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I’m in the midst of writing and revising my thesis proposal. It deals with the ontology of tags–ontology in the sense of being and what is. While perusing the internet for information sources speaking to the notion of tags and folksonomies (collections of tags), I ran across something new in Thomas Vander Wal’s blog, Off the Top. It is a short video of the ideas embedded in the talks he’s been giving recently about social networks. In it he explores the granularity of social networks and the overlapping connections that comprise them.

Though the vid is short, I found it interesting because it speaks to my ideas and understanding of culture, which is a type of social network I suppose. I wanted to post it here and get back to a more thorough explanation of it in relation to culture.

Granular Social Network from Thomas Vander Wal on Vimeo.

Tags:cultural schemas, culture, granularity, sharing social network
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One of these days I’ll get to the IA Summit. There are some slides of presentations from this year’s summit available on Slideshare. This is one that I wish were available for download, but unfortunately is not. But, I can post it here to make it easy for myself to find, and I get to share it with those who might be interested. It’s definitely hard to read on this blog, so it’s worthwhile clicking on the Slideshare link and then viewing it in full screen mode.

I not only like the title of this presentation, Linkosophy, but it focuses on some of the fundamental issues of emergent networks and communities as well the issue of imposing structure. These are some of the issues that I am most interested in in terms of ontology, semantics, and tagging. This presentation discusses some of the tagging that has emerged and its relationship with structure.

Tags:community, ia summit, networks, structure tagging
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Well, I set a date for defense of my dissertation proposal. It’ll be on June 12, 2008 at 9:00AM. I’ve got a few more weeks to refine and finish up the proposal. I want to get it to my committee members about four weeks prior.

So what’s my dissertation going to be about? The tentative title is The Ontology of Tags. It’s basically an exploration of the use of tags as representations of cultural schemas, which are the flexible and adaptable cognitive structures that comprise the conceptualizations of an ontology. I adopt a Heideggerian existentialist perspective on ontology, which is phenomenological rather than categorical.

The formal ontologies constructed for information systems today are based on a classical notion of ontology that consists of complex taxonomies comprised of categories and relationships between them. However, formal ontologies are problematic in that they simultaneously crystallize and decontextualize information, which in order to be meaningful must be adaptive in context. In trying to construct a correct taxonomical system, formal ontologies are focused on syntactic precision rather than meaningful exchange of information. It is not fair to claim that syntax is irrelevant, but the meaning we make of information is dependent upon more than its syntactic structure. The semantic content of information is dependent upon the context in which it exists. For true semantic interoperability to occur among diverse information systems, within or across domains, information must be contextualized.

The way to introduce this contextualization is through the notion of culture. Culture is a phenomenon that emerges through the interplay of intrapersonal cognitive structures (i.e., schemas) and the extrapersonal structures of the world. Culture shapes the way we conceptualize the entities and phenomena of the world of our experience. What I describe as culture, Heidegger describes as background, in which we are continually immersed as Dasein. We are always being-in-the-world. Moreover, we are always being-in-becoming, emerging into the world as it were.

My thesis is that ontologies are more properly conceptualized as cultural schemas (i.e., shared cognitive schemas) rather than taxonomical structures. Situating them as cultural schemas means that they are inherently flexible and adaptable. I believe we can create schematic or phenomenological ontologies for information systems using sets of tags and folksonomies, which can complement and supplement the formal ontologies that are developed by ontology engineers and information scientists.

So, that’s my thesis and proposal in a nutshell. Although I try to explain it as simply as I can, most people still have trouble grasping it. I consider myself very lucky to have a committee that gets it. And each brings a particular expertise to the committee that touches on the major components of my justification and research project. I’m really excited and looking forward to June 12th.

Tags:cultural schemas, culture, folksonomies, Heidegger, ontologies, ontology, semantics tags
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Al Gore did another TED Talk last month. He has a new slide show where he talks about the democracy crisis as a parallel to the climate crisis. He tasks us with a generational imperative. I think it’s brilliant. And I only hope that my research can be part of the solution to both crises.

Tags:climate crisis, cultural schemas, culture, democracy generational
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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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Re-blogged from Autism and Understanding Others « Neuroanthropology

Amanda Baggs presents her own life and thoughts in her YouTube video, In My Language, her translation of how she is in a constant conversation with the world around her.  She is autistic and does not speak.  But she can type, and after three minutes showing her interacting with her environment, she uses computer technology to explain herself to us.

This is interesting to me because it provides a high contrast example of the difficulty of communication between cultures. It is difficult for many people, even academics, to grasp the idea that culture has a significant impact on what we perceive as real and existential. People from different cultures don’t see the same things, even when looking at the same entity. When walking through the Australian Outback, I come across a rock formation and I see it as a rock formation. When one of the indigenous persons of the area come across that same rock formation, they see it as Krantjirinja, their Kangaroo Ancestor. It’s not a “different interpretation” or differing “social constructions” that apply different words to the same entity. They are not the same entities.

