Fwd: Working without being ambushed by Ambiguity (was: issue-57 background reading for F2F (short required reading)

An interesting e-mail by Tim Berners Lee on ambiguity on the web.

Begin forwarded message:

> Resent-From: www-tag@w3.org
> From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>
> Subject: Working without being ambushed by Ambiguity (was: issue-57 background reading for F2F (short required reading)
> Date: 15 October 2012 20:53:55 CEST
> To: Graham Klyne <GK@ninebynine.org>
> Cc: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>, David Booth <david@dbooth.org>, "www-tag@w3.org List" <www-tag@w3.org>
> 
> (I guess this is one of these things which is perennial.  I have not
> studied much of the history of philosophy but I do find one
> needs to be prepared to jump in in order to keep the  course
> of what I otherwise regard as engineering still on track…
> as I have said before, this is philosophical engineering we are doing...)
> 
> The point which David Booth has brought up, not for the
> first time, and which Pat has expounded very well, that 
> no symbol can ever have completely unambiguous meaning
> is, yes, quite valid.  There are several such points which
> we have to go over every now and again (preferably out of the critical path of
> working group work) and agree we all understand it and
> agree that we can all continue in practice without it.
> And indeed continue in theory without it as well.
> And Pat, you have lead us through that journey from 
> philosophical foundationlessness to logical foundations
> before and maybe you can help us again or just point
> to where you did before.  And Graham you make an
> important distinction.
> 
> There are lots of models, I am sure, one can make of
> ambiguity and language and communication which will
> allow us to do this, and they may differ in how they work
> and it probably is best that we agree they exist but not get 
> hung up arguing about which one is "right". They
> will all be imperfect, but good enough. 
> 
> PHYSICS ANALOGY
> 
> I have before and will now compare this with classical and 
> quantum physics.  We go through our young lives with 
> classical physics, and are taught that a billiard ball
> has a given diameter, a given mass, and a given position
> and a velocity, all of which we can measure.
> We learn how to build houses and drive cars
> all based on this physics. And then we get older and people
> tell us that actually a billiard ball does not have a well defined
> diameter.  Not only, if you look closely at it edge,
> is it a mass of atoms, but also those atoms in fact have only
> a probability of being in any one place at any one time.
> And even the billiard ball itself, if we measure its position too
> accurately in principle we can only do it by losing knowledge of
> its momentum.   Now the naively pedantic response may be to insist, that
> everything we learned in Classical Physics be
> thrown away.  This is the response which says
> that it is no use talking about the position of a ball anyway,
> as its atoms could in fact just randomly move 3 inches east 
> at the same time.  So it is that those who see that 
> in a deep enough analysis almost given term admits of ambiguity
> might say that the Architecture of the WWW" is useless as
> it says URIs should only be used to denote one thing.
> 
> But in fact we really need to use the physics we have learned.
> We need to keep all we know about the way billiard balls
> interact at human scale.  Even though we have to be aware of
> quantum effects every now and again, when we find light
> being diffracted through a grating instead of being scattered,
> or electrons tunneling though a thin layer,
> we have ways of going into the details of the quantum effects
> where appropriate, and interfacing that thinking with the 
> classical thinking.  So it is with denotation by names.  We need to 
> keep the models of ambiguity in our back pocket  and
> bring them out when we need them, but not use them
> to ambush any discussion in the classical form.
> We should not use them to suggest that any use of the idea of a name
> having something it denotes is to be thrown away.
> 
> Ok, so in physics there is maths which allows you to show that 
> in the large scale, the quantum model of the world in fact gives
> rise, to a very high degree of approximation, to the classic model.
> 
> VARIOUS WAYS OF DEALING WITH AMBIGUITY
> 
> So now how do we construct a practical ability to use
> terms like the thing that a string denotes from the morass 
> of ambiguity which is communication?
> There are a number of models, none of which is perfect.
> What have we?
> 
> 1) The Authoritative Dictionary model.  The guy who puts together
> the Oxford English Dictionary just knows more than anyone else 
> about how people use words, and we all make sure we use words
> just as they are described there.  If we don't find a use in it we want,
> we sent him a note.
