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6th Internet Identity Workshop Coming Up :: Off the Top :: vanderwal.net

Discussions around persona (not the IA persona variety) and identity abound and the need for services that grasp these differences are worked through. The need for better understanding the incredible value the role of identity in tagging services has also been discussed here, which is something many services do not grasp and are doing a dis-service to the people who want to tag items in their own perspective and context to ease their own refinding of the object (Twine really needs a much better understanding of tagging as their automated tagging is incredibly poor and missing many tangents for understanding that need to be applied for full and proper understanding of the objects in their service).

As I began my research into computational ontologies, I immediately realized that the promise of interoperability that an ontology was supposed to provide was basically unachievable in its current manifestation. Ontology is the theory of being that has ancient roots in philosophy. Aristotle’s elements, for example, were used as a taxonomic system to describe the existence of things in the world. Ontology has been confused, in my opinion, for classification and categorization systems. And for many philosophers throughout the ages the assumption was that there was a single, objective universe that existed, with the implication that there was a single ontology that could be constructed to describe it. The Aristotelian tradition of classification has continued through the ages has spawned studies in the philosophy of language, and the study of meaning and reference. Language, however, is a symbolic reference system and its traditional primacy in ontology perpetuates the notion of ontology as a classification system. To describe a thing, however, is not to necessarily understand its being. But we are trapped by language because we are forced to use it to communicate with one another about the nature of being of things. Existentialist philosophy shows us one way out of this dilemma of being able to describe the being of entities and phenomena in the world without confusing that being with the categories that are used to describe it. Existentialist philosophy always spoke to me since I first began reading it as an undergraduate. It spurred in me an insatiable desire to understand how different peoples conceptualized the world and what they perceived to exist.

The assumption that different peoples had different conceptualizations of the world wasn’t necessarily a new one, but the very idea that “our” particular conceptualization of it wasn’t necessarily the “correct and objective one” was a radical notion born of the postmodern age. It is in this context that I first encountered existentialist philosophy. It leads me to a completely different conceptualization of ontology than has been traditionally understood. It also led Quine [1] to conceive of multiple domain ontologies in contrast to a single ontology shared by all.

Domain ontologies made sense. The ontological commitments made by physicists in terms of mass and energy were completely different than the conceptualizations of chemists or biologists had of mass and energy. As we developed our independent domain knowledge, our conceptualizations of the same or similar entities or phenomena became increasingly complex and varied from one another. Enter computers and the digitization of information, the digitization of these complex conceptualizations we wanted to share. What better way to share than to develop an ontology of the conceptual relationships of the information contained in the information system? The ontology would provide the structure for communicating our conceptualizations! It’ll be brilliant!

As I began to understand what computational ontologies were and how they were constructed. I saw that they were categorization systems–slightly more complex perhaps than a typical taxonomy, but still rigid and mistakenly confusing the description of the entity or phenomenon with its being. The idea that language can fully represent a conceptualization remains at the core of computational ontology development. Enter me and my radical Heideggerian and relativistic notions…

Ontology refers to the underlying conceptualization we have of phenomena in the universe, not the language employed in its description. What we perceive to exist is largely based on our cultural upbringing and training. We perceive what we are “culturally programmed” to perceive. This is true for national/ethnic cultural groupings as much as it is true for domain specialists who share a particular conceptualization. Ontology, therefore, is dependent upon culture, and just as there are many cultures there can also be many ontologies. Moreover, ontologies are cultural, they are the shared conceptualizations of a culture.

Creating logical formalisms to describe these cultural conceptualizations fails to account for the fact that culture is an emergent phenomenon. It emerges from the interplay of intrapersonal cognitive schemas and the extrapersonal structures of the world. Our shared cognitive (i.e., cultural) schemas are flexible and adaptable, allowing us flexibility in understanding and adaptability to context. Ontologies constructed as logical formalisms eliminate these essential qualities, crystallizing the conceptualization as a rigid definition and hierarchy of relationships, and decontextualizing it, thereby voiding it of its semantic content. How can we overcome these difficulties?

It seems obvious to me that ontologies are cultural schemas. We should construct them in such a way that reflects their nature. We need a connectionist element to our ontologies that allows for the flexibility and adaptation they exhibit as cultural schemas. Ontologies, from this perspective are more like folksonomies than logical formalisms.

Folksonomies are constructed with tags. They continue to grow and change, but are relatively stable over periods of time, just as cultural schemas are. Tags are individualized, but when aggregated into tag sets or tagclouds represent a cultural understanding of the entities and phenomena by a culture. Tags are lexical units that represent the entry points into the complex networks of conceptual associations that comprise our schemas, and hence our ontologies.