Such is the case with Amanda Baggs. She perceives a completely different world, understands and communicates with and within it in completely different ways than non-autistic persons. Not understanding what she experiences during the first three minutes of the video–having no reference system with which to understand it–makes it frustrating for those of us who are used to a particular form of cultural interaction. If we give in to our frustration, we dismiss Amanda and pass up an opportunity to expand our cognitive horizons and understanding of the world (and the autistic persons in it). Amanda’s video is an extreme example, but we often don’t invest enough time to understand before dismissing people from other cultures or simply assuming that they see what we see.

The problem is the same for computational systems, especially across domains. Creating a “specification of a conceptualization” will never be able to address the issue of seeing completely different things, even if it is machine-readable. It’s difficult enough to construct an ontology for a single domain, but trying to do it across domains requires a completely different approach. Machine-readable specifications just wont’ cut it. It’s like trying to give a dictionary or a glossary to someone and telling them to learn to speak another language.

This is why I advocate for the introduction of culture into the study of ontologies in computational systems. Ontology is, after all, a philosophia prima that examines the notion of Being, explores the nature of existence and tries to describe what exists. But there are many ways to understand the nature of existence, and culture is the primary force in shaping our understanding of it. So if we are to be successful in developing ontologies for our information systems, we will have to incorporate an understanding of the culture that uses the technology and the information within the system. Only then will we be able to see what members of other cultures see and be able to translate information meaningfully.

Tags:cultural schemas, culture, ontology, perception, semantics understanding
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With all of the health problems I’ve had recently, I was surprised to find this in Mitcham’s Thinking through Technology: The Path between Engineering and Philosophy, in which he is discussing Heidegger’s conceptualization of technology:

When we suffer or are in pain, we are simply too close to what we are experiencing; we need distance, some self-knowledge, appreciation of who we really are and of our limitations. But this is acquired not through rejection or repression of the pain; it comes only with time and through naming the source of our pain by asking questions and talking about it, rendering our suffering or recalling its background of happiness in poetry and art, sitting quietly and experiencing its presence–or rather what is immediately and unobtrusively there, just on the other side of the curtain of our disturbed feelings–gradually standing back and becoming detached from the tossed surface of our conscious calculations.

Tags:cognition, experience, Heidegger, perception technology
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The IST Graduate Symposium was held on January 31 and February 1, 2008. I had the privilege of chairing the symposium last year, but this year the event became much bigger, with big names in industry and academia giving keynotes and talks. The symposium gained a lot of support from the administration in this third year.

Annemijn and I proposed a panel about IST research in the developing world, and with some cajoling were able to get six panelists including myself. My advisor, Fred Fonseca, agreed to moderate the panel. There was some good discussion and a diversity of research and opinions that illustrated the complexity and scope of potential IST research in developing countries. There were some good questions from the audience. I thought it went pretty well.

The panel seems to have made enough of an impression that it was the only one quoted in the news blurb put out by the university. And they quoted me(!), much to my surprise:

News - Full Story

Tags:culture, IST symposium
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I can’t answer that question definitively, but I have a few ideas. Not only will it be important to gather data and information from a variety of sources using a variety of systems, platforms and protocols, but it will be important that we address the communication of knowledge between the many cultures that exist on the planet. Developing information systems that allow us to translate cognitive and cultural schemas that are embedded in the information and knowledge of different cultures is one essential step. Enabling streams of continuous flow of information related to climate, geography, culture, humanitarian relief, food sourcing and distribution, infrastructure support, population displacement and relocation, epidemiological surveillance, and conflict emergence is another essential step. Creating a visualization mechanism that allows for understanding the continuous information flow by the collective bodies of decision makers responsible for managing the impacts of climate change is an essential third step. These steps are a bare outline of the boundaries of a potential solution. Any solution will be vastly more complicated and involve a great many information scientists and knowledge workers.

If you haven’t watched An Inconvenient Truth (and you should as it will shake you to your core), you may want to watch Al Gore’s acceptance speech of the Nobel Peace Prize given in Oslo, Norway just a couple days ago:

The full text of the speech can be read at Al Gore’s site.

Tags:climate crisis, culture, information, spatial visualization
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Jonathan Harris wants to make sense of the infinite world on the Web — so he builds dazzling graphic interfaces that help us visualize the data floating around out there. Here he presents “We Feel Fine,” a project that scours blogs to collect the planet’s emoti(c)ons, and the “Yahoo! Time Capsule,” which preserves images, quotes and thoughts snapped up in 2006. And he premieres “Universe,” which presents current events as constellations of words — a tag cloud of our collective consciousness.

TED Talk: Jonathan Harris

Tags:information, spatial visualization
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