Re: scientific publishing process (was Re: Cost and access)

Hello Paul,

On Sat, Oct 04, 2014 at 06:47:19PM -0500, Paul Tyson wrote:
> I certainly was not suggesting this. It would indeed be silly to publish
> large collections of empirical quantitative propositions in RDF.

Yes. And describing such collections with RDF on a level above basic metadata
is not so silly but very difficult in many cases - as I tried to show with my
example.

> Connecting those propositions to significant conclusions through sound
> arguments is the more important problem. They will attempt to do so,
> presumably, by creating monographs in an electronic source format that
> has more or less structure to it. The structure will support many useful
> operations, including formatting the content for different media,
> hyperlinking to other resources, indexing, and metadata gleaning. The
> structure will most likely *not* support any programmatic operations to
> expose the logical form of the arguments in such a way that another
> person could extract them and put them into his own logic machine to
> confirm, deny, strengthen, or weaken the arguments.
> 
> Take for example a research paper whose argument proceeded along the
> lines of "All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is
> mortal." Along comes a skeptic who purports to have evidence that
> Socrates is not a man. He publishes the evidence in such a way that
> other users can if they wish insert the conclusion from such evidence in
> place of the minor premise in the original researcher's argument. Then
> the conclusion cannot be affirmed. The original researcher must either
> find a different form of argument to prove his conclusion, overturn the
> skeptic's evidence (by further argument, also machine-processable), or
> withdraw his conclusion.
> 
> This simple model illustrates how human knowledge has progressed for
> millenia, mediated solely by oral, written, and visual and diagrammatic
> communication. I am suggesting we enlist computers to do something more
> for us in this realm than just speeding up the millenia-old mechanisms.

Can you express this argument with triples? I would not be able to do that.
Maybe if I devoted my life to it - starting with the famous "the cat sat on a
mat" example. The end result would be incomprehensible to others and
absolutely useless.

I even doubt that science works the way you describe it. Mathematics works 
this way and there are good reasons that formal proofs are absolute exeptions
in this field ca. 2014.

Basic metadata is good. Publishing datasets with the paper is good. Having
typed links in the paper is good. But I would not demand to go further.

Regards,

Michael Brunnbauer

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