petermr's blog

Dictated to Arcturus

In a few hours this country will have voted for a new government. At least it thinks it will be a new government but in fact the government of the country is unrelated to the former democratic process. A good example of this is the passing of the digital economy bill about a month ago. (if I had been blogging then I would undoubtedly have blogged about it. ) http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/apr/08/digital-economy-bill-passes-third-reading

I reproduce this photograph without permission as a matter of public interest. This shows the process of government a few isolated members of parliament who have been persuaded to stay on to make the process legal. This process has resulted in a loss of freedom for every person in this country. It means that big business protected those who believe that they can own content can controlled the way that normal people access information. These freedoms are also being eroded elsewhere and as on the continent of Europe and the French HADOPI (three strikes and you’re out).

So the process we’re going through today has really no effect on the government of the country. It produces a random number of members of parliament on whom we rely for their personal commitment to the democratic process. We do not control the policies of the parties and the parties now believe that they have free run to elect a quasi president who makes decisions as he (there are no females in sight) feels it. There are no checks and balances. A quasi president can take the country to war against public opinion with no dissent from the people we have elected. The laws on protest are gradually being eroded. It is now illegal to make your voice heard near the House of Commons.

So what can we do. We have to work with whichever candidate happens to be elected. Most of them have some sort of morality that aligns them to the public and individual good. And we have better access to them through the tools that MySociety and others have developed. An MP cannot hide easily in the electronic era. But we cannot rely on party politics to control was process. Where in the last manifesto of the labour government did it promised to destroy our digital rights? Nobody voted for that.

So it would not surprise me if at some stage the people of this country decided to follow a dictator or simply to take to the streets. It’s not in our recent tradition but when government continues to ignore democracy than people have limits which can be overstepped. Digital democracy is one of the few nonviolent tools that we have left. Are we voting for it today? And which of the Cambridge candidates has the strongest voice?

The people of Hartlepool voted in a monkey as Mayor. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/1965569.stm on a platform of free bananas for schoolchildren. Did the country fall apart?

But if we do not preserve digital democracy it will.

Typed to Arcturus

There’s an out-of-the ordinary candidate – Old Holborn – standing in Cambridge in the general election, whose face has never been seen. He always wears a mask and no-one knows who he is. It’s legal. Here’s his? Blog http://www.oldholborn.net/ with the rubric:

You can stick your CCTV, Police State, wheelie bin Stasi, DNA, WMD, “Social Cohesion”, benefits for all, guilty until proved innocent, don’t do that it’s illegal now, can’t say that, ID cards for all, where are you going, what have you been saying/doing/reading, can’t photograph that, how very dare you, golliwog banning, we know where you live, we’re watching you Soviet Utopia up your arses. Sideways.

and videos of him http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJFhxNUzfF0

Before you dismiss him out-of-hand he and I agree about copyright. He puts it more picturesquely than me:

Copyright © Old Holborn 2007-2008 and the respective owners whoever they may be – though it’s hardly likely is it?. All rights reserved. Every single one. None of the materials provided on this web site may be used, eaten, reproduced, or transmitted, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, carrier pidgeon, osmosis, semaphore, chav txting (gr8) recording or the use of any information storage and retrieval system, papyrus, bits of old toilet paper, fag packets, carrier bags, mystic meg etc., except as provided for under fair use, without permission in writing from the publisher – me and my dog. To request such permission and for further enquiries, contact the dog using the contact form. Offer her a bone. She likes bones.

And a manifesto

To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is it’s justice; that is its morality.

Like the theatre of the absurd, this is the politics of the absurd. It should not be dismissed without thought. We are, indeed, faced with effectively almost no choice in this election – candidates whose similarities are greater than their differences and where the morality and effectiveness of MPs has been progressively eroded over the decades. I am not naive enough to believe that it was always better in the past, but there are almost no politicians of the stature of Foot, Healey, Heath, Thatcher, Jenkins. We are offered the choice of a bland uniformity of politicians with no intention of making parliament accountable to the people. As Gilbert put it:

“When in that house MPs divide
If they’ve a brain and cerebellum too
They have to leave that brain outside
And vote just as their leaders tell’em to

But then the prospect of a lot
Of dull MPs in close proximity,
All thinking for themselves, is what
No man can face with equanimity.

W.S.Gilbert, Iolanthe, 1882

Our system is broken – there is no leadership, no moderation by MPs, no policy and no accountability. Our state is out of control. The politics of the absurd is a natural reaction and has a long history in Britain.

