Kashori - Semantics for Social Agents

Semantics for Agents

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Comment on a Post by Phil Dawes 

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 it is still necessary for me to communicate to you and to our machines, unambiguously if possible, what exactly I intend to denote by that URI. How am I supposed to do that? Or if I am the audience, how am I supposed to know how to interpret that URI so that I understand the same concept you had when you published it?

And its not just a matter of mistakes, carelessness, or incompetence. Nor is it really a failing of URIs or RDF. The real problem is that the world itself does not come neatly divided into conceptual categories. It presents as a very nearly continuous whole, and we each parse it up as best we can, depending on our context, history, and many other factors. I have posted about this before, It Takes an Agent to be Semantic. Before we can really use that URI to communicate then, we must somehow bring our interpretations into alignment, we must establish a common ground of interpretation. I have proposed an approach to this in Creating a Common Ground for URI Meaning. Lately I've come to think of common ground as synonymous with utterance (or statement) context and now think that the meaning of a URI is its location in the context of the semantic web

What I'm looking for now is how to represent this context of common ground in OWL. I'm trying to build an ontology of context.

# posted by John Black @ 8:52 AM
1 comments

Sunday, December 17, 2006

Can there be a URI for the concepts "I", "you", "this", "it", "here", "there", "now", etc.? 

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/ontology/indexicals.owl#here
http://kashori.com/ontology/indexicals.owl#there
http://kashori.com/ontology/indexicals.owl#now

Therefore they would only be of use if they could be embedded in a structure that specified a context.

# posted by John Black @ 10:34 PM
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"We are in the habit, I take it, of positing a single idea or form in the case of the various multiplicities to which we give the same name. Do you not understand?" "I do." "In the present case, then, let us take any multiplicity you please; for example, there are many couches and tables." "Of course." "But these utensils imply, I suppose, only two ideas or forms, one of a couch and one of a table." "Yes." "And are we not also in the habit of saying that the craftsman who produces either of them fixes his eyes on the idea or form, and so makes in the one case the couches and in the other the tables that we use, and similarly of other things? For surely no craftsman makes the idea itself. How could he?" "By no means."
Plato, Republic X, page 596a

"This convention is not of the nature of a promise: For even promises themselves, as we shall see afterwards, arise from human conventions. It is only a general sense of common interest; which sense all the members of the society express to one another, and which induces them to regulate their conduct by certain rules. I observe, that it will be for my interest to leave another in the possession of his goods, provided he will act in the same manner with regard to me. He is sensible of a like interest in the regulation of his conduct. When this common sense of interest is mutually expressed, and is known to both, it produces a suitable resolution and behaviour. And this may properly enough be called a convention or agreement betwixt us, though without the interposition of a promise; since the actions of each of us have a reference to those of the other, and are performed upon the supposition, that something is to be performed on the other part. Two men, who pull the oars of a boat, do it by an agreement or convention, though they have never given promises to each other. Nor is the rule concerning the stability of possession the less derived from human conventions, that it arises gradually, and acquires force by a slow progression, and. by our repeated experience of the inconveniences of transgressing it. On the contrary, this experience assures us still more, that the sense of interest has become common to all our fellows, and gives us a confidence of the future regularity of their conduct: And it is only on the expectation of this, that our moderation and abstinence are founded. In like manner are languages gradually established by human conventions without any promise. ..." - A Treatise of Human Nature, Chapter 74 by David Hume

"...Semeiotike, or the doctrine of signs; the most usual whereof being words, it is aptly enough termed also Logike, logic: the business whereof is to consider the nature of signs, the mind makes use of for the understanding of things, or conveying its knowledge to others. For, since the things the mind contemplates are none of them, besides itself, present to the understanding, it is necessary that something else, as a sign or representation of the thing it considers, should be present to it: and these are ideas. And because the scene of ideas that makes one man's thoughts cannot be laid open to the immediate view of another, nor laid up anywhere but in the memory, a no very sure repository: therefore to communicate our thoughts to one another, as well as record them for our own use, signs of our ideas are also necessary: those which men have found most convenient, and therefore generally make use of, are articulate sounds. The consideration, then, of ideas and words as the great instruments of knowledge, makes no despicable part of their contemplation who would take a view of human knowledge in the whole extent of it. And perhaps if they were distinctly weighed, and duly considered, they would afford us another sort of logic and critic, than what we have been hitherto acquainted with." - AN ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING by John Locke 1690