[topicmapmail] Superclass-Subclass
Jon Awbrey
jawbrey@oakland.edu
Fri, 20 Dec 2002 16:21:26 -0500
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the indexer bit of my old theme one program --
that you may have seen somewhere hereabouts:
http://www.nexist.org/wiki/Doc5099Document --
began as a hume-thorndike-guthrie-tolman-zipf
machine, but what i found out in the usual way
is that associations can be worthwhile but only
the tiniest fraction of what intelligence needs.
there's this unfinished note in my draft folder, last tweaked 20 May 2002,
titled "sign relations as 'the' pragmatic context" -- someday i'm gonna
get back to it ...
jon
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Jack Park wrote:
>
> I've been pondering this discussion. First, let me say that my son and
> daughter, while researching for their chapter in _XML Topic Maps_ soon
> discovered that the entirety of the biological classification scheme, as
> sketched in fragment by Murray earlier in this thread, is up for massive
> conjecture, argument, and maybe revision. But, it is what we have today.
>
> And then, while thinking about all the discourse here on graphs, there are
> a couple of really interesting papers that, I think, are appropriate. One
> is the paper "The Hume Machine: can association networks to more than
> formal rules?" available now at
>
> http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/teil-latour.html
>
> If you use the navigation tools on that page, you discover an entire table
> of contents of online stuff that may be appropriate. Let me quote from one
> such paper http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/hofstadter.html which
> speaks to something Stanislaw Ulam once said about "seeing as" (which, I think,
> nails Murray's notions of *context*):
>
> "To conclude, I would like to cite the words of someone whose fluid way of
> thinking I have always admired--the great mathematician Stanislaw Ulam. As
> Heinz Pagels reports in his book The Dreams of Reason, one time Ulam and
> his mathematician friend Gian-Carlo Rota were having a lively debate about
> artificial intelligence, a discipline whose approach Ulam thought was
> simplistic. Convinced that perception is the key to intelligence, Ulam was
> trying to explain the subtlety of human perception by showing how
> subjective it is, how influenced by context. He said to Rota, "When you
> perceive intelligently, you always perceive a function, never an object in
> the physical sense. Cameras always register objects, but human perception
> is always the perception of functional roles. The two processes could not
> be more different.... Your friends in AI are now beginning to trumpet the
> role of contexts, but they are not practicing their lesson. They still want
> to build machines that see by imitating cameras, perhaps with some feedback
> thrown in. Such an approach is bound to fail..."
>
> In [1], Rota wrote:
> "What is it that you see when you see? You see an object _as_ a key, you
> see a man in a car _as_ a passenger, you see some sheets of paper _as_ a
> book. It is the word "as" that must be mathematically formalized, on a par
> with the connectives "and", "or" "implies" and "not" that have already been
> accepted into a formal logic. Until you do that, you will not get very far
> with your AI-problem."
> [I suspect those words were a quotation from a conversation with Ulam
> himself]
>
> That's my 0.02 EUROs for the day.
> Cheers
> Jack
>
> [1]Rota, Gian-Carlo The barrier of meaning. In memorium: Stanislaw Ulam.
> Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 36 (1989), no. 2, 141--143
>
> At 04:34 PM 12/20/2002 +0000, Murray Altheim wrote:
> >Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
> >
> >>* Murray Altheim
> >>| | 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, [...]
> >>I wonder why people keep saying stuff like this. Where are the
> >>semantics in RDFS?
> >
> >
> >Either I'm not clear or you're misinterpreting me. I've myself
> >had a difficulty with people comparing RDF and XTM, since one
> >is very simply graph syntax, the other a very specific syntax
> >for topic maps (about three levels up in the chain of being).
> >My point was that you needed RDFS as a schema language to be
> >able to create a markup language capable of doing what XTM does,
> >and that you *could* do anything you like with RDF/RDFS, such as
> >XUL, DAML, etc. As we both know, RDFS is just a schema language,
> >like DTDs or XML Schema.
> >
> >
> >>| [...] topic maps start with a basic core and allow anything to be
> >>| constructed, comparable more to RDFS than RDF.
> >>XTM 1.0 specifies a syntax and an (implicit) model, in just the same
> >>way that the RDF M&S specification does, and at a comparable level of
> >>generality. RDFS corresponds much more closely to TMCL than it does to
> >>topic maps themselves. Ditto for DAML+OIL and OWL.
> >
> >
> >Yes, I understand this. I think most people on this list do. Maybe
> >I'm wrong.
> >
> >
> >>| I see no reason why topic maps couldn't be used to express anything
> >>| that can be expressed in another language.
> >>Agreed. The expression may not always be convenient, but it's
> >>difficult to think of something that couldn't (given the right set of
> >>published subjects) be expressed.
> >
> >
> >One of the things I've tried to get across to people is that
> >there *is* an interesting comparison between RDF-as-simple-graphs
> >and XTM, in that whereas RDF can't without RDFS express XTM, XTM
> >can by virtue of its <topic> and <association> elements provide
> >a fairly simple graph syntax, and that with the addition of some
> >PSIs could be used to create an interesting knowledge modeling
> >language. As I've said before, I'm eager to see Common Logic,
> >as I think it could easily be either expressed or transformed
> >in/into XTM. Then adding XTM's mapping capability and things
> >begin to get quite interesting. I'm not sure CL will have any
> >built-in mapping ability or even hooks into the outside world
> >(CGIF didn't, for example).
> >
> >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
> >
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>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web.
> Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-74960-2.
>
> http://www.nexist.org/wiki/User0Blog
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