Re: Semiotic metamodel : Concept, Thing ans Sign

Hi, sorry for the delay in the response too.

Yes, maybe I'm ambitious. And maybe I don't have all the tools/skills I
need at hand when I try to develop or communicate my ideas.

I was surprised when someone told that only using RDF Schema is possible to
infer types. Actually, I'm currently inferring type information on
arbitrary sets of entities using only their properties information. When I
know that many subjects share the same set of properties I can be allowed
to think that they belong to the same class. And when they share the same
values for their properties, I can infer they are in a similar 'state'
(i.e.: single / married, student / employee, etc).

Using RDF as the core format where many data sources converge, and this
kind of metadata information from the RDF I'll try to observe 'Concepts' to
which classes/types belong. It's a kind of role or meta class where some
instances of Things are classified. Things are abstract subjects of
discurse of what references or Signs can be made of. For example, Woody
Allen has an occurrence (manifestation of existence) as the director
(concept / role) of some movie (another Thing).

The goal is to be able to take note of all of those relationships in a kind
of index where equivalences between different sources of data talking about
the same subjects, in a different vocabulary, can be deduced. This is the
intention of many Semantic Web projects already, and this metadata
(de)aggregation would benefit a lot from linked data sources.

Luckily I could develop an (ongoing) proof of concept project of what I
propose, which I'm hosting at googlecode:

https://code.google.com/p/cognescent/ (checkout sources only in the CBI
folder)

It's a Java Web Application project with instructions in how to exec in the
README. It's a work in progress. It provides an OData frontend, browse
service document, instances and metadata, all from any RDF datasource. It
can also be configured to use a relational database modifying Main.java
manually (for now). It translates the relational data to RDF to perform
model set up.

Best regards,
Sebastian.


On Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 10:20 AM, Thierry BIARD, EIRL AMBESAS <
thierry.ambesas@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Sebastian,
>
>
>
> I hope you are fine. Sorry for the delay of response. As far as RDF is
> concerned, I am not good enough to discuss this matter. I suppose that Pat
> Hayes is an expert and that his comments are relevant and will help you on
> your ambitious demarche. You are not of those who give up. I know that you
> will continue.
>
>
>
> Best regards.
>
>
>
> Thierry
>
>
>
> *De :* Sebastian Samaruga [mailto:cognescent@gmail.com]
> *Envoyé :* mercredi 17 septembre 2014 19:55
> *À :* Pat Hayes
> *Cc :* Thierry BIARD, EIRL AMBESAS; semantic-web@w3.org;
> pragmaticweb@lists.spline.inf.fu-berlin.de
> *Objet :* Re: Micellaneous
>
>
>
> Ok, I should have stated that this is intended to build an API in some
> language to perform the mentioned operations.
>
> Aggregating URIs means that if they occur multiple times in a closed world
> model in which I know all the statements then I can be sure that they
> represent the same thing. Another task of a given ETL tool could be perform
> merging and mapping of some kind, maybe to an upper ontology to facilitate
> this task.
>
> The algorithm for types is there and it is working. Those are inferred
> types and as in the previous paragraph I suppose a closed world like, for
> example, and RDF dump of a relational database. This closed world
> assumption can be relaxed having the possibility of merging multiple
> documents in the ETL component.
>
> Methods and contexts refer to the to be implemented API. Sorry for not be
> clear enouth about that. And Resource class methods (getXXX) receive the
> context as their arguments which can be one of the tree possible arguments
> listed. Subclasses (Concept, Thing, Sign) may override this behavior.
>
> Best,
> Sebastian Samaruga.
>
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 2:13 PM, Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us> wrote:
>
>
> On Sep 17, 2014, at 9:30 AM, Sebastian Samaruga <cognescent@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> OK so far, although RDF does not support contexts, so a given IRI is
> assumed to denote the same thing everywhere it occurs.
>
> > Aggregating all occurrences of the same URI I came up with the Thing
> they represent.
>
> ? How does that work? What do you mean by 'aggregating'? And how can you
> know if you have all the occurrences of a given IRI, on the entire Web?
> (You can't possibly know this.)
>
> > 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.
>
> That is not going to work, because you would also need to know the domain
> and range properties of those predicates, and that information is not
> always given explicitly. At the very least, you will need RDFS or OWL type
> reasoning here.
>
> >
> > Now, the meta model:
> > The core concepts inherits from a Resource class. This parent class has
> the following methods:
>
> "methods"? That term is not meaningful in RDF.
>
> >
> > 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.
>
> To repeat, there are no contexts in RDF.
>
> I would strongly recommend that you read more about RDF and its intended
> semantics before proceeding.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Pat Hayes
>
> >
> > Best,
> > Sebastian Samaruga..
> >
>
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