[topicmapmail] Not just Temporality in Topic Maps, but a whole approach

[Simon Grant]

Thanks to Murray for more copious, helpful and interesting comments.

A few things I'd like to pick up on below; but first a question:
what sense of identity does this list have? What it is, who it is 
for, what kind of people belong to it, what are the topics which are 
discussed here, as opposed to those which are not?

I am still sorry that I wrote as I did earlier, which was interpreted 
as a (not necessarily complementary) view of the list members - of 
course it was not intended that way at all. But it might be helpful 
to consider what may have contributed to my mistake. I'll tell you 
straight what would have avoided it altogether: a public topic map of 
the subjects of interest to people here. In the absence of any such 
"face", it is very easy to project one thing or another onto the list 
and its concerns. I was imagining things, not in any prejudicial way, 
but just externalising too much of what people will inevitably go 
through when confronted by a blank sheet. They go on impressions that 
may be quite misleading. What I was expecting back was not to be 
labelled as a potential threat, but a simple correction, either along 
the lines of - actually, there are people who are interested in 
this  -  or alternatively - not here, find them elsewhere. After all, 
that's quite a common thing for a list - to know their own boundaries 
and neighbours, to route people on to the places where they can 
interact most fruitfully.

At present I am still left with questions unresolved in my mind - 
what questions is it permissible to ask about appropriate topics? Do 
people subscribe to the idea that the best way to interact with this 
(or any) list is to raise a topic, and simply go away if no one joins 
in? No doubt it is one way of doing things.

At 00:35 2006-06-12, Murray Altheim wrote:
>But both he and Kal are correct -- there is no
>free lunch, you don't get anything for nothing, well, not quite
>anyway.

I wasn't asking whether there was a free lunch, I intended to ask
1. whether people shared the view that TMs are in some way closer to 
human mental representation (which, incidentally, is used as a 
marketing point by Ontopia)
2. whether people were interested in discussing which ways of using 
TMs are closer to, and which less close, to the human way of thinking 
about things.

Put like this, is there anything wrong or strange or inappropriate 
with my questions? If it's a matter of "find out more first", I'm 
perfectly happy to learn what is needed to get deeper into exploring 
the questions myself (indeed I am progressing that right now). It's 
always helpful to be directed to just what needs to be learned.

One of the things that was clarified for me today is that in TMs, the 
concept of "internal occurrence" is (or at least can be) used to 
attach any data to a topic that is neither an external occurrence nor 
represented as an association. I think that is rather confusing, as 
the concept of "internal occurrence" diverges quite sharply from a 
natural language understanding of the term "occurrence", compared 
with the very natural way it is used in external occurrences. I 
wondered what justification there is for using the same term. 
Whatever else, that partly clears up my own questions on temporality.

>As to being "aligned" to human thinking, I think (without trying to
>appear obtuse) that it's an unanswerable question. Whose "human
>thinking" do you mean? (and pardon me, but I think "human" is redundant
>here) And how would one determine any alignment? Epistemologically
>it's impossible.

I disagree on both points. Certainly, higher apes have some similar 
cognitive processes, so "human" is not redundant. And anyway I'd not 
like to prejudice questions on AI in general. Easier to be specific. 
As far as different people go (indeed, different people tend to 
structure their knowledge differently), well, it could be seen as an 
interesting research area.

Determining alignment: well, I can easily design a thought experiment 
whereby people are presented with different structures, and the time 
taken to learn something sufficiently to answer questions on the 
subject is measured. Is there any reason why that shouldn't be the 
basis of a respectable experimental design? That kind of experiment 
might have interesting implications in the field of learning material 
design - but I agree there are no quick, simple, or obvious solutions.

>If you mean most closely associated with what some people call "common
>sense" reasoning, the informal way that people generally view and
>express ideas about reality (not implying here that there is one way),
>then what you're leaning towards is in the area of my own research,
>i.e., the cross between formal and informal modeling, where one might
>build an application that has enough features of formal models to be
>useful but not stray so far into formality (at least on the surface)
>as to make it difficult for lay people to use.

