Semantic breakfast

These notes are taken from a breakfast discussion on semantic indexing with Ben Hammersley, and several other people. It's pretty haphazard right now; I'll clean it up someday.

If you're here from the Mailing List Bots discussion, searching for "metamantic web" ought to find the relevant section of the notes. This'd be the first google'able use of that phrase, too.

- R.

??? -- http://www.nitle.org/semantic_search.php

"surface occlusion, with a matrix of words" -- ...

very once in a while, after a sniff, he would actually read the letter and take a few notes. It turned out the scholar was studying the spread of cholera in the early American colonies. Letters posted from villages with cholera were disinfected with vinegar

-- http://stacks.msnbc.com/news/765360.asp

"prototype theory" -- the quickest example (good to know if you're thinking about indexes) -- the best example of the failure of ontologies is the platypus. Fundamentally, people do full categorization; they don't use abstractions and instances, they use examples and instances. The current ontology of animals is centered around animals. ... you have to make cleaving lines

prototype theory says "this is a clump -- my thing is like that clump, but it has extra features". the main problem is that you still need a type system. what you do is you have voluntary typing -- you don't have an abstract. you create the class by putting things into it. --- connects to Twingle! -- the "prototype theory" is a formal discipline for looking at that in a different way. I kindof look at things from an OOP pattern, and didn't

-- http://hook.org/anselm/thirdparty/categories.htm

trying to categorize posts -- semantic tower of babel. a system that became a MT plugin --morelikethisfromothers -- it goes out to anybody who links to your post -- goes back to the site that's linking to you -- finds the linking post, and looks to anything which is on that blog is -- the author by dint of linking creates

-- metaphor theory by george _______

"society of mind", people using metaphors to bridge from one domain to another. it has a problem, in that people don't create fine enough categories "metamantics" -- problem with morelikethisfromothers, for any post that's in my category, what is the relevance of its connection to your categories?

"metamantitian" or "metamanticist". TBL always talks about the semantic web -- maybe we should call benhammersley the "metamantic web" [quietly propogate this meme, credit to andy@hook.org, zero google hits as of]

"curated collections" -- we don't have time, too much stuff, too many ontologies.

-- http://www.soundratings.com -- audioscrobbler

A discussion with #foaf results in this IRC conversation; figured I'd include it here for whatever reason. Filtered to my side of the conversation, to respect privacy; it'll get cleaned up with the rest of the post, eventually, into a conversation.