The problem of "subject identity" has recently been recognized as more difficult than previously thought by proponents of the Semantic Web.This Annex also mentions several interesting papers already mentioned here in various previous posts. Meanwhile, the SWBP RDFTM Task Force has delivered a rich Survey of Interoperability Proposals with a quite exhaustive presentation of the identity issue.
I've been playing lately with SWRL, wondering how it could be used to express subject identification rules. We have poked enough lately with the notions of context and protocol of identification to think about going from those qualitative general considerations to something more effective like a "Subject Identification Rule Language" able to capture complex rules of identification including declared or computed properties of subjects as well as context elements.
After reading Bernard's recent posting, I thought I'd forward an announcement for the Fifth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT-05), which is part of an ongoing conference on context originated by Patrick Brézillon.
ReplyDeleteI'm very much in agreement with Bernard's comments on the issues surrounding subject identity, and my own research supports the notion of a "quantum identity," one based very much on notions of subjective context and interpretation. If one moves away from an objective, Platonic view of reality, then subject-ivity must follow. I think this must be reflected in the approach to our artificial (i.e., non-innate) representations of knowledge and information.
This actually ties in quite strongly with my own research into Faceted Classification, where facets are individually bound by the constraints of their placement within a matrix or network of related ideas. (I'm extending the notion of FC beyond what is current, where facets are part of a simple hierarchy, and are rather part of a graph, which happens to be easily represented as a Topic Map graph, given its ability to support contexts via scoping.) I'm trying to think back on that whole "fractal reality" meme that went around years ago -- it seems to fit in as a puzzle piece as well.