RE: [humanmarkup-comment] Base Schema-community: SEMIOTIC COMMUNI TY

[Rex Brooks <rexb@starbourne.com>]

Getting closer. The notion that we can use semiotic topic maps 
appeals to me as a way to organize sign systems into data 
dictionaries. It also happens to answer the question of how we are 
going to get the relevant data resources connected up for HumanML 
applications.

This is an area where I wish I had a few grad students or post grads 
who could be fascinated into doing some heavy lifting for us. 
Classifying Cultures, even at the level of simply organizing the 
names of such cultures into a table that would serve as the basis for 
one such data dictionary, ought to be worth a couple three masters 
theses or doctoral dissertations. However, I doubt it is going to get 
done yesterday just because I would like to have it to hand now.

Regardless of the writer's fantasy, (sigh), there are a couple of 
further thoughts on community that I want to get into our archive 
before I trundle onward. I think that, also in contradistinction to 
the straw man schema, community is probably going to be used in other 
elements, which is really just a way to capture one more change that 
I think is needed in this element before it gets added to Primary 
Base Schema, which is where I think it belongs along with humanGroup.

And, Lastly, community is yet another non-linear, atemporal, 
context-bound and therefore time-bound even though atemporal, 
element. That basically means that a WASP cultural entity exists 
simultaneously in 1776 and 1976, though the attributes of said 
culture for any particular time period will be slightly different 
both in the way that the community views itself and how it is viewed 
from without or by other cultural communities.

My! What a cooincidence. the next element in alphbetical order is: 
(you guessed it) CULTURE. I can't really promise, or warn you all 
when I will get to it. I have some hope for today, but it will 
probably be Friday or next week/

Ciao,
Rex

At 2:44 PM -0500 8/5/02, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
>As much as I can follow it, sure.  But individuals
>don't belong to sign systems.  They use them and by
>use, appear to belong to a community of use.  That
>is precisely how public safety systems use gang grafitti,
>and criminal argot.  Use of it is simply evidence that
>further inquiry is warranted.  On the other hand, the
>use of it in correct contexts is one way members
>of such communities identify each other and communicate
>in code or shorthand.
>
>It doesn't matter so much as it does that one have a
>reasonably easy to use system for collecting and organizing
>observations that enable one to select and dispatch
>resources for testing observations and for mediating
>behaviors of the observed.
>
>Umm... actually, a soccer riot is a predictable behavior
>of a named community.  The act does not define the
>community but the observed potential does organize
>the circumstances under which the behavior may occur.
>Thus, to plan for allocating and dispatching resources
>to act on the event, or to preempt the event, the model
>works pretty well.
>
>I think we pretty much agree on this. 
>
>BTW:  any well organized relational database is a topic
>map of sorts if one includes the relationships that provide
>views to involvements among the table types.  That is
>what a data dictionary system provides.   The challenge
>is to build one that will scale up to lots and lots of
>users with different points of view (say, task oriented
>views).  What a topic map can provide is an implementation
>neutral way to express the information needed for the
>topic.
>
>len
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Rex Brooks [mailto:rexb@starbourne.com]
>
>Basically I don't think an emotional mob, an archetypal lynch mob,
>for instance, qualifies as  community in the way I think of a
>community, and such group dynamics are distinctly different from a
>community process, such as a local PTA.
>
>
>>A thought experiment:  if we were to say that a community
>>as Sylvia says, is identified by the act of sharing, then
>>classified by the types of things shared, could we condense
>>the sign experiment down to a set of signs (recursively
>>constructed) and a set of topic maps over those signs
>>and that the community can be identified by the act
>>of sharing signs, and classified by the shared topic maps?
>
>Works for me.
>
>>I'm not a topic map guru.  But given the element type
>>
>><!ELEMENT sign (sign*, signifier, signified+, referent* ) >
>><!ATTRIBUTE sign
>>    id ID #REQUIRED
>>    type (symbol | icon | index) #REQUIRED >
>>
>>how would we use topic maps to classify and navigate
>>instances of that element type?
>
>This is a very important consideration. This is where we have
>recourse to standard published subject indexes (which don't exist
>yet) which use one or another upper level ontology as the base search
>structure. What I suspect is going to happen, of necessity, will that
>major, organized disciplines will provide indexes to their topic
>areas, stating which ontologies they use and we will have search
>engines of search engines at the front end of our document trees for
>topic maps so that we can track our criteria sets. (OH GD, here come
>the patterns again! This is like deja vu all over again. Once you
>start recognizing patterns, your mind goes straight to one of
>Wolfram's patterns whenever you see one. I'll be glad to get done
>with that damn thing!)
>
><digression>For those of you who thought the concern over the Topic
>Maps community's apparent preference for the Cyc Ontology (made by
>someone associated with that system and for whom, I would suppose, no
>potential extra fee is a consideration) with little or no
>consideration given to the DAML+OIL, except for similarly-minded
>folks to say they find faults here and there with it in terms of
>classifications of associations such as dog being or not being an
>associated member of the either the pet or domesticated animals
>(superset--my term) published subject topic.</digression>
>
>Sorry for the digression, and I hate to make it sound trivial because
>it decidedly isn't, especially when we get down to classifications of
>communities by topic maps over shared sign systems.
>
>Also, just to make it clear to those among our lurkers who aren't
>getting IT straightaway, this represents a major reduction in
>computing  performance overhead, and an increase in speed for finding
>associations to which an individual's memberships in communities
>apply. That's also why we need to make sure we get this as correct as
>we can, because we will probably be living with the results much like
>we do with credit reports, motor vehicle code violations histories,
>etc.
>
>To repeat, memberships in communities would occur by assertion, I
>assume, or by behavioral tracking. Communities would be defined by
>shared sign systems. Topic Maps group associations by categories,
>categories are organized by ontologies, found by search engines of
>search engines, mostly all done by metadata in the headers of
>documents, delivering the sign systems to which an individual belongs.
>
>Is that what you're looking for Len?


-- 
Rex Brooks
Starbourne Communications Design
1361-A Addison, Berkeley, CA 94702 *510-849-2309
http://www.starbourne.com * rexb@starbourne.com