Friday, May 27, 2005
Notational Standards
discussion à
The next generation knowledge tools
Note
to Fred Freitas,
Associate
Professor
Departamento
de Tecnologia de Informacao –
TCI
Universidade Federal de Alagoas –
UFAL
–
I am addressing you personally as I try to get a handle on how to address a set of concerns that arise in the intersection of Semantic Web, as practiced and something that might be called “semantic science” more broadly considered.
This note will be posted as a bead in an edited threaded discussion being developed at [95]
You posted a conference announcement to the Protégé forum
Building and Applying Ontologies for the Semantic Web
With description:
Ontologies promise a shared
and common understanding of a domain that can be communicated between people
and application systems. [1] Therefore, they have emerged as an important
research area since the 1990’s.
Ontologies are used for
different purposes (natural language processing [2], e-commerce, e-learning,
knowledge management, [3] semantic web, information retrieval, etc) by different
research communities (knowledge engineering, database, software engineering,
etc). [4]
The emergence of the
Semantic Web has marked another stage in the evolution of the ontology field.
According to Berners-Lee, the Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web
in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers
and people to work in cooperation. This cooperation can be achieved by using
shared knowledge-components. Therefore ontologies have become a key instrument
in developing the Semantic Web. They interweave human understanding of symbols
with their machine processability. [5]
This workshop addresses the
problems of building and applying ontologies in the Semantic Web and other
areas listed below, as well as the theoretical and practical challenges arising
from these applications. We invite contributions to enhance the
state-of-the-art of creating, managing and using ontologies.
I have inserted a footnote indicator and ask the following questions or make a comment:
[1] Here the classical SW mistake is made in using the term “communicate” to indicate what a computer application does.
What a human does when a human communicates is physically quite different from what a computer program does. This error in language use is a complete error in the sense that with a single word one actually must mean two quite different things. “Communicate” is not well defined because of this dual use. Because of this error, a great deal of the time that is spent on SW activity is wasted – we get ourselves confused and this is simply unnecessary.
[2] Most individuals involved in natural language discussion know the distinction I make in [1]
[3] To include e-learning and knowledge management here means that we are clearly not merely talking about the bottom up process that TBL has discussed.
TBL “acts as if” all knowledge is the same “kind of” knowledge as knowledge required to know what the format of a banking transaction is.
Knowledge of things in the “computer” and things not in the computer, was the core distinction made by the Topic Map standard. (www.topicmaps.org) This distinction is claimed by most in the RDF community as being un-important.
[4] None of these are life sciences.
Bioinformatics and related activities struggle with the confusion that comes out of the SW community, where engineering is regarded as .. well.. something holy. The “second school of semantic science” is formed to state clearly that there is a different scholarly understanding about what can be engineered and what cannot be engineered.
[5] So we return to the question about knowledge representational languages, and the notion that meaning only occurs as part of a formative experience in a moment that a human’s awareness is focused on something.
I have developed the formative aspects from a neuro-cognitive point of view.
Your comments?