moment buy the story given by the store that someone somewhere was killed with a teaspoon or that this would be a reason to require proof of age. I think that's just an employee making something up rather than saying "I don't know". Quite apart from the improbability of anyone other than Humpty Dumpty being done in with a teaspoon, any store that asked for proof age for anything that someone, somewhere had managed to get killed with, would soon be out of business. Where would we buy candlesticks, lead piping, rope. So I think this is pretty unlikely.
So there are really two possibilities, neither of them very impressive. Either the store is being over-zealous in their application of the law, as often happens in these things, or there has been some programming error. However, As a technical friend of mine pointed out:
Since the message is automatically provided by a computerized checkout system,
there is absolutely no chance that it is associated with that item by error.
This is right of course: computers never, ever commit errors. I'm not being facetious; it's really in the nature of a computer not to make mistakes. What they do do, more often than not, is do things wrong. It's not the computer that makes the mistake, it's whoever set it up to do whatever it was supposed to be doing. The system that asked for proof of age for a teaspoon may not have been making an error, but most likely a mistake was made, perhaps due to inadequate modeling of the data. Maybe for instance the store system was programmed to flag up all shiny metal things as knives, or perhaps all cutlery. Whichever way we look at it, this has the hallmarks of some ghastly ontological mishap.
So what is ontology anyway? Contrary to what some might think, it is not some new buzzword, some Web 3.0 technology. In fact, every computer system has an ontology anyway, whether or not anyone knows what it is or whether it was thought about very clearly when the programming was going on. Every system manipulates data about things in the real world, and so there is some implied view of the real world itself, underpinning the data in the system. That's all it is - there's no magic to it.
The ontology of a given system may be muddled or it may be clearly thought out, but either way it's there. For example, here is a suggested ontology for spoons:
More accurately this is a taxonomy (like the famous taxonomy of species) since we have not shown any detailed facts about our knives, forks and spoons. If we added facts about the shapes of our pieces of cutlery or the purposes they were designed for, then this would be an ontology.
Each level in the diagram shows a kind of real world thing, with facts about it that make it what it is. At the level below, each thing "inherits" characteristics from the thing above it (notice for instance the runcible spoon, which is a long spoon with prongs, for getting pickles out of jars). This is the model of reality that may or may not be faithfully reflected in a computer system.
Now there is a law in England that requires anyone who buys a knife to show some proof that they are over the age of 18. So if you were to create a point of sales system that could flag up when the teller should ask for some proof of age, where would you put that requirement in the above? Against cutlery or against knives? In fact we could extend our ontology sideways to include camping equipment, kitchen utensils and so on, some of which are also knives. Then you could individually identify each of the things for which the law requires proof of age. Or you could simply define a logical union of all the things identified the relevant law, and apply the proof-of-age thing to that.
It may seem that I am being picky here. Why can't the anonymous programmer of some store be a bit vague about how they program their stuff?
The shop that held itself up to such ridicule is no small country store but one of the most mature and well managed of the UK's major supermarket chains. If they can't get it right, what will happen when we start to trust someone less sophisticated, a government for example, with more sensitive data than the meaning of spoons. We are seeing more and more intrusions into our lives by increasingly zealous governments, determined to protect us at every turn, and while few would argue about the dangers of knife crime, we need to insist on a lot more thought about computer systems and data before things continue in this vein. Otherwise we will probably see mistakes of greater impact than someone having to show their age to buy a teaspoon.
Meanwhile the least we can do is laugh at firms when they make these sorts of blunders, whether these blunders are a result of overzealous officialdom or wooly ontological thinking. If laughing at them doesn't work, we may find ourselves march on Westminster bearing the apparently deadly spoons.
Night of the Long Spoons anyone?
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