So shall I vote for Old Holborn? I have not finally decided. But it’s a non-zero probability. The absurd vote has a legitimacy. After the election it’s a coalition of the Judean People’s Front with the People’s Front of Judea and probably an ungovernable mess. We are sick of the lack of traditional MPs to govern – why perpetuate this?

It’s an Open secret now that ever since I lived in Cambridge I have not voted, but the bear has:

I can only vote once, but the bear can early and often.

Old Holborn did not have to show his face, and nor do I. But I may have to satisfy them that I am who I say I am. It’s a way of taking elections seriously and absurdly at the same time. So if you are in Chesterton (CB4) you may see the bear early.

Because democracy has to be fought for on every day that we don’t have an election. The election is a holiday.

Dictated to Arcturus

Two amusements for chemists

We are now at the stage where we can read the full text of a chemical experiment and extract much of the meaning out of it using natural language processing and other techniques. Because we can do this in high volume we can use machines to find anything that looks slightly unusual. Here are two examples of material that we have found which I’d like readers of this blog to look at and see if they can spot anything unusual. There probably isn’t anything actually wrong with the experiments but there may well be essential details that have not been reported. And

From a patent (a hamburger PDF but you should still be able to read this). Patents are Open so I can’t be sued for reproducing this.

Does anything strike you as slightly strange in this? You do not have to know what naphthyridine is and I think a bright high school student could spot it. (I don’t know the answer to the problem but I can make a good guess).

From: Acta Cryst. (2010). E66, o1029    [ doi:10.1107/S1600536810011888 ] (Open Access!! So I can copy the structure without being pursued by lawyers!)

1-(Biphenyl-4-ylmethylidene)thiosemicarbazide monohydrate

Experimental

A solution of 4-biphenylcarboxaldehyde (1.822 g, 0.01 mol) and thiosemicarbazide (0.91 g, 0.01 mol) in absolute methanol (50 ml) was refluxing for 4 h, in the presence of p-toluenesulfonic acid (0.005 g) as catalyst, with continuous stirring. Completeness of the reaction was TLC controlled indicating the disappearance of the aldehyde spot. On cooling to room temperature the precipitate was filtered off, washed with copious cold methanol and dried in air (yield: 1.581 g, 61%; m.p. 475 K). Yellow single crystals compound were obtained after recrystallization from a solution of chloroform/methanol (3:7 v/v) after 10 days at room temperature.

Again there is something slightly odd in this. You don’t have to know what the molecules are to spot the problem, but knowing them might help to answer it (although I don’t actually know the answer). Again a bright high school student might be able to spot the problem.

Please make suggestions and guesses or the robots will be disappointed. I’ll leave three days before answering.

Typed into Arcturus

Open Access week has been declared:

http://openaccessweek.ning.com/

Every can and everyone should.

Open Access is spreading inexorably. It’s taken about 15 years at least. Let’s get Open Data accepted as well and in a shorter time J

Typed and scraped into Arcturus

In reporting http://election.theyworkforyou.com/quiz/ I’ve confused Democracy Club http://www.democracyclub.org.uk/welcome and MySociety. I arrived at the quiz from links from MySociety (I think) and both organizations are listed as contributing. The formal position is:

“This [the quiz] is a joint effort between Democracy Club and MySociety […]  Democracy Club is not a mySociety project, though parts of it have been supported by the organisation.”

May I therefore congratulate DemocracyClub and it’s great to see more organizations using the web to spread awareness of important issues.

Dictated to my machine Arcturus

I get too many spams already on this blog perhaps 20 to 50 per day that get past Akismet (without which I would be swamped) and I delete them before reading. However one that caught my eye today is sufficiently outrageous that I hope that Ben Goldacre (Bad Science) picks it up. It’s at http://www.articlesdirectorynow.info/maintain-the-four-essential-chemical-substances-within-your-brain/ . Now as a chemist I know that my brain contains many thousands of chemical substances (not including macro molecules such as proteins, nucleic acids, and polysaccharides). So I was intrigued which of those many Saracens that I could do without. Here are apparently the ones that are essential, and before you go any further I should make it clear that this is mainstream nutraceutical pseudo science. (the compounds are real and I have included Wikipedia links in case you wish to find out what they actually are)

With that said, here are some brain food you should eat more of, Providing that you had not already done that.

