RE: Article: SW = ( SM + SC )

Nice piece Sean.

For my SLR 0.02 I'd like to suggest that your comment about
Conversion/Semantic Magic/Equivalence/transformation is perhaps only the
thin end of a very interesting wedge. Your description seems to be of a
fairly passive cloud - which, ok, is likely to be the case in the near
future. But Pandora's box is opening - there are a lot of inference
mechanisms out there (logic/production rule based as you mentioned,
transformation indeed, but also numerical, statistical and going well into
the realms of fuzziness and artificial neural systems). Networked frameworks
of triples, URIs and potential conversion mechanisms etc offer a transport
between such systems.

Anyone that is likely to plug a system into the SW is also likely to want
some ability to do at least simple reasoning on the data, and it would
presumably be desirable to leave some channels open for exchange of (perhaps
unsolicited) information.

The model I'm trying to picture *is* one of a cloud, but with queries
appearing as conflicts to be resolved in that space, seeding raindrops that
fall out as the answers to the queries. Vast numbers of queries will be
pumping into the system (from humans & machines alike), and the whole system
will be acting in a widely distributed way to resolve the queries/conflicts
down to minimum (though most queries would probably be resolved fairly
locally, due to context).

I don't see a problem with asking for "the brightest star" - I'd expect my
machine to respond with perhaps some alternatives to clarify what I was on
about - "...are we talking about the space in which twinkles Sirius, or the
one where Posh Spice warbles?" (alternatives based on the response of remote
systems for which the input had some meaning, directly or transformed by NLU
or whatever). After a few cycles, with a wing and a prayer the system would
return the best matched resources.

Ok, so I'm wandering into SF/AI/pie-in-the-sky territory - why not? I reckon
the number of hosts on the web is currently of a similar order of magnitude
to the number of neurones in the human brain, and each host probably has a
lot more processing power than a biological neurone - what's lacking is some
interconnectivity. Need I say more?

Cheeers,
Danny.

---
Danny Ayers
http://www.isacat.net

Received on Monday, 12 March 2001 09:04:05 UTC