> 
> (This is perhaps the model we have in kindergarden)
> 
> 2) The naive "meaning as use" model, sometimes blamed on Wittgenstein. 
> You use terms however you like, as meaning is use, and so you can never be using them inconsistently with their meaning.
> 
> (Sometimes this may be -- who knows -- a response to realizing that the model 1 is not perfect)
> 
> 3) The Expertise model.  The OED applies as above, but
> also we send lawyers to school for several years to agree on a set
> of terms which are more closely defined so we can use them
> in cases where we need unambiguity, like in contracts.
> To know what something means, ask a lawyer and if necessary 
> go to court to add enough extra definition to be able to continue.
> 
> Pat describes some of the great lengths to which lawyers sometimes
> have to go 
> 
> 4) The Areas of Expertise model. As above, but add in 
> groups of people with expertise in given areas. 
> Ask them to write anything you need in that area, and in 
> court  bring them in as expert witnesses.
> 
> 5) The Standards Committee model.
> A committee writes a standard for use in a particular area
> writes it using a mixture of words which it feels are well enough
> defined in models 1 2 or 3, and terms which it defines
> specifically locally for its own use within the standard specification.
> It discusses and ruminates until it feels it has found a set
> or terms which are all mutually well defined and tight enough
> to make a standard which people will use without undesirable
> consequence through misunderstanding. (Not a standard
> which everyone will understand unambiguously in exactly the same way, note).
> 
> (From time to time, the group may share its work with others
> and be horrified to find it has in the now larger community involved
> go through much longer discussion and rumination.)
> 
> There is recourse in that others can, while the group is extant
> in some form, challenge it to resolve perceived ambiguities in
> the terms it uses or the things it writes.
> 
> A FRAMEWORK WHICH ALLOWS THESE WAYS TO MIX
> 
> A common facet of all these models is that they 
> do not give complete unambiguity at all, just a good enough 
> definition.  "Good enough for government work" as they saying goes.
> Where "government work" is defined within some community
> of some size (See http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Fractal).
> 
> We can continue listing these sorts of models.
> More importantly, we can engineer them.
> The initial philosophers seemed to treat language as a
> natural or god-made thing to be investigated not
> engineered invented things,
> but in fact dictionaries and court procedure and standards bodies
> are all engineered systems.  So we can design the ones we need.
> 
> We therefore can improve on these systems,
> and, given that there is so much violence and counter productivity
> in the world and that much of it one might imagines stems from
> misunderstandings of some sort, it may behoove use to improve 
> on them.  That said, lets talk about this for URIs and
> specifically the Semantic Web design.
> 
> The Semantic Web meta model.
> 
> In a way the semantic web out-metas the model question.
> By focussing on the interchange of data in a restricted
> normal form, it can treat mathematically the systems 
> above -- and other systems -- in a logical way impossible
> with natural language terms.
> 
> The semantic web itself is a design, not a philosophical observation
> about how language works anywhere else. 
> 
> It decrees that there should be terms defined in the 
> http: URI space, and decrees that the DNS
> be part of a system of delegation of Ownership  
> of each term.  (I'm not going to quibble here about 
> whether ownership of terms delegated within domains)
> By realizing that there are many communities of people
> using all sorts of combination, and allowing people
> to create new terms very easily and being able to 
> avoid re-use of the same string,  it allows us to set up
> a system where the participating parties agree
> 
> - The DNS, and further systems within many domain's http spaces,
> allow a social entity to allocate a name in HTTP space.
> That social entity is deemed the "Owner" of the name.
> Ownership is defined 
> - The network and the HTTP allows a machine to look up
> the name and get information back
> - This information you get back provides elucidation in two forms,
> in natural language (with various models of ambiguity relief)
> and logic (where the core terms such as the syntax of turtle,
> and rdf:type are defined in mode 5 by the W3C working groups
> etc).
> 
> Everyone who uses the semantic web has to then sign
> up to this meta-model, though they can pick and chose 
> models above.