1. The region with the mind termed hippocampus (
responsible for turning short-term memory into long-term memory) includes the chemical ellagitannins. It’s important that you sustain this chemical because the degree of ellagitannins lessensas you expand older. To include things like it as part of your eating plan, consume some fruits like strawberries, raspberries or blueberries.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellagitannin

2. The striatum (the portion of your brain that’s used for spatial memory) have a chemical named proanthocyanins. These can be contain in blueberries, grapes and red wine.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proanthocyanin

3. The brain, in general, have huge amount of DHA, which is a type of healthy fat (omega-). Oily fishes, like salmon, are great sources of DHA but there is a booming incidence of mercury poisoning of seafood in general. This is the reason why I normally suggest the consumption of krill oil as an alternative.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docosahexaenoic_acid

4. Once it comes to vitamins, make confident that you simply incorporate vitamin B within your eating habits. Make certain that you just eat specifically vitamin B12 as that is recognized to improve the psychological functions and stop the damage of human brain cells. On top of that it really is recognized as to decrease the chance of forming diseases like Alzheimer, or other mental issues. To consist of the B12 vitamin inside your diet, you ought to consume red meat. B12 can be a vitamin which you cannot locate in plants, so if you are a vegan, make sure you also contain this vitamin within your meals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_b12

If you want to have a balanced view of what is proven and what is not in nutrition (and most of it is not proven), read Ben’s blog and book. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Science_%28book%29

Dictated to my machine Arcturus

When I spoke at the ACS symposium in March in San Francisco I was delighted that Cameron Neylon was there because he was able to record my presentation. He has now put it online at http://www.viddler.com/explore/CameronNeylon/videos/11/ ( about 26 minutes) and has done a very good job. The text is not always extremely clear (this is a feature of recording screens) but I normally speak a considerable amount of what is on the screen for this purpose so it should be possible to understand the gist if not the detail. The talk covers a wide range of subjects with illustrations of most of them and includes

• The problems of producing non-semantic information such as continuing to publish in PDF to the exclusion of xml or other modern formats.
• The major problem of digital rights on scientific information. I argue that this must change and the publishers who continue to copyright data or otherwise hide it behind firewalls are actively preventing science.
• I argue that almost all the current innovation in Chemical Software comes from individuals and that most of them work in the open source and open data are community.
• I show that machines can read millions of chemical paragraphs a year and that the major sources are journals (where they are not protected by false digital rights), theses (where they are not hidden in non-semantic repositories) and patents. I demonstrated how we can read a patent in less than a minute and extract most of the chemical reactions from it.
• I show how it is possible to create machines that crawl the current website of publishers and where allowed abstract, semantify, and aggregate it in searchable form. I believe the large secondary abstracters in chemistry we’ll soon be largely replaced by robotic tools which will create information resources that are more detailed and richer and easier to search. Assuming these are open it will also lead to a wealth of innovation. As an example I showed Nick Day’s Crystaleye which has aggregated nearly 200,000 structures from the literature and and added a huge amount of semantics (http: //wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/crystaleye).
• I showed the potential of linked open data and how the Bio scientists are years ahead of the chemists because they wish to share data rather than protect and resell it.
• I showed the panton principles which a group of us have launched recently under the auspices of the open knowledge foundation and science commons. These principles are aimed at making Scientific Data open and making it easier to do so.
• I showed a new project Amy where we are developing ways of talking to fume cupboards rather than using a mouse and where we are incorporating many other techniques of communication such as gestures, ultrasound, Computervision etc.

Once again to thank Cameron for this because it is difficult for me to produce conventional slides of my presentations. This is partly because I use multi media and partly because I do not know beforehand what I’m going to say.

Dictated to my computer (please report speakos! – the equivalent of typos)
I was hoping to get some coding done but I have just discovered another brilliant site from the usual suspects at mysociety.org. It’s called the straight choice and encourages people to upload election leaflets. Although many election leaflets are produced nationally I think the majority are done locally and it is in these in which some of the worst distortions of truth and the political process occur. By collecting and analysing these leaflets it is possible to keep a check on what the candidates say and claim.
[STRAIGHT CHOICE]
Electioneering is a high-stakes game. We, at The Straight Choice (http://www.thestraightchoice.org/about.php ), believe that it’s time for that game to become a spectator sport.

The Straight Choice is an real-time election leaflet project. Our ambition is to create a live visualization of the flood of party political leaflets as they are delivered across the country during an election campaign. If you have recently received any election leaflets through your door you can help by photographing or scanning them and uploading the images to our server.

The idea was conjured up in December 2008 at a weekend in Derbyshire, and finally acted upon in Francis’s front living room in Cambridge at the end of April 2009.

