Re: HM.applications-Profiling-Level of Details/Abstraction

["Sean B. Palmer" <sean@mysterylights.com>]

Hi Mark,

> [...] In my own opinion it is the presence of context that some how
> establishes the characteristics of a magic glue for this kind of purpose.

It took me a while to wade through your non-standard terminology, but I
feel that you have come across a very important axiom here. The concepts of
"contextualization" and "shared meaning" (which is what I think you mean by
"magic glue"... in fact, I prefer your term!) are very important indeed,
but are parts of the larger architecture that we must be *aware* of, but
don't have to specifically write to. In other words, I mean that when
creating an "SW", we have to keep in mind the fact that we wan our data to
be interoperable and scale well, but that nothing will be achieved at all
unless we can build the smaller applications first.

[...]
> So far I have learned that an application using the RDF will establish
> its own rule base given that the RDF is loosely floating somehow in
> a gravity free environment,

Heh, you certainly have a way with words :-) RDF isn't loosely floating
anywhere, but the resources that are referred to in RDF certainly seem to
be doing so... But it isn't gravity-free. Just scattering the Web with bits
of data is not going to be very constructive: which is why we need that
magic glue of yours. That "magic glue" may come in many forms: one of which
is the SWAG dictionary [1] that we're working on. But that's a "Semantic
Web" thing, and I think it's drifting well outside the scope of HumanML.

> [...] where objects obtain connective properties by the application's
> task oriented interface to either machine or human need.

Nah, if interfaces had to connect all of the data together, it'd never
work. Imagine if all of the HyperLinks for the WWW were stored in
browsers...

> Please be patient with me here. I just woke from one dream where I
> saw a connectivity of information as a linking mechanism. I'm now trying
> to contemplate the existence of a magic glue. If you get what I'm saying
> here, can you explain magic glue to me.

Perhaps I don't understand what you mean by magic glue...

> [...] It seams that meaningfulness expressed in RDF form will need some
> form of AI to determine its associative connection to the request being
> made to it. In other words, a magic glue.

I don't think that "magic glue" relates to AI in any way shape or form: at
least, not what I think of as being AI. The contemporary definition does
differ and diversify to the point where almost any work can be considered
AI work :-) Anyway, here's a good quote that explains the principle:-

[[[
A Semantic Web is not Artificial Intelligence
The concept of machine-understandable documents does not imply some magical
artificial intelligence which allows machines to comprehend human
mumblings. It only indicates a machine's ability to solve a well-defined
problem by performing well-defined operations on existing well-defined
data. Instead of asking machines to understand people's language, it
involves asking people to make the extra effort

Even though it simple to define, RDF at the level with the power of a
semantic web will be complete language, capable of expressing paradox and
tautology, and in which it will be possible to phrase questions whose
answers would to a machine require a search of the entire web and an
unimaginable amount of time to resolve. This should not deter us from
making the language complete. Each mechanical RDF application will use a
schema to restrict its use of RDF to a deliberately limited language.
However, when links are made between the RDF webs, the result will be an
expression of a huge amount of information. It is clear that because the
Semantic Web must be able to include all kinds of data to represent the
world, tha the language itself must be compeletely expressive
]]] - http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/RDFNot

Once again, it depends upon one's definition of "AI". Anyway, I like the
term "magic glue", although I think that in reality, the process will be
mundane enough to just be called "glue". Stupid terminology :-)

[1] http://webns.net/

--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> .
:Sean :hasHomepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .