- From: Jim McCusker <mccusker@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 08:15:28 -0500
- To: Oliver Ruebenacker <curoli@gmail.com>
- Cc: John Madden <john.madden@duke.edu>, w3c semweb HCLS <public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>
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