djsaab.info

A convenient online tool to create tagclouds for a document. A single tagcloud for a text document is called a textcloud. TagCrowd allows you to generate a textcloud. You can specify the number of tags you want displayed, display their frequency, combine similar words, ignore common words, and include a blacklist of words. I found copying and pasting into the fieldis much faster than using an uploaded .doc file.

I created a textcloud (50 tags, no frequencies) for my master’s thesis:

Tags:tagclouds, tags, textclouds, thesis tool
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Explaining what ontology is is difficult enough. Everyone seems to have their own idea about what it is. I have my own ideas about what ontology is and how they should be constructed. Even more difficult is trying to explain what an ontologist does. The Preface to the FOIS’06 Proceedings crafts an extraordinary description of ontology and the work of ontologists as theoreticians and engineers.

Formal Ontology in Information Systems, Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference (FOIS 2006), Brandon Bennett and Christiane Fellbaum (eds.), IOS Press

Preface

Since ancient times, ontology, the analysis and categorisation of what exists, has been fundamental to philosophical enquiry. But, until recently, ontology has been seen as an abstract, purely theoretical discipline, far removed from the practical applications of science. However, with the increasing use of sophisticated computerised information systems, solving problems of an ontological nature is now key to the effective use of technologies supporting a wide range of human activities. The ship of Theseus and the tail of Tibbles the cat are no longer merely amusing puzzles. We employ databases and software applications to deal with everything from ships and ship building to anatomy and amputations. When we design a computer to take stock of a ship yard or check that all goes well at the veterinary hospital, we need to ensure that our system operates in a consistent and reliable way even when manipulating information that involves subtle issues of semantics and identity. So, whereas ontologists may once have shied away from practical problems, now the practicalities of achieving cohesion in an information-based society demand that attention must be paid to ontology.

Researchers in such areas as artificial intelligence, formal and computational linguistics, biomedical informatics, conceptual modeling, knowledge engineering and information retrieval have come to realise that a solid foundation for their research calls for serious work in ontology, understood as a general theory of the types of entities and relations that make up their respective domains of inquiry. In all these areas, attention is now being focused on the content of information rather than on just the formats and languages used to represent information. The clearest example of this development is provided by the many initiatives growing up around the project of the Semantic Web. And, as the need for integrating research in these different fields arises, so does the realisation that strong principles for building well-founded ontologies might provide significant advantages over ad hoc, case-based solutions. The tools of formal ontology address precisely these needs, but a real effort is required in order to apply such philosophical tools to the domain of information systems. Reciprocally, research in the information sciences raises specific ontological questions which call for further philosophical investigations.

Tags:concepts, fois, formal ontology, informatics, information, language, ontologies, philosophy, science semantics
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Tags:culture, dogma, human rights, knowledge, politics, religion, science, truth values
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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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I first posted this in Bwebwenato. The discussion of graduate students and their perspectives on life and scholarship has been a frequently recurring one in the last weeks. I figured it was time to reflect upon it again.

My friend, Mark, who has been living in Uganda, recently sent me an excerpt from a magazine article. The excerpt really spoke to me, as I’m sure it did to Mark, because of the intensity of my experiences as an expatriate. It also reflects the good headspace I’m in right now, even as I adjust to a new, pressure-filled environment of graduate student life. I’ve been where many of these budding scholars haven’t, and have yet to be. I’m proud of that experience.

In November 2005, MEN’S JOURAL featured a list of the “60 Things A Man Must Do in His Lifetime.” Among them was “Become an Expat” by Bob Shacochis, which seems to have application to us all:

“When you teach grad students, those brainy, dreamy, slack-ass selves who have been squeezed through the educational intestine into the relatively expansive bowel of never-ending higher education, you have a recurring thought each time you enter a seminar room and scan the robust, nascently cynical faces of the whatever generation horseshoed around the table, receptive to the morsels of your wisdom: When are you guys ever going to get the fuck out of here?