> 
> Importantly, implicit or explicit in the information which is 
> returned is information about which mode is used 
> to relieve ambiguity.
> 
> So the crucial design, then, is that when one agent sends
> another a message, that agent will pick a set of 
> terms which have different owners who operate or curate
> different vocabularies using different models above or 
> indeed combination of models and new models.
> 
> The vocabularies are picked so that the disambiguation
> is good enough.   Good enough for the situation,
> for the sending and receiving agent.
> 
> (We tend to call the information which we get back over HTTP
> the definition of the term. Well, we would except that we 
> would be ambushed by people who want to use the word
> "definition" specifically for a definition using one or other
> particular model).
> 
> 
> Of course in parallel with the actual looking up 
> of stuff on the web, also people share understandings
> over beers in bars as they always have done,
> but the semantic web linked data system is cool in two ways:
> Firstly, it instantiates the models of disambiguation
> providing a way to "look up the meaning" of something
> without having to have a notion that meaning is unambiguous.
> Secondly, it gives us the ability to write programs to help us,
> because of the logic interchanged. That's really handy.
> 
> Now we have to, mainly, get on with the business of
> building systems, but we have to be aware of when the ambiguity
> case arises.  We need, in our discussions, to have things
> to point people to so that naive pedantic arguments don't
> derail perfectly good discussion and logic based on the idea that 
> names denote things.  But we need to be aware
> of when the pedantry is appropriate, and have avenues
> ready to go down.
> 
> Example 1.
> 
> In our semantic web based world,
> When you are using a form, you may fill in details
> about, say, a seminar you are organizing, and generally
> the prompts on the form allow you to fill in things
> like "Date", "Start time" and "End time" without likely
> damage due to misunderstanding.
> If you have to choose in a pull-down menu whether to categorize it
> as a talk or a class or a seminar or a concert, you might
> be more puzzled, but a good app will pull in comments
> from the ontology when you hover over it uncertainly,
> giving you enough more detailed information to make
> your decision. You can maybe even clock off and follow
> a link to bring up the detailed information from the ontology,
> and also you can search for members of each subclass,
> to see what existing things have been categorized each way and do on.
> So a user can well use the meaning lookup system,
> resolve the meaning well enough.
> 
> Example 2
> 
> Consider now the person who is creating the form.
> Each time they add a field, they will hopefully pick 
> an associated property for it.  And hopefully they 
> will pick a property from an existing ontology which 
> will give it wide interoperability.  You want the events defined by users of the form  to appear on people's calendars, for example,
> and feeds of upcoming talks.
> So at this point the user as form creator is
> more aware of the different organizations, and the different
> disambiguation models, which apply to each.
> The user will at this point quite likely pick a number
> very standard terms, a few from other ontologies,
> and then be stuck and have to make up a few properties.
> This is when the system needs ideally to be able to 
> give the user a feel for the cost of
> getting others to agree on the ontology, of keeping it up.
> 
> This is where there should be buttons to invite comments
> and buttons to form a group, an buttons to to allow
> one to ask another group to collaborate, and so on.
> And depending on the sort of group formed
> and the sorts of groups to be collaborated with, 
> the social processes will be of all kinds.
> 
> End of examples.
> 
> So we can build systems which instantiate 
> and enhance the social processes which 
> we use to resolve ambiguity.
> 
> So yes there many times when all the details of the
> way the semantic web resolves ambiguity enough
> for us to be able to talk about names having a single
> thing they denote, and even having a definition.
> 
> And we understand the extent to
> which that breaks and where it affects us and we
> have a task of creating systems (technical and social)
> which behave appropriately and allow us to agree
> enough on the meaning of old terms and new ones
> to be able to collaborate better and better.
> 
> But right now these social systems are in place in various forms
> so we need not be ambushed by the many rat-holes
> around this, some of which need to be charted and left rarely visited.
> 
> Tim
> 
> 
> 
> 
> * "God created the Counting Numbers, and man invented the rest" -- @@@? 
> 
> ** We don't want to send all the naive pedantic arguments off
> on the B ark, and then die from an unsanitized telephone.
> 
> 
> 

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/