tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-58376482008-01-07T23:22:02.176-05:00John BlackBlogger67125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-15999634257605184752008-01-02T09:58:00.000-05:002008-01-07T05:55:59.963-05:00

In the paper Interactively converging on context-sensitive representations: A solution to the frame problem by Robert M. French and Patrick Anselme, the authors describe a robotic simulation of context-sensitive representations: "Agre and Chapman (1987) developed a simulation, Pengi, in which an agent — a penguin — makes use of context-dependent representations in order to avoid being attacked,

John Blacktag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-65313113433265053802007-12-30T05:50:00.000-05:002008-01-07T23:22:02.235-05:00

The paper Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment (2002 PDF) by Jon Kleinberg proposes the following definition of the problem of efficiently and reliably finding documents on the web out of the billions available, a problem he names the Abundance Problem: "The number of pages that could reasonably be returned as relevant is far too large for a human user to digest. To provide

John Blacktag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-23085815849858289952007-12-29T18:04:00.000-05:002007-12-29T18:48:39.520-05:00

In the paper Global Abductive Inference and Authoritative Sources, or, How Search Engines Can Save Cognitive Science* by Andy Clark 2002 (PDF), Clark presents a problem that looks very much like the one I mention in Words (or URI) as Locations in the Fabric of Context, but he refers to it has the "Frame Problem", and attributes its origin with John McCarthy and and Pat Hayes. Clark also presents

John Blacktag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-31273094518118913602007-12-28T06:42:00.000-05:002007-12-28T11:15:01.235-05:00

From Section 4 of Tarski's 1944 paper, hosted on John Sowa's website, titled The Semantic Conception of Truth: "the fundamental conventions regarding the use of any language require that in any utterance we make about an object it is the name of the object which must be employed, and not the object itself. In consequence, if we wish to say something about a sentence, for example, that it is true,

John Blacktag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-54447739430137415652007-12-12T23:19:00.000-05:002007-12-13T09:02:43.515-05:00

Neither Brain nor Ghost - Book Chapter Summaries by Teed Rockwell. In the post, Words (or URI) as Locations in the Fabric of Context, I speculated that a full interpretation of a name (or word, or URI in the semantic web) would require access to a web of associations extending out very far in computational space. But Teed Rockwell, in his book, Neither Brain nor Ghost, points to a solution. "

John Blacktag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-68222833623233277842007-12-10T23:42:00.000-05:002007-12-10T23:42:37.374-05:00

A name does not move from place to place. There is no 'Transfer of information'. However, signals are transfered, by transducers. There is no information before the sense of it occurs. A sign becomes a name with a reference when it coincides with a shift of attention towards an object in the world. The name, the object, and the shift of attention to the object - these three all happen at once, it

John Blacktag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-17630643403645128992007-11-27T21:50:00.000-05:002007-11-27T21:58:17.820-05:00

To name is to know. Paglia extends this with, " to know is to control." From Wikipedia's Name article, we hear from Shakespere on names, Tis but thy name that is my enemy; Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other

John Blacktag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-1164668830523446652007-04-22T10:00:00.000-05:002007-05-08T08:54:02.536-05:00

There is still controversy, but most agree that big globally accepted ontologies are not likely in the near future, if ever. Critics of the Semantic Web (upper case) say such ontologies are required and that this will be the downfall of the technology, since the required global agreements will never happen in the real, factious world. Semantic Web proponents come back and say this criticism is

John Blacktag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-1164891566095339882007-04-14T23:05:00.000-05:002007-04-14T22:02:56.586-05:00

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

John Blacktag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-12637856271515522552007-04-14T11:20:00.000-05:002007-04-14T11:37:03.810-05:00

In his book, The Rediscovery of the Mind, John Searle, writes about his hypothesis of the Background, which asserts that all language semantics depends on a shared context, "It is tempting to think that this argument rests on ambiguity, marginal cases, etc. But that is a mistake. Once full explicitness has been achieved, once all structural and lexical ambiguities have been removed, the problem

John Blacktag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-1164759283589238812007-04-14T11:15:00.000-05:002007-04-14T10:29:02.547-05:00

I read a lot of claims like the following found in a blog post by Lee Feigenbaum (aka http://thefigtrees.net/lee/ldf-card#LDF) titled "Semantic Web Technologies in the Enterprise", "But when I assert facts about http://thefigtrees.net/lee/ldf-card#LDF, there's no chance of semantic ambiguity. Anyone sharing that URI is referencing the same concept that I am, and my software can take advantage of

John Blacktag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-1166710465045849492006-12-21T08:52:00.000-05:002007-01-02T05:08:36.860-05:00

I agree here with Phil Dawes. And I'm glad he spotted those statements in Jim Hendler's article and pointed them out to us. I believe this is the major problem remaining to be solved for the semantic web. Sure, you can mint any URI, and by definition of the formal system - whatever it is that is denoted by that URI by me shall be the very same concept that is denoted by you. The problem is that

John Blacktag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-1166418034417606442006-12-17T22:34:00.000-05:002006-12-18T00:24:46.533-05:00

