Re: Arcs

On 21/10/10 23:54, Andrew S. Townley wrote:
> On 21 Oct 2010, at 11:31 AM, Patrick Durusau wrote:
>> On Thu, 2010-10-21 at 15:36 +1300, Murray Altheim wrote:
[...]
>> It is a question of semantic software recognizing owners' flags rather
>> than training owners to use different flags.
>
> isn't the above what we've been trying to do for the last 30 years? :(

Hi Andrew,

Not really. As a species we've been trying to communicate with each
other since we could grunt, and none of the issues inherent in that
communication have gone away. What has changed is the availability
of tools that permit at the very least the complete availability of
documentation of what it is we're attempting to communicate, i.e.,
the ability to fully spell out (literally) the definitions of our
terms and relations in ways that permit discovery and analysis, to
both human and machine. These systems are still by and large horribly
primitive, but they exist for the first time. We can largely credit
Roy Fielding for this.

> Funny how semantic software that was supposed to eliminate
> interoperability problems has caused a new batch of interoperability
> problems. Some of it is a direct example of Murry's "flag planting"
> but some is that there's always a domain boundary people hit or
> adaptations that need to be made to make applications efficient
> in a particular context.

I think that most of these problems are simply poor design. There's
no way to legislate good design, nor keep software designers from
jumping into solutions before they understand the actual problems,
nor from jumping ignorantly or fully cognizant of the rules they're
ignoring.

>> Solutions that rely on adapting people to software are deeply
>> problematic.
>
> Hard enough getting people adapting to people correctly! :)

All we can do is work on a principle of agreement: if one uses this
term and we provide you the documentation and one has read the
documentation and one understands it in the same way as we understand
it, then we are communicating. Ugh. Difficult, yes.

> However, that's exactly what we're talking about here.  There's got
> to be some level of broad agreement on how you bridge the semantic
> silos so that these identifiers are truly interoperable--and these
> are as much people issues as they are technology issues.  Some great
> work has been done in this space, but I'm not convinced it's widely
> enough publicized so that people on the ground are aware of it
>--especially those of us who came to the party relatively late.

This is asking the wrong question. You can't bridge those silos
without doing damage, if by "silo"  you mean a domain of knowledge
developed within a community for a particular purpose, being used
outside of that domain by a different community with different
understanding. I *completely* agree that this is not a technological
issue, but technology can assist in providing the solution by at
least providing the ability to discover and analyse the documentation
of the terms and relations used.

To my knowledge, nobody has gone down this path, but technology can
also provide for *dialogue* in dynamically negotiating agreement.
Normally it's just the fudge factor (I have never seen a duck nor do
I know what a duck is, but I've read the documentation and I think
it sounds like a duck, walks like a duck; must be a duck).

> I totally agree that more emphasis in this area would be very useful!

One of the more interesting areas of research in AI/KR is context,
with at one point yearly conferences solely focused on the subject
(e.g., [1]). Topic Maps have a rather primitive concept of context
in the use of 'scope' that could be expanded, possibly within the
existing model, or perhaps we need to elaborate.  We should be
paying more attention to the results of that research. I seem to
remember David Kirch and Patrick Brezillion as central figures,
people to check out.

I also think it behooves everyone to do a bit of epistemological
homework before jumping head-deep into the pool of modeling. It's
a deep pool and the bottom is littered with the bodies of those
who have gone before us and had no ability to swim. I won't name
names, but as a hint they had lots of DARPA money.

Murray

[1] http://context-07.ruc.dk/proc.html
...........................................................................
Murray Altheim <murray10 at altheim dot com>                       = =  ===
http://www.altheim.com/murray/                                     ===  ===
SGML Grease Monkey, Banjo Player, Wantanabe Zen Monk               = =  ===

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