Re: resend: definition of a 'thing'

Earlier this week I attended an invited talk given by an anthropologist, 
Dr, John Haviland of UCSD [1]

He began with a quick tutorial about Linguistic Frames of Reference 
(FoR) which seems extremely appropriate in this discussion. In a 
nutshell languages differ in the frames of reference used for describing 
spatial locations. Three distinct frames of reference have been 
identified: intrinsic, absolute and relative

In case you are not a cognitive scientist and want to get the short 
definitions before using one or more of these FoR's, please visit [2] or 
[3]. This might be valuable [4]

Christine

Spime Wrangler

cperey@perey.com
mobile (until Dec 7) +86 132 6171 6195
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[1] http://www.anthro.ucsd.edu/~jhaviland/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_frame_of_reference
[3] 
http://download.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/pdf/PIIS1364661302019629.pdf 

[4] http://www.cogsci.northwestern.edu/cogsci2004/papers/paper254.pdf

On 11/10/2010 4:22 PM, Alex Hill wrote:
> It seems to me that we could divorce the definition of a "location" from
> the sort of technology that supports it.
> In the future, everything will be tracked by some means (I am already
> being tracked at a coarse level; credit card receipts, GPS, etc.).
> Whether it is the device recognizing the item, partially recognizing the
> item and using a database to improve accuracy, or a direct signal
> indicating its location, it is still a "thing" that needs some sort of URI.
> And since it is a part of the physical world, it can be the "location"
> for a POI.
> This is why I would lean towards incorporating "thing" into "location"
> if possible.
> Here is an example use-case:
> My device sees a rock. I decide it is a POI and attach some data to it.
> The "world" or "cyberspace" may know nothing about it, yet.
> Yes, it may conveniently be big and difficult to move. Therefore it's
> "location" description is quite simple.
> However, if it is small enough to be moved, its "location" description
> gets more complex.
> If a sensor has been affixed, then tracking its location becomes
> straightforward.
> However, if only the information the URI includes is what my device saw
> then the "location" of this item is intermittent, perhaps "unknown", for
> periods of time.
> There will certainly be services that use a combination of credit card
> receipts, last GPS location and face recognition to give a device my
> "location".
> Seems we need to decide early on if we want to capture this in the POI
> standard.
>
> On Nov 10, 2010, at 9:51 AM, Mike Liebhold wrote:
>
>> Here's draft definition of 'thing'
>>
>> A ' thing is a physical object with no fixed location that may have a
>> POI digital information attached that cannot be automatically detected
>> by geopositioning sensors. The POI,therefore will only be detectable
>> by a default visual ( or acoustic?) search, invoked by a client.
>>
>> ***
>> Question: Does this require a default registry of visual or acoustic
>> search services that can decode the visual ( or acoustic?) pattern to
>> point the client to the appropriate URI that explains the POI format?
>>
>>
>
> Alex Hill Ph.D.
> Postdoctoral Fellow
> Augmented Environments Laboratory
> Georgia Institute of Technology
> http://www.augmentedenvironments.org/lab
>

Received on Thursday, 11 November 2010 05:14:54 UTC