The name of the website is derived from a leaflet in the controversial by-election in Bermondsey in 1983 which has become the type specimen of accusations of dodgy campaigning.

The team

This website has been put together by three of the usual suspects who don’t have time or contacts to sell ideas or apply for grants. The code has been deposited at code.google/theelectionleafletproject.

Julian Todd had the job of pestering people about an election leaflet monitoring website after discovering just how crucially important these pieces of paper really are. In 2003 he wrote Public Whip with Francis Irving, which became the input for mySociety’s TheyWorkForYou.com. In 2007 he made undemocracy.com which applied the same idea to the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council. Julian and has volunteered his phone number (0791 6090736), should you be interested in talking to someone about this project

Richard Pope initially spent a couple of days writing the code for this site and making it look pretty for the European Elections in 2009. During the run up to the 2010 General Election he has been working full time on the project on a voluntary basis expanding the website and dealing with the press. He is the brains behind the Planning Alerts project, Groups Near You and StreetWire. In 2005 he made theElection Memory project to record and publicise manifestos of the different parties in the Lambeth local elections.

Francis Irving is the other half of Public Whip . He has done substantial work on mySociety’s WhatDoTheyKnow.com — among other projects — and would specifically like you to sign up for Serious Change.

Thanks

Our biggest thanks go out to the hundreds of volunteers who have kindly uploaded leaflets in recent weeks and months. This site couldn’t exist without you.

Thanks also to mySociety and Democracy Club for their support and publicity in terms of promoting the site to interested citizens across the country.

In terms of project development, Richard Pope has put a lot of free time and effort into developing the code since April 2009, with a cash contribution of £3000 from Julian and use of his server. As the load has increased in recent days owing to the election, the service has been upgraded by Donovan Hide to Amazon S3 technology with a contribution from ScraperWiki.

We have also had the support of a great bunch volunteers who have helped promote The Straight Choice by delivering leaflets during by-elections. If you’d like to help out, please get in touch we’d love to hear from you.

Donovan Hide helped get all the images uploaded to and served from Amazon’s S3 service.

FAQs

How do I upload an election leaflet

You need to upload a photograph of the leaflet in JPG format, then enter a few details about the leaflet. Click here to get started.

I’m a party activist, can I upload a leaflet?

Yes. Just upload a photos of your leaflet and enter one of the post codes it is aimed at when prompted. Click here to add a leaflet now.

Who can reuse the images

By uploading an image to The Straight Choice you are allowing free reuse of the image. For this site to make an impact on the way electioneering is conducted it’s important that the dodgy ones get as wide an audience as possible, and this helps it happen. If you would like to make sure that proper attribution for a particular image please let us know.

Is this project affiliated to or supported by any political party

No.

Can I reuse the images on my website or blog?

Yes, but please make a copy of the image on your site and link back to us.

What do you mean by a leaflet? Does a letter count?

Any kind of written communication – letters, leaflets, flyers – contain useful information. If in doubt, upload it anyway or get in touch with us.

Can I send you leaflets by post?

Yes. Please send them to:

The Straight Choice c/o Scraperwiki, LSP 2, 146 Brownlow Hill, Liverpool L3 5RF

and mark each leaflet with the postcode (or postcode district) it was delivered to.

Contact

You can get in touch with us via team [at] thestraightchoice.org or phone Julian on 0791 6090736.

Thanks and acknowledgements

Linking leaflets to constituencies is made possible thanks to the TheyWorkForYou.com API

[PETERMR]
As our technology can now analyse written text (using machine learning and other methods) and I would be interested to put the various textual messages into classification software. The main problem is getting it from photographs such as JPEG and converting this into machine-readable ASCII. There are two main ways of doing this;

• Crowd sourcing. http://www.thestraightchoice.org/analyze.php It shows how a number of volunteers have been analysing leaflets. This is probably the best way at the moment given that there are many people who will see the value and have fun in doing this. However I think that the primary effort is to add metadata rather than to extract full text.
• Machine learning and text mining. In principle it might be possible to do optical character recognition on the leaflets but I suspect the results will be awful. If the Crowdsourcing could be extended to typing up the content of the leaflets (if and most of them also vacuous that the effort is relatively small) then it would be possible to use well cried classification techniques to categorise the leaflets.

