What 'mean' means

I've been working for a couple of months now with Gerard de Melo at Lexvo.org. The first objective was to make an example of Linked Data both social and technical good practice. If you have published a set of URIs, and find out afterwards that another set for the same resources has better quality, and moreover you have not the bandwidth or resources to maintain your dataset, what should you do? The example at hand was to redirect the work I've been doing at lingvoj.org towards the data at Lexvo.org which are far more complete, and moreover integrated in a general approach which I found extremely interesting.

The neat result of this work so far is that URIs for languages at lingvoj.org are now redirecting seamlessly to matching lexvo.org URIs, see e.g., http://www.lingvoj.org/lang/fr.

Everything is a Sign

That is, every thing is a sign. The first and main function of any language is to allow division of the world into "this" and "not this", based on some interpretation of data received from the world. Such an interpretation of data as signs is the basic form of semiosis, a process performed for quite a while by humans, and for many more ages by animals before them. It can now be performed by machines or information systems (roughly, computers connected to data acquisition devices). The aspects of this process can be defined as following.

1. SALIENCE : Capacity to separate as meaningful (significant or salient) a certain data set from the continuous data flow we get from the world through our perceptive experience, be it direct through our biological senses, or indirect through one or more several levels of mediation : reading data gathered by instrumental devices, compilation of such data over time, texts interpreting those data.
2. SIGNIFICATION : Capacity to consider the salient data set as a signifier conveying a particular meaning (signified), based on some characteristics such as spatial connectivity, permanence in time, regularity of patterns, similarity with other data sets previously interpreted and stored as signs, or anything the interpreter sees fit by its own rules and general view of the world. The core and essential meaning assigned is generally permanence, existence of a "thing" underlying the "sign". The thing is the signified associated to the signifier which is the data set.
3. REPRESENTATION : Translate this sign/thing (both signifier and signified) into some proxy in a representation language allowing storage and retrieval for further use. Typical forms of representation include assignation of identifiers (symbols, icons, names, code numbers), description of the signified, and its connection to pre-existing ones through classification, typing, or any other kind of association or linking.

The above analysis can be set as the basis for a general semiosis framework applicable to natural languages (human or otherwise), formal languages used in our information systems, and scientific languages (theories in physics, biology). This framework, while keeping agnostic at the metaphysical level on the ontological status of things, will hopefully help to provide a solid theoretical foundation to the emerging semiosphere, the network of human knowledge and languages and information systems.

For use of this approch in the Semantic Web area, see a first cut ontology here. 

[Note 2013-02-05] : This post has been for years and is still the top viewed in this blog, and I really don't understand why. Passer-by if you care to tell me how you came here, please comment below. Thanks!

Managing Co-reference (Was: A Semantic Elephant?)

One more public thread on SW list on our favourite issue. But some interesting points to note in the current discussion, well summed up by Aldo Gangemi at mid-course.

• We definitely need some property or mechanism, weaker than owl:sameAs, to assert that two URIs have similar referents.
• The semiotic aspects of co-reference are more and more acknowledged, even by formal logic gurus.

Hopefully this thread will eventually have some follow-up on some standardization track.

A couple of things I've been about lately

I've been silent here for over two months now, my blogging time devoted to the Mondeca blog in French Leçons de Choses. But there is a couple of things I've been working on, worth mentioning.

I've exchanged with Michel Biezunski on his Data Projection Model , and found out that its genericity and simplicity made it easy and straightforward to express the structure of Mondeca ITM, without the borderline hacking needed when using either OWL-RDF or XTM for the same task. Now open questions: What will happen with that model? Who will see the benefits over languages already in this space, and singularly over RDF? Who will build tools supporting it?

Been wondering if a semiotic approach could shed some light on our thoughts on referents, and came out with a RDF semiotic triangle. The URI is the signifier, the RDF description is the formalisation of the signified concept associated with the URI. The referent is out of the language and signs realm, and should stay there. In this approach, attempting to achieve a representation of the referent, even using tricks as blank resources or hubjects of any kind, is therefore a recursive trap and actually a non-sense. So any declaration of same-ness or identity of referents should be avoided. Only concepts bear identity, not their referents. From that point on, came to the idea that linking different concepts/signs (URI + RDF description) which humans consider to have more or less similar referent will take the form of processing rules, more than declarative semantics.

Thanks to Jakob Voss for this post in a long thread on public-esw-thes list, which really triggered a kind of illumination about this. As an example, trying to say that my SKOS concept a:Restaurant has the same referent as your OWL class b:Restaurant through any RDF declarative relation between those two resources shoud be avoided. But I can set in my system a functional rule expressing that any document of which subject is an instance of your b:Restaurant class will be indexed against my a:Restaurant concept. The referent is represented nowhere, but it is acting at the core of this rule.

Actually we have this very indexing rule mechanism working in some Mondeca applications, and I have submitted a paper to XTech 2007 about it. More to come if ever the paper is selected.

Lately, got interested again in triggering some process to have languages available not only as tags to use in XML, but as proper RDF resources. This is an old story tracking back to OASIS Published Subjects Technical Committees, and singularly PSI for languages. Track this topic on ESW Wiki, and see here for ongoing thread and more explanations. There again, my proposal is to forget absolute identification of a language by a URI. Concepts identified by URI are the properties and property values than can be declared for a language, and let applications decide on which properties are useful to them. No absolute rule saying that two descriptions refer to the same language.

The Concept of Subject in a Semiotic Light

The linked paper is by Jens-Erik Mai, whose publications can be found here. Personally, I recommend studying his dissertation. At various times in the past, I have connected a C.S. Peirce scholar, Mary Keeler, to Steven Newcomb, one of the founders of the topic maps paradigm (among other important contributions). What we get from that coupling is the realization that there is, indeed, a semiotic aspect to the nature of subjects. From the linked paper:

One of the key functions of library and information services is to provide access to information based on users' requests for knowledge. Knowledge can be stored in a wide range of information bearing objects such as text, image, sound, multimedia, and as technology develops more people gain access to the objects, through different media. We will here analyze the processes and problems associated with determining the subject matter of an information bearing object.