Re: When does a document acquire (web) semantics?

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 7:50 AM, Oliver Ruebenacker <curoli@gmail.com> wrote:
>     Hello,
>
>  When asking for a practical example, I was more concerned about the
> consumer rather than the producer of data. It is easy to claim some
> data has meaning, but the question is to what extend that meaning can
> be appreciated by others.
>
>  Why don't we build a little meaning detector. Some device that takes
> a document and makes beep if it finds meaning in it. With such a
> device, it would be easy to find out, when exactly the document
> acquired the meaning. Or at least, design an experiment where the
> outcome is predicted by a theory based on the meaning of the document.
>
>  If it turns out that such a device can not be build, or such an
> experiment can not be designed, then I would assume that the document
> alone has no meaning, and that instead, meaning resides in a system
> larger than the document. That system than needs to be identified.

I like this. For me, computable formal semantics (what we would encode
the document in) isn't exactly the same as "meaning". As in, when I
read a document and gain information from it, I don't gain the same
kind of state that would be encoded in the graph of the document. I'm
still convinced that there are semantics embedded in sub-symbolic
representations (by sub-symbolic, I simply mean a 1:1 connection
between entity/concept/whatever and the symbol/URI/triple for it) that
are lost using direct symbolic encodings.

Jim
--
Jim McCusker
Programmer Analyst
Krauthammer Lab, Pathology Informatics
Yale School of Medicine
james.mccusker@yale.edu | (203) 785-6330
http://krauthammerlab.med.yale.edu

PhD Student
Tetherless World Constellation
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
mccusj@cs.rpi.edu
http://tw.rpi.edu

Received on Tuesday, 2 February 2010 13:16:20 UTC