Sounds like a very interesting research area. As with all of these 
things, it's difficult to make a judgement about overlap in research 
interests without a much deeper discussion.

>Again, here there is no free lunch.

I'm not clear what the free lunch would have been, had it existed. 
Has anyone suggested there is a free lunch here?

>I hope your application
>isn't air traffic control, nuclear energy,

I've been closely involved with research in the issues underlying 
complex system control and human error, but I've never developed a 
close interest in Cyc.

>HCI doesn't address modeling directly, but it requires an underlying
>model.

What kind of model? Chapter 2 of my PhD thesis is rather old now, but 
did address general questions about "mental models" in some depth. I 
wonder how far the field has moved on. I did write some relevant 
papers in subsequent years... :-) Perhaps you could send me links to 
any articles you have written around the topic, so I have a better 
idea where you're coming from.

>If that model is weak, the interface is similarly weak. If you
>choose to have no formal, consistent model, you'll have no consistent
>interface, just confusion.

Formality and consistency are not what humans engaged in interaction 
(as opposed to theorising) are best known for. So I wonder about what 
is being imagined here.

>>So really, what I would be interested in knowing is, how many people
>>around here are interested primarily in semantics and human
>>comprehensibility of TMs, and would like (for instance) to explore the
>>ways of using TMs to represent human knowledge in ways that *feel* most
>>comfortable to the people involved. My guess is that the majority here
>>are interested in the formalities, the logic, the proofs - maybe in
>>something close to mathematical elegance. Again, I have nothing against
>>that in itself. Just that, for pragmatic applications, for
>>communication, it is really useful to have representations that are as
>>intuitive as possible. That is a different kind of constraint to the
>>set of formal and logical ones.
>
>I have to agree with previous comments. It's an inappropriate
>question;

Why?

>your presuppositions are wrong.

What do you assume those presuppositions to be? It would be very 
helpful to spell this out - perhaps then we can really clear the air.

>This is a diverse
>community and speaking with some experience of the matter, there
>are as many different views here as there are people. Even given
>that, I don't think that the majority are that interested in
>formality and logic per se, they are more interesting in modeling
>in an applications (rather than theoretical) setting. It's not a
>group of mathematicians, though they are represented here too.

Fine, I can accept that the list has no clear positive sense of 
identity, if that is what you are implying.

>What you're calling "pragmatic applications" strikes me as a rather
>strange notion, particularly as the term "pragmatic" rings with a
>lot more meaning than you probably intended.

Maybe, but I can hardly be taken to account for other people's 
meanings unless that is part of common understanding. I suggest just 
taking the concept relatively flatly - yes, one that does something 
useful. I intend no more.

>What is a "pragmatic
>application"? One that does something useful? One that performs
>some sort of logic-based inferencing? Or one that does some sort
>of intuitive magic, making machine inferences lacking any machine-
>interpretable statements? The latter has been a broken promise of
>AI for many decades, though I still see jokers trying to sell this
>notion to the ignorant*.

Hmm, an interesting view.

>As to intuition, there is no one generalized human intuition, so there
>can be no one generalized model. That idea died about 2500 years ago.
>I'd be interested in hearing your ideas on intuitive constraints.

Not sure - I don't fully understand what is being asked.

>>Is there anywhere else where people of the kind I am talking about hang out?
>
>No, sorry. You can choose a community to hang around with, but I've
>never seen one that was of (relatively speaking) one like mind,
>except religious cults. The closest you might find to the kind of
>informality-without-baggage you seem to seek is probably the
>tagging and folksonomy types such as at del.icio.us. But those
>"systems" (and I use the term loosely) are simple classification
>systems, not ontological models, and they raise a lot more problems
>and issues than they actually solve, a free lunch perhaps, but
>likely to upset your stomach if you look to them as nourishment
>rather than simple entertainment...  like the McDonalds of KR.

Ah, here I agree... :-)

But how are people meant to make a reasoned choice of community to 
hang out with?

Simon