Category Archives: Ontology
25 Oct Chaos and Order, Fractals and Language Power
Fractals may appear chaotic when viewed from a distance, but they exhibit recognizable patterns or mirrored structures when viewed up close. So, too, there is a distance we humans must travel from the chaotic structure of a thought to the regular structure of a meaningful dialog made of symbols in the form of audible words and body language. […]
01 Oct Methodology or Mythology
Call me a “nut”, but I have always been enthralled by science fiction. An image of Dave, a surprised and confused astronaut from 2001, a Space Odyssey, stays in my mind. In his eyes, I could see his brain working frantically to figure out how to master the situation, and giving way to hopelessness. The […]
04 Aug Context of Knowing, Thinking and Believing
There may be an incontrovertible thing out there called “truth.” But it seems quite elusive to me. In Japanese it is very polite to append just about any declarative sentence, any assertion of knowledge with “to omoimasu” (と思います) meaning I think. By being less committal, we save the other people in the conversation from embarrassment because their […]
20 Apr Digital Presence and Immortality
Immortality? I’ve heard it said that a person was “immortalized” in such and such a painting, sculpture or poem. Unless you pack the burial with all the images of a person, the fact that those images outlast the decaying body may be a form of immortality. Are authors immortal? I’m rereading All’s Well, and I […]
31 Mar Asymmetrical Balance, True Love and Chaos
Inequality is the Pattern Unequal distributions characterize everything in the universe from subatomic particles to galaxies. In fact the whole idea of “equality” in the physical universe seems at least a tiny bit sketchy. At the extreme end of unequal distributions is chaos. On the near end are things that approximate equality: balance, parity, equal opportunity, symmetry […]
17 Mar Intro to Cybernetic Models
Are you my Motherboard? From Eliza to Watson, Jeeves, Siri and Alfred, people have been naming their computers. Some systems are named after their inventors – like Wolfram Alpha and its siblings. Who is JARVIS? Just Another Rather Very Intelligent System? These attempts have, in their own little ways, touched our lives. But we are still waiting on the cusp of an innovation that will […]
06 Mar Correlation in Neuroeconomics
I find that driving when my body is tense, especially on slick roads or in poor visibility, is uncomfortable to the point of danger. Stress is a killer. I found, as a student, that relaxing at the piano just before going in to the test helped me perform better (on the test). I think many […]
26 Feb Choosing an Ontology Framework
Ontology is a knowledge representation language like Roger Schank‘s Semantic Networks and John Sowa‘s Conceptual Graphs or Doug Lenat‘s Semantic Web. An Ontology framework is the model (structure, function and content definition) in which you choose to build your ontology. Like a Relational Database or an Object Oriented Programming Language, an ontology has defined structures, functions […]
24 Feb Intro to the End of Code
By: Joe Roushar – February 2013 In the Beginning When computer programming began, it consisted mostly of written computer instructions called code. Data was minimal. Decks of dozens to hundreds of punched cards told the computer what to do with the data, which was also encoded on punched cards. The process of writing and debugging code was tremendously tedious. As computing […]