Re: Micellaneous

Thierry, thanks really for your time answering my emails. I didn't take the
online course. Although I've spending some of my time in some kind of
semantic (semiotic) metamodel for what I understand as knowledge
representation.

I'm copying this mail to the liists.

For what I came with, the core concepts, borrowed from semiotics, are:
1. Concept
2. Thing
3. Sign

First, a Sign is an occurrence of a Thing in some context. For example, in
RDF, some URI referring something that somehow exist.

A Thing is something that can exist and, given that notion, can appear in
occurrences of some kind. A thing also aggregates all of its occurrences as
they represent the Thing as a whole.

Finally, a Concept is an abstraction of a set of Things. Things are
instances of Concepts and, again, which Concept they are instance of is
context dependent. A Thing could be regarded as an occurrence of a Concept.

So, given that I begin with Things and I need a source of them I can begin
with some RDF source without the need of any schema embedded in it. The
URIs in the triples are Signs. Aggregating all occurrences of the same URI
I came up with the Thing they represent. Then using a simple algorithm of
which URIs share the same predicates I can infer the type of the URIs and
came up with the Concepts.

Now, the meta model:
The core concepts inherits from a Resource class. This parent class has the
following methods:

Resource::getSigns(Sign | Thing | Concept) : Occurrences of argument
Resource::getThings(Sign | Thing | Concept) : Instances of argument
Resource::getConcepts(Sign | Thing | Concept) : Classes / roles of argument.

Example data:
aPerson :employment anEmployment (Signs)
Peter :employment SalesDptManager (Thiings)
Person, Employe :employment Employment, Position (Concepts)

So, care must be taken building an ETL RDF tool that populates this
bindings in Resource instances, provides querying facilities and support
the construction of entities which apply rules-transformation kind of
behavior using 'template' resources.

Then the model should allow to build queries navigating Resource APIs like
retrieving all the Concepts a Thing plays in a context, which Signs are
instances of a given Thing in a given Concept context, etc.

Best,
Sebastian Samaruga.