Are the following URI allowable according to web and semantic web standards? Are they ambiguous? Are they useful? In each case, the referent would depend on the context of the use of the URI. http://kashori.com/ontology/indexicals.owl#I http://kashori.com/ontology/indexicals.owl#you http://kashori.com/ontology/indexicals.owl#this http://kashori.com/ontology/indexicals.owl#it http://kashori.com/

John Blacktag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-1157505231639373972006-09-05T19:57:00.000-05:002006-10-08T07:39:21.826-05:00

What would make a good application for the semantic web? I recently got to thinking about this question after hearing of a start-up company in my home town, Charlottesville, VA. OpenQ is a small, young, and profitable company providing something they call Key Opinion Leader (KOL) management software. Similar to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, KOL software helps manage a critical

John Blacktag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-1157501083823128192006-09-05T19:01:00.000-05:002006-09-05T20:14:34.766-05:00

Norman Walsh has recently posted on using URI as names. I agree with the basic argument of these essays, HTTP URI make good names. But I take issue with some of the assumptions he makes about names. For example, that good URI are, or should be, if used properly, unambiguous. I believe that I have proved, in my post Problems Identifying Information that, as names, some ambiguous URI are

John Blacktag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-1153881066786277102006-07-25T21:30:00.000-05:002006-07-27T22:08:43.190-05:00

When viewed in an absolute sense, I mean when you consider all the different senses in which it may be used, a word like 'bank' is ambiguous. But a particular utterance of the word, in a particular context, is not ambiguous. Now I think it is the utterance in context that is fundamental and it is derived, secondary, and artificial to treat words as absolute and discrete. This requires the view

John Blacktag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-1153082292486071662006-07-16T15:37:00.000-05:002006-08-24T20:08:19.043-05:00

In an article titled, THE SEMANTIC WEB: AN INTERVIEW WITH TIM BERNERS-LEE, "TBL: The goal of the Semantic Web initiative is to create a universal medium for the exchange of data where data can be shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people. The Semantic Web is designed to smoothly interconnect personal information management, enterprise application integration, and the global

John Blacktag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-1152841904258346432006-07-13T20:21:00.000-05:002006-11-16T17:35:45.406-05:00

The W3C's Technical Architecture Group has published a document titled Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One which states that, "By design a URI identifies one resource. We do not limit the scope of what might be a resource. The term "resource" is used in a general sense for whatever might be identified by a URI. It is conventional on the hypertext Web to describe Web pages, images,

John Blacktag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-1152237011995078172006-07-06T20:33:00.000-05:002006-07-07T21:20:48.590-05:00

Uniqueness does not prevent ambiguity. Consider a fingerprint. Fingerprints have for some time been used to identify suspects in criminal investigations. A human fingerprint is considered unique, except in the case of identical twins. It would seem to be an ideal identifier for a person. But it might also be used for many other purposes. A gruesome example, after an airliner crash, a fingerprint

John Blacktag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-1151867623449363552006-07-02T13:47:00.000-05:002006-07-02T14:31:09.403-05:00

So does the experiment described in Anatomy of a Reference matter? Here is why I think it is important. I can create a unique URI for each one of my blue drinking glasses. And I can pair them off one by one, every glass with one of the unique URIs. I can even put a representation of each glass at the web address that will be accessed when the corresponding URI is fed into a browser. And yet, by

John Blacktag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-1150465849626400122006-06-16T08:46:00.000-05:002006-06-26T18:41:02.196-05:00

I have been musing about some of the unsolved issues with the semantic web: One is how best to use URIs to reference objects that are not accessible on the web, such as people, or cars. Another is how to make such URI references self-defining. A method is needed to publish URI references in a decentralized way without reliance on context. This would allow the semantic web to grow rapidly. But it

John Blacktag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-1150407938362114992006-06-15T16:27:00.000-05:002006-06-15T16:45:38.380-05:00

I presented a paper at IRW2006, a workshop at WWW2006. The paper was titled, "Creating a Common Ground for URI Meaning Using Socially Constructed Web Sites". I'm going to discuss the ideas in that paper further here. Also, I'm going to discuss some of the other papers given at IRW2006. Here is the abstract, "ABSTRACT The semantic web proposes to inject machine meaningful data into the existing

John Blacktag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-1133954656392852502005-12-07T05:50:00.000-05:002006-01-02T19:31:27.586-05:00

There will be a workshop co-located with WWW2006 around May 22/23 on "Identity, Reference, and the Web".

John Blacktag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-1133703059015110772005-12-04T08:02:00.000-05:002006-01-02T15:33:30.496-05:00

The process of authentication of a digital identifier is a form of symbol grounding by computational systems. A digital symbol is grounded in a real world individual, in real time, by requiring the simultaneous presentation of the symbol together with something else from the real world, a password for example, through some input channel, that can (or should) only come from that one unique

John Blacktag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5837648.post-1133521218691565382005-12-02T05:26:00.000-05:002005-12-03T07:26:22.536-05:00

Recently much work has been done on digital identity. See, for example, the Identity tag at http://del.icio.us. So what is digital identity? Kim Cameron, in the introduction to his Laws of Identity, defines it this way: "We will begin by defining a digital identity as a set of claims made by one digital subject about itself or another digital subject. We ask the reader to let us define what we

John Black