The difficulty with this notion is that an individual can have many cultural identities, many types of shared conceptualizations that would make the interpretation of a particular tag difficult. Without knowing the cultural identity of the person creating or offering that tag, we cannot know its semantic content. It remains decontextualized. Identity is an important element in understanding ontologies. For example, a single individual could tag a geographic space or entity as part of a geographic ontology. That individual may tag it “exciting” if he were a hunter, but he might also tag it “dangerous” if he is also a father. Hunter and father are two cultural identities of a single person. And knowing his cultural identities are essential to properly interpreting the tags he has created and added to the folksonomy.

Van der Wal is right. Identity is an important element in the study of tagging. The reason it is important is that it provides context for semantic understanding of the entity or phenomenon being tagged. One way to understand how and why it is important is by putting into the context of ontologies as cultural schemas, and recognizing that tags represent entry points into a complex network of conceptual associations but are not the conceptualizations themselves.

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[1] Quine, W. V. O. (1953) “On What There Is”, as reprinted in From a Logical Point of View, New York: Harper & Row.

Tags:cultural schemas, emergent, identity, ontologies, tagging tags
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Mental map of London at Mauro Cherubini’s moleskine

Mauro posts about an interesting use of tags as applied to maps. This is one of the things that I’m interested in researching. I think it’s possible to develop an emergent and adaptable ontology of geographic spaces using tags. In order to do so, one needs to link information about the particular identity/role perspective in order to be able to interpret the tag appropriately. In this case, the identity would be Tourist.

There’s also an issue of visualization, I think. As you can see on the map, the tagcloud is superimposed on a map of a particular scale. Zooming in would help to disentangle the tagcloud and make the tags more readable, but we should be albe to scale the tagcloud as well so as to avoid the obfuscation of some tags by others. This is more problematic, of course, in that the number of tags could vary to a considerable degree, and the question arises as to whether we could ever provide a non-obfuscatory representation of tags when the number of tags is quite large.

Anyway, interesting stuff that is of interest to me.

Tags:emergent, folksonomies, geographic, geospatial, maps, ontologies, tagging tags
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Ontology is the theory of being. It asks the fundamental questions: What exists? What is real? Philosophers have been trying to work out the answer to these questions since at least the ancient Greeks first posed them. Ontology has been understood by philosophers as being singular. Ontology, if one were to be devised, would delineate all things that exist in the universe and their relationships with one another. From a philosophical perspective, there can be only one Ontology.

Things changed in the twentieth century. Scientists, in particular a guy named Quine, began to conceive of Ontology a theory of a specific domain. Since there were many domains and types of domain knowledge, it stood to reason that there were more than one ontology. The concept of multiple ontologies, each being a way of explaining the knowledge of a different domain, caught on among scientists. And ever since, scientists and philosophers have been trying to devise ontologies for their respective domains of research. They are trying to capture not only the things that comprise the domain, but also the concepts and processes each domain deems pertinent.

Information and computer scientists have devoted a lot of time and resources to developing ontologies. The impetus behind such research is the promise of interoperability and the sharing of data and information between information systems. The problem with computers is that they don’t grasp meaning. They can manipulate data and identify patterns of information, but they can’t create meaning for themselves or for humans. Ontologies are seen to be the keys to the kingdom, as it were, for the creation and sharing of meaning among the bits and bytes of data and information we have floating around in our information systems.

Researchers in information systems have been working on developing ontologies for a while. And they’ve failed miserably. There have only been a few successful ontologies developed, but they’re not generalizable. Why have ontology engineers and researchers failed? For many reasons, I think. First among them is their failure to understand what an ontology is–a taxonomy, a concept model, a concept map is not an ontology. Yet, time and again, researchers attempt to create rigid hierarchical structures that they think are ontologies. Second, they give primacy to their own biased worldview. They are convince that their scientific paradigms–to the exclusion of other paradigms, scientific or other–are the only valid or meaningful ways of understanding the world. They attempt to reduce the concepts and entities of a given domain to some form of quantitative measure–the only “real” measure of what exists in the world.

In combining the first two mistakes, they commit a third: neglecting schematic forms of cognition in favor of a symbolic processing paradigm. Their attempts to make ontologies interoperable amount to vocabulary matching strategies. Anyone who has ever done any language translation understands that there is often a lot of cultural filling-in that must happen in order to make the translation meaningful. There is no such thing as word-for-word translation. Yet, we keep searching for strategies that allow our machines to do just that.

Ontologies are not taxonomies. Ontologies are not intelligible as discreet quanta of information. And ontologies are not the result of symbolic processes. Ontologies are concepts, variable and schematic in nature. I also contend that they are emergent and akin to cultural schemas. How we can develop ontologies for information systems that reflect their emergent and adaptable nature is the focus of my research. I’ll have lots more to post about my theoretical perspectives and research. I just wanted to get the ball rolling.

Tags:concepts, cultural schemas, emergent, ontologies taxonomies
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