Saturday, April 14, 2007

The Semantic Stacks 

I want to compare a large library with the web. And I want to equate the call numbers on books and other materials that are "on the stacks" with web pages and other materials that are "on the web". You use call numbers to access books and other information resources. You use URI to access web pages and other information resources. Now lets supose you decided to create a new language for expressing data, lets call it the "Semantic Stacks" language. And you decide to use library call numbers as names for things. This seems like a good idea. As a name for Abraham Lincoln, a call number, say "973.7092 LinC", has the additional benefit that when used in a library it will lead you to a book about Abraham Lincoln.

But wait! This could lead to a call number identity crisis. Because it seems like the call number should name the book about Abraham Lincoln, rather than the man Abraham Lincoln. After all, when you go the location in the stacks based on the call number, you get a book - not a man! So we can't really use "973.7092 LinC" to name the man because that would lead to ambiguity in computers. How is a computer suposed to know if you are referring to the book, which is what you get when you go there, or the man. Of course, we want to be able to use call numbers to name the man as well. What to do? What to do? Aha! Lets put a box, instead of a book, at the location in the stacks of any call number that we want to use to name something other than a book. On the front of this box we can write the words, "Go here" along with the call number of another book. That way, you can tell if a call number is about a book or about something the other book is about. Of course, you have to go to the location addressed by the second call number to find out what the call number is about. Let us hope that will be less costly than trying to disambiguate the name in some other way, such as by observing the context in which it is used, as you would with names in other languages.

# posted by John Black @ 11:05 PM
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Prior Art

Socrates

"We are in the habit, I take it, of positing a single idea or form in the case of the various multiplicities to which we give the same name. Do you not understand?" "I do." "In the present case, then, let us take any multiplicity you please; for example, there are many couches and tables." "Of course." "But these utensils imply, I suppose, only two ideas or forms, one of a couch and one of a table." "Yes." "And are we not also in the habit of saying that the craftsman who produces either of them fixes his eyes on the idea or form, and so makes in the one case the couches and in the other the tables that we use, and similarly of other things? For surely no craftsman makes the idea itself. How could he?" "By no means."
Plato, Republic X, page 596a

David Hume

"This convention is not of the nature of a promise: For even promises themselves, as we shall see afterwards, arise from human conventions. It is only a general sense of common interest; which sense all the members of the society express to one another, and which induces them to regulate their conduct by certain rules. I observe, that it will be for my interest to leave another in the possession of his goods, provided he will act in the same manner with regard to me. He is sensible of a like interest in the regulation of his conduct. When this common sense of interest is mutually expressed, and is known to both, it produces a suitable resolution and behaviour. And this may properly enough be called a convention or agreement betwixt us, though without the interposition of a promise; since the actions of each of us have a reference to those of the other, and are performed upon the supposition, that something is to be performed on the other part. Two men, who pull the oars of a boat, do it by an agreement or convention, though they have never given promises to each other. Nor is the rule concerning the stability of possession the less derived from human conventions, that it arises gradually, and acquires force by a slow progression, and. by our repeated experience of the inconveniences of transgressing it. On the contrary, this experience assures us still more, that the sense of interest has become common to all our fellows, and gives us a confidence of the future regularity of their conduct: And it is only on the expectation of this, that our moderation and abstinence are founded. In like manner are languages gradually established by human conventions without any promise. ..." - A Treatise of Human Nature, Chapter 74 by David Hume

John Locke

"...Semeiotike, or the doctrine of signs; the most usual whereof being words, it is aptly enough termed also Logike, logic: the business whereof is to consider the nature of signs, the mind makes use of for the understanding of things, or conveying its knowledge to others. For, since the things the mind contemplates are none of them, besides itself, present to the understanding, it is necessary that something else, as a sign or representation of the thing it considers, should be present to it: and these are ideas. And because the scene of ideas that makes one man's thoughts cannot be laid open to the immediate view of another, nor laid up anywhere but in the memory, a no very sure repository: therefore to communicate our thoughts to one another, as well as record them for our own use, signs of our ideas are also necessary: those which men have found most convenient, and therefore generally make use of, are articulate sounds. The consideration, then, of ideas and words as the great instruments of knowledge, makes no despicable part of their contemplation who would take a view of human knowledge in the whole extent of it. And perhaps if they were distinctly weighed, and duly considered, they would afford us another sort of logic and critic, than what we have been hitherto acquainted with." - AN ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING by John Locke 1690