[topicmapmail] Superclass-subclass indentation in the Omnigator

[Murray Altheim]

Thomas B. Passin wrote:

> [Murray Altheim]
>
>>One of the things I've been (actually) enjoying in my research is
>>finally getting down to reading some of the Charles Sanders Peirce
>>materials, as well as things about various forms of logic. One of
>>the things I find in both the Peirceans and others such as Jon
>>Awbrey is that they try to emphasize knowledge domains. There's a
>>good paper on this called "Pragmatic semiotics and knowledge
>>organization" by Torkild Thellefsen and Martin Thellefsen (I'm
>>trying to locate a web copy), that expresses the issue that *all*
>>knowledge is contextualized, ie., that concepts have their meaning
>>only within a given knowledge domain. This issue pervades all
>>communication right down to the very words we use. As stated in
>>the Thellefsen's paper, they "are against an objective understanding
>>of knowledge because we believe that knowledge is created within
>>contexts, and indeed, it creates contexts."
> 
> I very much believe in the importance of contexts, too.  I am less clear
> that, deep below the surface expressions, everything is contextual, but it
> may well be so.  Not only that, people give weight (or strength) to
> associations and can temporarily change those weights so as to consider
> other aspects of a subject.  Permanent changes of the weights lead to
> changes in viewpoint, philosophy, etc.  It is as if people have a buffer or
> sandbox area within which they can play around with temporary structures.


It's been a few years since I tried keeping up with cognitive
psychology, but I know for a while the common belief was that
memory is associative, that an idea isn't stored in one locality
of the brain but spread across its space, connecting with other
ideas associatively. So, if I think of an orange, I think of its
smell, I think of the small plastic cups they use to serve it in
the OU refectory, of being served it by my mom after skinning my
knee, of particular episodes in my life "connected with oranges".
The idea of "an orange" is not objectified, ie., there is no
"canonical definition of an orange" in my head. I'm not sure I
could even come up with one absent the context in which I "know"
of oranges.


> I do not know if Topic Maps should have stronger support for association
> weights and complex contexts or not - partly it depends on the goals we set
> for them.  Maybe they are not needed or collocation and navigation purposes.
> But maybe they are.


In the same way as RDF provides a very basic graph syntax, that
when coupled with RDFS one can then begin to describe the semantics
of the syntactic constructions, topic maps start with a basic core
and allow anything to be constructed, comparable more to RDFS than
RDF. I see no reason why topic maps couldn't be used to express
anything that can be expressed in another language. I began in
early 2001 to "convert" parts of Cyc into XTM syntax, and I still
think that with a foundation of PSIs such as those provided by
the foundational semantics of Cyc, one could serialize the Cyc
ontology in XTM just as one could serialize it into some other
XML syntax. The advantage of doing it in XTM is that one gains
the topic map semantics for mapping, scoping, etc. which would be
something one would have to reinvent in RDFS or some other syntax.

I recently published a draft of a set of PSIs for datatypes based
on XML Schema Datatypes, and with that and a set of PSIs for some
appropriate form of logic (ie., appropriate for your application),
I think it'd be *relatively* straightforward to design an
inferencing system based on that. I say "relatively" since of
course no such system is trivial.


>>Like I said, I don't mean this message as a slam on anyone, just
>>a gentle reminder that these types of errors generally occur due
>>to a lack of expressive precision as well as ignoring the lexical
>>and terminological contextualization that occurs due to knowledge
>>domains, which themselves don't always have very firm boundaries.
>>Knowledge modeling is a hell of a lot more difficult to do
>>correctly than at first glance, as I'm finding out lately.
> 
> What Murray said - a hell of a lot more difficult.
> 
> This line of thinking sometimes leads people to advocate the creation of
> ever more precise and formal vocabularies.  For myself, I am far more
> interested in using topic maps to work with people's normal, imprecise,
> informal-association-based ways than I am in precise vocabularies, even
> though I know how valuable they can be.


Yes, I agree. I'm personally also more interested in exactly what you're
talking about; my Ph.D. is focused on designing a system to allow authors
to design informal, imprecise (ie., "just plain illogical") ontologies
and use them to organize their research materials and narrative structures.
I am not a fan of precision when it constrains creativity, and besides,
I'm certain there's very few authors who'd actually use a system if
they couldn't express themselves in ways that break rules.


> People apparently have some deep, not-very-conscious store of knowledge
> whose organization is poorly known, yet they function very well in our
> incredibly imprecise world of surface expression.  Do we have to create the
> deep world with topic maps before they can be useful?  I hope not.  Rather I
> hope and expect that we can recreate a surfface world with  topic maps, and
> strengthen it as we slowly add to the deep knowledge underneath it.


This reminds me of those slow motion films of bumble bees flying,
or ducks landing on water. Life is often not very graceful, but
we get by on less-than-perfect precision most of the time quite well.
So long as we can adequately express complex and perhaps recursive
levels of context I think we're okay, at very least syntactically.

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                  <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/>
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK

            If you're the first person in a new territory,
            you're likely to get shot at.
                                                     -- ma