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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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Information Science in action:

Tags:culture, human rights, information, statistics visualization
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He was one of my favorite characters in life. Loved his writing, his eccentric stories.
A loss for humanity.

An Obituary

I added the Vonnegut quotes to the sidebar less than a week ago.

Tags:vonnegut
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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.

Interpreting 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.

Tags:cognition, cultural schemas, geospatial, neural networks, neurophilosophy, perception spatial
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[This is not meant to be a well-written, coherent essay. Rather, it is simply my reflections of some of the concepts discussed in: Uschold, M. (2003) Where Are the Semantics in the Semantic Web? AI Magazine 24(3): 25-36.]

Talking about an agent’s ontology, Uschold says:

If it were written only for people to understand, this specification could be a glossary.

It is a simple statement that belies the complexity of human cognition and its ability to function as a connectionist network. Humans are able to read a word and its definition and recall a complex of associations and experiences to create meaning, to understand its semantic content and the ontological commitments that are shared within a community. An agent doesn’t have this ability and must rely on explicit specifications (ala Gruber) and formal languages to communicate its meaning to other agents. Successful communication is the goal, but machines are confronted with heterogeneous sources, “different ontology representation languages, different modeling styles, and an inconsistent use of terminology.”

Uschold describes the semantic continuum:

Semantics can be implicit, existing only in the minds of the humans who communicate and build web applications. They can also be explicit and informal, or they can be formal. The further I move along the continuum, the less ambiguity there is, and the more likely it is to have interoperable, robust, and correctly functioning web applications.

The difficulty with implicit semantics is their inherent ambiguity. People don’t always agree about the meaning of a term. Yet this is exactly where people live, so to speak. Humans engage in dialogue and discourse in order to clarify meaning. Through this interaction, we make the implicit semantics explicit. Engaging with machines isn’t as interactive, typically. We don’t expect our machines to be intelligent in terms of understanding semantic content and to be able to express that understanding as humans do. We also don’t expect that machines will be able to assess contextual cues that we use as humans to make meaning of our interactions with others, nor do we expect machines to remember our previous interactions with them (unless we explicitly encode that into the preferences of each particular application or service).

As Uschold continues to describe the continuum, moving towards the more formally expressed semantics for machine processing, it occurs to me that what we are doing is conforming our natural ways of interacting to the requirements of a machine. Why are we not trying to make the machine conform to our natural way of doing things? Shouldn’t the goal be to enable the machine to dynamically discover the meaning of content and how to use it? This, as it turns out, is what Uschold tackles next, machine-proccessible semantics:

For a computer to automatically determine the intended meaning of a given term in an ontology is an impossible task, in principle; it would require seeing into the mind of the author. Therefore, a computer cannot determine whether the intended meaning of two terms is the same.

Getting an agent to understand semantic content can be accomplished by hardwiring the meaning of terms and procedures into them, or through accessing external, publicly agreed to declarations such as ontologies. The heterogeneity of information and meaning makes both of these strategies limited. Information from different web sites may need to be integrated, so we require some way to map the different meanings to each other. Ontologies in conjunction with semantic mapping and translation techniques play a key role in semantic integration (Uschold citing Bradshaw et al. 2003).

Uschold speaks of human consensus regarding the use of terms. He refers to this consensus as an implicit shared semantic repository. I use the term cultural schemas to refer to this shared cognitive “repository.”

So, where are the semantics in the semantic web? Uschold offers these six explanations:

1. They are often just in the human-as-unstated assumptions derived from implicit consensus (e.g., price on a travle or bookseller web site).
2. They are informal specification documents, e.g., the semantics of UML or RDF SCHEMA.
3. They are hardwired in implemented code (e.g., in UML and RDF tools and in web shopping agents).
4. They are in formal specifications to help humans understand or write code (e.g., a modal logic specification of meaning of inform in an agent communication language).
5. They are formally encoded for machine processing, (e.g., fuel-pump has (superclasses SHO: pump)).
6. They are in the axiomatic and model-theoretic semantics of representation languages (e.g., the formal semantics of RDF).

Tags:cognition, concepts, cultural schemas, formal ontology, information, language, ontologies, semantic web semantics
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