astitva jneyatva-abhideyatva

astitva, jñānēyatva,

abhidēyatva

Nāgarāju Pappu Trends in Social and Semantic Computing, Dept. of CSE, IIT-Kanpur, 3rd Mar’ 09

Whatever is, is knowable, is namable


Computing & Society – Evolution of Social Applications


Static Equilibrium to Dynamic Harmony


Content Organization Knowledge models Large Scale Ontology Engineering


Basic stance of ontology is – meanings are entities, events and relations

Meanings occur in Cognition

Central issue of ontological engineering is – how to specify meaning for robots or computational agents

Meanings are impressed in cognition & are expressed in natural language

impress-meanings recur

Ontology seeks entitative account of such recurrence

Ontological engineering seeks automation of such account


Formal Vs. Descriptive Ontology

Formal Ontology is Reasoning among entities Formal Logic is reasoning among Propositions


US Library of Congress Top Level Hierarchy: D: History (general)

DA: Great Britain DB: Austria DC: France DD: Germany DE: Mediterranean DF: Greece DG: Italy DH: Low Countries DJ: Netherlands

DK: Former Soviet Union DL: Scandinavia DP: Iberian Peninsula DQ: Switzerland DR: Balkan Peninsula DS: Asia DT: Africa DU: Oceania

• Designed to Optimize for Space. • One Entry can only be at one place • Who decides the Categories?

•  Same Metaphor translated in early information systems – File Systems, Hierarchical Databases


Categories Vs. Tags • Different functions • Different ways of organizing information, • Different world views ?


• Expert Designed Directory • Cross References (One Url can be at most at 3 places)

• Storage and linking are delinked

• Only Tags, content is not stored • Community Organization of Content

Web 1.0

Web 2.0

Web 2.0/3.0


Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags : Clay Shirky


Semantics of Tags and Categories

l  Categories are hierarchical (IS-A relationship) l  Tags are associated with a node (Non-IS-A

Relationship) l  The meaning of a tag is embedded in its name. l  The supported behavior is ‘association’

l  Web3.0 attempts to support various kinds of

behavior other than ‘association’ l  Semantic Searches, Intelligent Personal Agents l  Finding Relationships between various objects


Communities, Cultures and Content

l  Current applications are designed for an Individual l  Applications for Community are very primitive

l  Variation on To: Cc: Bcc: -- is the only mechanism

l  A protocol assumes the existence of a constitution l  How do we design constitutions for community conduct? l  Internet Groups, Communities (Slashdot, Orkut,

Wikipedia..) l  Very primitive systemic support for policies and constitution – leads

to lots of problems

l  What kind of Cultural Mechanisms are required for a very large community to co-exist? l  The Culture of svīkr�ti


Letting go of the hierarchy…

l  The current generation collaborative applications are so compelling to use where as the Enterprise Systems require a lot of learning, training and are frequently known to be ‘intrusive’ and ‘imposing’

l  Collaboration assumes no hierarchy l  Counter Intuitive – but it is very simple and easy to develop such systems.

Computational Complexity is much lower l  Example: No Hierarchical Lock Manager!

l  No-fixed, pre-designed, pre-meditated electronic concrete l  The current generation open sources environments, social networking,

content management environments give the ‘control’ back to the user. l  Workflow/Process Driven Systems Vs. Content Driven Systems

l  The Authorities decide a process l  The user chooses what to do when

l  The User is not the ‘Samosa’ consumed by the ‘System’ l  The environment offers various tools to the User.


Enterprise Systems and Semantics

• Domain Transformations

• Structural Relationships

• Semantic Relationships

Architecture is Transforming Domain Semantics to Computing Semantics


Semantics and Structures

A Structural Specification

l  Company has Employees l  Company has promoters l  Company has a management team l  Company has a board of directors l  Managers are employees l  Employees have name, address, role,

designation, Salary l  Company has temporary staff. l  Company has a certain number of

business units l  Company has a certain operational,

support functions

A Semantic Specification

l  Company is owned by promoters (Power)

l  Company is controlled by the management team/founders (control)

l  Employees are the company (existence)

l  Company is engaged in a certain business operations. (function)

l  Company needs certain support functions (quality)

l  Company makes profit (causal) l  Company pays taxes l  Consultants are associated with

the company. (temporal)


Semantics and Structures

l  Structural Specification: l  You give a query – get a result

l  Semantic Specification: l  You ask a question, seek an answer

l  IS-A and Non IS-A relationships l  Three other Variations on IS-A relationships

which are structural l  All others are Semantic Relationships


Example of an Ontological/Semantic Specification

How many such Propositions? Are propositions really ‘semantic relationships’?


WESTERN AND INDIAN APPROACHES TO SEMANTICS AND FORMAL ONTOLOGIES


Māhāb

hās)

ya

Verbal Ambiguity: Can describe same state of affairs using different verbs. …search for Universal Verb (sāmānya kriyā)!

Pāt

añja

li (2

00B

C, o

n 1.

3.1)

What are you doing? All verbs can come as answers – cooking, going, staying, knowing etc.

na hi bhavati kim karoti astīti – “It does not happen – what are you doing? I am.”

asti, vidyate, bhavati being, presence, happening

‘X becomes Y’ presupposes ‘X was not Y’, ‘X will be Y’ or ‘X begins to be Y’ etc. But ‘X is Y’ does not presuppose or imply any sentence with ‘become’.

This proves that ‘X is Y’ is a primitive verb which shows up even in the meaning of ‘X becomes Y’ but its atomicity does not permit assimilation of its meaning in any other verbal form.

Greek Indian

ον, being, is a universal verb ‘happening’ is a universal verb

Atomicity vs. Pervasion


Comprehensive

Foundational Ontologies

Aristotelian Ontology Vaiśes)ika Ontology

Descriptive Ontologies

relation among real entities are logical

relation among real entities are real entities

hierarchy of universals is valid across categories of reals

different categories of reals have different highest universal

Declarative Categories Differentiated Categories

‘Existence’ is a specific entity ‘Existence’ is a declaration


The Power of the Indian Approaches

l  Suppositions and Not Propositions. l  Relationships are independent enteritis, not

logical connectives l  Any domain can thus be reduced to a set of very

small set of Relationships and Category Types l  Heuristic Inferences is possible l  Quality is an Ontological Configuration of Entities

(Dharma and Guna) l  Experiences in Using this Approach

l  A universal enterprise semantic network (MCUBE) l  A very large global learning network


Long Range Perspective on Knowledge Generation

Saunaka Yaska Panini (Linguistics) Baudhayana Caraka Kanada Gautama

Aryabhatta Dignaga Prasastapada (Ontology)

Virasena (Human Action) Bhoja Udayana Bhaskaracharya Abhinavagupta (Aesthetics)

Gangesa (Logic) Jyesthdeva Nilakantha

Buddha Mahavira Kapila


Age of Turbulence


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astitva jneyatva-abhideyatva

Technology

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current applications

semantics of tags

enterprise systems

level hierarchy

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community conduct