We know that languages serve to make people communicate since the dawn of time. But that languages make us communicate with digital devices is quite recent. Siri has been my friend since 2011, Alexa has only spoken Italian since 2018, and to follow the other voice assistants, Microsoft Cortana, Google Assistant … they are friends I don’t frequent.
We humans are predisposed to learning, developing and using language, which recent studies increasingly describe as a kind of biotechnology of which we are simultaneously owners, users, speakers, custodians and innovators.
Language is an asset that each of us possesses and has competence in terms of learning and use. It is an asset that evolves over time with individual and common use. And it is for this reason a rare human example of private property that becomes collective good. And if you have more languages, you have access to more collective goods.
But how does this common good of ours serve the digitization of our country? And why do we humans speak and are understood quite well by our voice assistants but, to date, the information systems, especially those of the PA, do not communicate with each other?
In order to communicate with each other, information systems exchange data described through metadata, that is, information on data.
Too often, however, the information systems of the PAs do not communicate with each other and do not understand each other reciprocally precisely because they do not have the ability to be open to the exchange of data. Using a term from the language of computer science: they have no “semantic interoperability”. And from semantic interoperability comes the accessibility and reuse of data.
PAs are great producers of public data, which is our data. Some are to be protected because they are sensitive; others are public and must be easily accessible. Public data are managed by the PA databases, but they are ours. Data is a common good.
Ours is the data of where and when we were born that are inscribed in the tax code, our municipalities are identified with the postcode and who we are in the digital world is our SPID. But the public data concerning health, the environment, the management of public money from taxes, investments, refreshments or support are also ours. And many others.
In recent years, however, the PAs have interpreted the word head “bank” of the polirematic “database” with the terminological meaning of the language of the law “safe deposit of money” (Article 1834 of the Civil Code). But how can we withdraw / deposit our money through any ATM so we must be able to access from all our digital devices to our public data that must be opened to be exchanged.
The Gigabit society is based on this exchange of data, on their reuse in the communication circuits that transform and regenerate them as renewable energies.
Verbal texts contain data and are themselves data in digital environments.
In the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) – named and communicated using many different terms for the same referent – there will be about 50 billion euros for the digitization of our country to overcome the gap detected by the digitization index of the economy and company (DESI 2020) of the European Commission that nails Italy to the 25th position on the then 28 EU member states (pre Brexit).
In Mission 1 a good share will go to the digitalization of the production system, but a fair amount will also go to the digitalization of the PA (in the version of the Plan of May 5 €. 9.75 billion).
As a linguist I looked for the frequency of the term “interoperability” in the 269 pages of the PNRR document and I found 26 occurrences. But to achieve the “interoperability” objectives described in the Plan we need open data. PAs must make our data available preferably with a CC-BY 4.0 license (Creative Commons Attribution), which binds the user to recognize the source while maintaining the nature of the sharing license.
As a linguist, I have long wondered if data needs language to be exchanged in digital environments. And I tell computer scientists that yes, data must be described and enriched with linguistic terminological metadata because these metadata in the infosphere facilitate their exchange and improve the dialogue between digital devices and human beings.
But that’s history for the next post 😉
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