He is a typical example from Julian Huppert’s leaflet (I have dictated this and am impressed with the relative speed and accuracy. I cannot bring myself to mouth vacuous statements so the job is not a large one and it should be possible to capture the bulk of the text in the leaflet in two or 3 minutes. Anyone who has a speech recognition system should be able to do this. )

1. It’s wrong and that so many of Britain’s old people can’t afford to heat their homes properly. Julian Huppert and the lib dems want a fair deal for the elderly – proper home insultaion [sic] and lower heating bills.
   
2. All children should get a fair start in life with the best possible education – regardless of their background. The lib dems would cut class sizes and ensure children in poor areas got a helping hand.
   
3. One of David Howarth biggest successes as Cambridge’s MP was to help lead the campaign to stop Brookfield Hospital from closure. Cambridge residents don’t get their fair share of public services from the government.
   
4. Labour’s record of shame.
   

• Hiding the truth about the invasion of Iraq
  
• Failing on climate change
  
• Introducing student fees despite promising not to
  
• Trying to close Cambridge is Brookfield Hospital
  
• Doubling tax on the lowest earners
  

I would use these sentences as training material for the classification program such as classification4j a simple but extremely effective java program. For example the first sentence could be classified as belonging to “elderly” and “energy”. By feeding in a few tens of such sentences we train or machine to recognise the type of language used. If we then feed into a new sentence the classifier will tell us whether it is about energy or the elderly or neither. Of course it sometimes makes mistakes but it is never deliberately devious. In similar vein two is about education, three is about health and four is an attack on opponents. It might be possible to sub classify this into Iraq, climate, student fees, health, and tax. I do not expect a machine to “understand” the argument (simplistic though most of the politicians’ arguments are) but we should be able to categorise them as “liberals attack labour on Iraq”, “liberals attack labour on climate”.
Of course given the excellent track record of MySociety and their usual suspects they may already have done this. If not maybe there should be a space in a site for uploading the text of the leaflets until eight PI for downloading the contents.

I have been concerned with how to vote in the upcoming UK general election. I want this to be a responsible vote and it may have to be a balance between national parties and local issues. Currently I have no confidence in the UK party system and I would wish to support any MP who was prepared to fight against it either from within or without. I have more confidence in MP’s representing local issues and I intended to last them publicly what their views were on a number of issues related to Cambridge.

I have written before about the wonderful work that MySociety (http://www.mysociety.org/ ) is doing in changing democracy in Britain if and bringing it to people. Although tools such as WriteToThem allow me to contact and expect a reply from my current MP, I did not know whether there was anything allowing me to get the views of current candidates. Now I have discovered that there is a simple and effective quiz which allows me to see whether I agree with the candidate on a number of issues. Visit http://election.theyworkforyou.com/quiz/ and type in your postcode (it’s secret). Then you will find all the candidates for whom we might vote. I note that there is no entry for the Conservative candidate. Is this an error or did s/he fail or refuse to answer questions.

There are a number of prepared questions against which one can agree or disagree strongly or not. For each question the site works out how this corresponds to the views of the current candidates. At the end of the quiz it totals all responses and tells Europe and W agree with most or rather who agrees with you most. Of course this is not an instruction on how to vote, it is primarily a way of getting candidates to come clean on what they believe and to have a public record of it.

Here is a typical example.Potholes (holes in the road or on the pavement(==sidewalk)) are a serious problem for cyclists in Cambridge. Indeed quite a few of the questions relate to cycling:

Potholes affect cyclists more than drivers and cycle routes should be a council priority for repairs.

Thus the liberal candidate strongly agrees with the premise while the UKIP candidate strongly disagrees. That means that Julian Huppert it gets more points on this question than Peter Burkinshaw. After all questions have been totalled the system produces the following table.

Who do you most agree with?

According to this I agree most with Tony Juniper. It does not of course means that I shall vote for him because there are many national considerations to take into account. If it does suggest that the UK independence party will have to work hard to get my vote.

One if this is yet another example of a greater value that MySociety and other web democracy sites are bringing to us as they represent one of the few hopes of truly having a voice heard and how me and my fellow citizens should govern and be governed.

This document is being dictated to Arcturus. I have just dictated about half an hour’s work (with some struggle and the need to teach the machine new words) when some command was interpreted as “destroy all work up to now and save nothing”. I suppose that is part of the learning process. In any case when we come to instruct our intelligent fume cupboard Amy, we need to have mastered the ability to speak reliably to our computers. I’d probably need to save the documents at regular intervals, but I suppose this is nothing new.

I moaned in my post about the failure of Microsoft and Adobe to support SVG in the browser but also that there were some small rays of hope. The first comes from a comment which I reproduce in full.

