Interpreting hybrid images « Neurophilosophy
The cultural schemas we share include the meaning we make of spatial relationships. Scale is an important factor in the way we cognize space. Scale becomes an element of our spatial schemas, which are closely linked to other cognitive and cultural schemas within our neural networks. Put another way, resolution and experience are important factors in perception.
Tags:cognitionInterpreting hybrid images « Neurophilosophy
This experiment showed the importance of scale information in perception. The researchers specifically manipulated the spatial resolution of the painting that is, the periodicity with which image intensity changes. Large scale features change little over a given distance, and therefore have a low spatial resolution, while fine-grained features change much more over the same distance, and so have a high spatial resolution. In a second experiment, the participants were shown random noise patterns before the cropped greyscale painting. One group was shown a pattern with a high spatial resolution, the other a pattern with a low spatial resolution. Afterwards, the former reported seeing the bust of Voltaire, while the latter reported seeing the nuns. This showed that previous experience is an important factor in perception. The participants had selectively perceived the frequency channels presented to them before they viewed the image.
, cultural schemas, geospatial, neural networks, neurophilosophy, perception spatialComments are off for this post
Mental map of London
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 tagsComments are off for this post
vespucci institute
I recently attended the Vespucci Initiative’s summer institute on geographic information science. It was held from 3-7 July 2006 outside of Florence, Italy. I’d never been to Italy before, and I had a fantastic time. It was my first foray into my own academic community, meeting with people who are doing research related to my own. I established a number of contacts with other graduate students, some of whom I hope to collaborate with in the future.
I got to share a lot of my ideas on the creation of ontologies for geographic information systems. My ideas are pretty radical and unlike the approach most ontology engineers take. I was a bit scared that people would think me insane, but the opposite turned out to be true. I was able to explain the complexity of my reasoning to academics as well as industry folks. They were intrigued by my ideas and my approach, so I came away from the workshop feeling pretty good about the work I’ve been doing over this last year. Of course, there are several more pieces of the puzzle that I have to work out, but I’m confident that I can contribute to the research and development of ontologies in information systems.
Firenze and Fiesole were beautiful. I didn’t care too much for the crowds in the city, and it was hot as hell, but being immersed in such an historic city and the Italian food and culture compensated. I did take a few pics, including some of il Duomo. I’d love to go back to Italy at some point and explore some other cities, like Venice, Genoa, and maybe even Rome.
, florence, geospatial, gis, italy, ontologies, sdi, semantics, tuscany vespucciComments are off for this post
