[topicmaps-comment] on verbs and nouns

[psp <beadmaster@ontologystream.com>]

I am hoping that I might get some help on some work I am doing on enfolding
data invariance (from Hoffman data compression dictionaries) into event
ontology.  There are three levels of abstraction from the bit stream to a
"incident model" for hacker activity in the Internet.

The first problem we face is a theory of type.  Are there something like
"topics" here, in this set of invariance (exact match of a bit map).

***

We start with the observation that the origin of verbs is quite different
from the origin of nouns.  We are interested in a discussion on this point,
but we also recognize that the problem is quite difficult.  It is not so
easy to see a clear difference in the origin of verbs and the origin of
nouns by a surface reading of the linguistic literatures.  Perhaps the
problem of the origins of nouns and verbs is related to the notions of
declarative and procedural knowledge.  We are more familiar with this
literature, and will try to make our thoughts clear using this literature
(in a paper in progress.)

John Sowa often starts with a distinction between declarative knowledge and
procedural knowledge.  His work is foundational too much of the machine
ontology work that has been done by the artificial intelligence community
and the information technology community.  In general terms, he points out
that a paradigm of declarative knowledge constructs has largely failed to
produce human like cognitive processing in computers.  Sowa and others turn
to a paradigm of what they call procedural knowledge constructs.  These are
process models.  But not many of the problems in process theory are solved
at this point.  Emergence and formative ontology being the most critical of
these problems in process theory.

***

It is obvious that that are many different approaches to declarative and
procedural knowledge, and many schools of thought.  However, we identify our
bias as being more or less developed in the terms developed by certain
cognitive science schools, particularly as expressed in Schacter and
Tulving's’s edited volume “Memory Systems 1994”, which was published in 1994
by MIT Press.

I quote:

“Let us now consider the distinction between “procedural” and ‘declarative”
information storage, which has been applied to human amnesia as well as to
the animal domain and which enjoys a certain amount of attention at present.

“Historically, this approach has suffered from a lack of clear definition of
just what constitutes each type of learning.  There has been some evolution
in this program in recent years, involving a deeper understanding of the
diverse memory systems and processes covered by the term “procedural”.  This
lead some researchers to abandon the term “procedural” in favor of a new
term, “nondeclarative”.  This new label hardly helps one distinguish between
the two systems in a principled fashion. In general, one understands the
distinction between declarative and nondeclarative only because it says
pretty much what all the other dichotomies say: some systems are involved
with stimulus-response or habit like learning; others are involved with
“cognitive” learning. “ Lynn Nadel – page 48, Memory Systems 1994.



Our bias is that multiple memory systems exist and that “memory of language”
is shaped by the neurophysiology of human memory production.  So the
distinctions made in the chapters of “Memory Systems 1994” should be seen in
any operational theory of human knowledge.  Of course, no such “operational
theory” currently exists largely, we claim, due to poverty of philosophical
models of human thought.


More on the direction we are taking is at:

http://www.ontologystream.com/SLIP/index1.htm

However, I am really struggling with getting the conflicts worked out so
that one can talk about tokenization of bit stream events.

***

For the Topic Maps community, the question might be about the role that
verbs play in Topic Map encoding of machine ontology.  A comparison to how
RDF treats verbs might also be helpful.

Of course, the process models that might hold "procedural knowledge" is
where I think I am going with this.

I will listen to what you have to say.