ONT Re: Architectronics Of Inquiry -- Discussion
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AOI. Architectronics Of Inquiry -- Discussion 7
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JA = Jon Awbrey
JP = Jack Park
Jack,
Follow the wiggly arrow of the chronosynclastic infundibulum >>>~~~>>>
JP: I have never been all that thrilled with "standards speak", that
compilation of gobbledy-gook that's created to make everyone else
think you are a great standards writer. But, being the creator of
the book on XML Topic Maps, I'm somewhat the insider who actually
knows that all those words you quote below are intended to say
just one simple thing:
JP: A *topic* is the *one* place you go to find out
everything that is knowable about one *subject*.
JA: I know that both you and Murray Altheim use a lot of neuro-metaphors,
and I remember thinking -- out loud? -- that what topic mappers were
really saying here was almost literally something like the following:
| If there were not a Grandmother cell,
| it would be necessary to confine her.
JA: Or something like that.
JA: But the questions are:
| If my_brain (does, does not)
| have its my_grandmother cell,
| (is, is not) that good reason
| for an e-merging global brain
| to (have, have not) its own?
JA: So that's already an 8-fold way too many questions -- but even worse:
JA: 09. What would a Global_Brain's_Grandmother cell look like?
10. Would we even recognize her; even if we could see her?
JA: So you can see that I have many questions about this.
JP: Pretty simple, what? You also need to know that a *subject*
is anything, yup, anything you might want to talk about.
JA: And they are anything but simple when projected on this neuro-field.
>>>~~~>>>
Yes, that's more questions than I know how to answer, either.
But that's my first real attempt to forge a link between the
field of Global Brains and the field of Topic Maps, and I'll
just have to leave it to cool for a while and hope that I'll
be able to hammer its koan-headed rawness out into something
more usable later on.
JP: That simple notion is, in some sense, the justification for
topic maps in the first place. To be a topic map (according
to emerging standards), if two or more topics could be shown
to contain information about the same subject, then they must
be merged. Emphasis on the term *must*. AFIK, topic maps
constitute the only standards-based effort to require the
merging processes. Other efforts support merging, but
don't require it. That does *not* detract in any way
from the validity and power of other efforts (e.g. OWL);
it only speaks to the opportunities available to those
who may wish to choose among paradigms.
Again, I have many questions, but something that you said off-line
made me think that what you really want here is something like this:
| If a global information system bears any virtual information about
| a subject, then there ought to be ways to make it actual and local.
Just a first try at capturing the gist of the "subject in question" (SIQ).
But what comes to mind next is another one of those memories
that approaches its 40th birthday in my brain, and so I ask
tolerance for the likelihood of confabulatory elaboration,
McCulloch's ideas about the "reticular formation" (RF),
that was thought to have a role in waking up the brain
and that he thought might play a role in the process
of "marshalling" ideas that he knew the company of
Aristotle and Peirce had given the good strategic
names of "apagoge" and "abduction".
So the question arises:
| Is the sought for e-merge of topics really just
| our old friend abuductive synthesis in disguise?
My RF cries out for the catalyst of caffeine ...
Jon Awbrey
JP: Incidentally, the reference you chose for that quotation is the latest
draft "Reference Model" for the next generation topic maps standard, one
which brings topic maps much closer, I think, to the representational power
now found in the likes of OWL and other RDF-based schemes. Indeed, it is my
own hunch that, with the new reference model, topic maps may get pretty close
to what I would call "category maps" in that some requirements of category
theoretic computations are satisfied. It's just a conjecture now, but it
may be that Rosen's categories could be represented and manipulated
using "category maps".
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http://www.cs.bsu.edu/homepages/mighty/history.html
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