Jeff Schiller says:

May 3, 2010 at 1:47 am  (Edit)

Just an update:

* Firefox is moving to support SMIL (animation) in its next release (3.7) and the nightlies now support it pretty well
* All WebKit-based browsers support SVG+SMIL for almost two years
* Microsoft has announced support for SVG in IE9 (though no animation yet)
* FakeSmile is a JS library that can be used to fake SMIL support for browsers that don’t have it yet
* the Chrome Frame plugin, Renesis plugin can be used to give IE8- support for SVG

This means that it’s now possible to get SVG+SMIL support in a good amount of browsers. When IE9 is released I hope Microsoft will continue its support of web standards and implement SMIL.

This is good news. I looked at SMIL about a decade ago and decided that although valuable it didn’t address what I wanted to do. SMIL is about running multi media streams (for example combined text audio and slides) while what I want to do is animate the primitives of Scientific Data. This includes changing coordinates, opacity, scale, and other programmable attributes in SVG. Nevertheless this is good news is there is a lot that we can do with static diagrams.

The attraction as xml as a format over the web is that all browsers can be expected to support it. I believe that Chemical Markup Language (CML) is a simple and universal way of transmitting chemical graphics over the web. We should be able to rely on some form of xml transformation such as JavaScript or XSLT to carry out the transformation from native chemistry to graphics primitives with no knowledge or need for Chemical Software. Indeed I wrote a complete transformation library for CML to SVG. This allows anyone to serve CML or even to transmit simple CML files and have them rendered in the browser with no other plugins or helper software. If Jeff is right then in a few months’ time it should be possible for us to display all our chemistry in cml, provides an XSLT library, and have it rendered in the browser. This could be the mainstream way that Wikipedia could OFFER scalable graphics for chemistry.

The second piece of good news is that Wikimedia has been addressing the problem of editing semantic graphics and they have produced a proposal and summary which looks moderately optimistic. Of course Wikipedia by itself does not have the power to change the deployment of graphics technology but I suspect its voice and actions will speak for themselves and will help to change the culture. Here is part of the proposal in some detail (http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Editable_Graphics ).

This is a proposal for a unified approach to editable graphics in MediaWiki. It draws from and is inspired by a number of technology related proposals concerning graphics on this wiki and also from some proposals on structured data handling.

• WYSIWYG editing from within the browser is used to edit the graphics.
  
• Diverse types of graphics are supported with each type potentially having its own custom representation and component elements. For example maps represented in terms of roads, stave music in terms of notes, graphs in terms of numbers, genealogies in terms of relationships.
  
• The underlying data is used to generate the graphics. We may generate SVG or bitmap formats to show in the browser, but that need not be the underlying format. This promotes editability, verifiability and flexibility of the graphics. Updating a pie chart is easiest when you have the underlying numbers. There is little danger of wedge sizes not matching the numerical values. A map can be presented in different projections and with different levels of detail. This is easiest if it is represented as its underlying GIS data rather than as vector graphics.
  
• One toolchain is used to generate graphics of many kinds in spite of the diversity of types of graphic. The in-browser WYSIWYG editor is smart enough to customise itself to different graphics types. You’ll have a different palette of elements to add if you’re working with a road map than if you are working with a biochemical pathway.
  

One possibility is to use XML and XSLT technology to support the diversity of graphics types and their representations yet bring all the different types of editable graphics into the same toolchain. Enhancements to that toolchain benefit all graphics types supported.

They also give a table of the current state of play. It’s patchy but IF Microsoft start to deploy SVG and if all parties make software Open Source then, who knows, we might have an interoperable web no more than 20 years after some of us were debating the vision in Geneva 1994.

Browser Technology For Images

• This is a comparison table of the technology available in browsers for rendering images.
  

Edit hint: Comparison table could be made into a new page ‘Comparison of Browser Technology for Images’ and linked to from here

• All methods marked ‘(code)’ in the syntax column can, with the appropriate programming (a non-trivial task), be used to render from XML or from custom text formats.
  
• In-browser editing marked as ‘possible’ indicates the method can potentially edit data if so programmed, but that’s not a built-in feature.
  
• SVG can be added to IE 6 and above by using the Chrome frame plug-in and there is also an SVG->Silverlight adapter extension. However neither of these plug-in is commonly installed on IE. A third possibility is svgweb which uses flash.
  

Thank you everyone who is working for Open Graphic Interoperability. As soon as it becomes a reality we will redeploy CML to use SVG displays. And volunteers will be highly valued.