“And I don’t mean finish the degree, get a job, a life. I mean turn your life upside down, expose it, raw, to the muddle. ‘Put out,’ as the New Testament (Luke 5:4) would have it, ‘into deep water.’ A headline in the New York Times on gardening delivers the same marching orders: IF A PLANT’S ROOTS ARE TOO TIGHT, REPOT. Go among strangers in strange lands. Sniff, lick, and swallow the mysteries. Learn to say clearly in an unpronounceable language, ‘Please, I very much need a toilet. A doctor. Change for a 500,000 note. I very much need a friend.’

“If you want to know a man, the proverb goes, travel with him. If you want to know yourself, travel alone. If you want to know your own home, your own country, go make a home in another country (not Canada, England, or most of Western Europe.) Stop at a crossroads where the light is surreal, nothing is familiar, the air smells like a nameless spice, and the vibes are just plain alien, and stay long enough to truly be there. Become an expatriate, a victim of self-inflicted exile for a year or two.

“Sink into an otherness that reflects a reverse image of yourself, wherein lies your identity, or lack of one. Teach English in Japan, aquaculture in the South Pacific, accounting in Brazil. Join the Peace Corps, work in the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, set up a fishing camp on the beach of Uruguay, become a foreign correspondent, study architecture in Istanbul, sell cigarettes in China.

“And here’s the point: Amid the fun, the risk, the discomfort, the seduction and sex in a fog of miscommunication, the servants and thieves, the food, the disease, your new friends and enemies, the grand dance between romance and disillusionment, you’ll find out a few things you thought you knew but didn’t.

“You’ll learn to engage the world, not fear it, or at least not to be paralyzed by your fear of it. You’ll find out, to your surprise, how American you are — 100-percent, and you can never be anything but –and that is worth knowing. You’ll discover that going native is self-deluding, a type of perversion. Whatever gender or race you are, you’ll find out how much you are eternally hated and conditionally loved and thoroughly envied, based on the evidence of your passport.

“You’ll find out what you need to know to be an honest citizen of your own country, patriotic or not, partisan or nonpartisan, active or passive. And you’ll understand in your survivor’s heart that it’s best not to worry too much about making the world better. Worry about not making it worse.

“When you come back home, it’s never quite all the way, and only your dog will recognize you.”

Tags:cultural schemas, culture, perception values
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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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Icon Analysis

One of the research areas in which I’m interested is that of spatial cognition. I find it fascinating how we cognize our bodily experiences and make meaning from them. Instantaneously, we create meaningful interpretations of our physical experiences through our situated and embedded cognition.

The article above examines human computer interaction (HCI) in relation to the icons we encounter on a daily basis. It approaches it from a neurological point of view and examines how we discriminate in terms of spatial distance, color, shape, and so on. Cool stuff.

Tags:cognition, hci, icons, perception spatial
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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.

Tags:fiesole, florence, geospatial, gis, italy, ontologies, sdi, semantics, tuscany vespucci
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I’ve been procrastinating for months with redesigning aemman.net. Now that Jason’s moved everything to new servers and has support for WordPress, I figured it’s time to give the redesign a shot.

I’m still having trouble with how to import Letao’s Bwebwenato to a separate archive and without having the posts bleed into the new blog by cluttering up the category or date links in the sidebar. I also need to figure out how to manage my CV and thesis using the Page function, hopefully without having to rewrite the xhtml and css code for the more than a dozen pages that comprise them.

I think I need some help. Maybe I’ll look on Craig’s List for someone who likes doing this sort of thing and knows their way around WordPress and php.

Tags:blog site
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My thesis, Conceptualizing Space: Mapping Schemas as Meaningful Representations, is something I’m very proud of. It’s a 6MB pdf file that you can read it at http://www.djsaab.info/thesis/djsaab_thesis.pdf.

I am also using this post as a test of WordPress’s tagging capability.

Tags:cultural schemas, culture, geographic, indigenous, narrative thesis
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