Astitva jneyatva-abhideyatva

Whatever is, astitva,
is knowable, jñānēyatva,
is namable abhidēyatva

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

Computing & Society – Evolution of Social Applications

© CanopusConsulting

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

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

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


Formal Vs.
Descriptive
Ontology

Formal
Ontology is
Reasoning
among entities

Formal Logic is
reasoning
among
Propositions

US Library of Congress Top Level Hierarchy: •  Same Metaphor translated in early
D: History (general)
information systems – File Systems,
DA: Great Britain DK: Former Soviet Union Hierarchical Databases
DB: Austria DL: Scandinavia DP:
DC: France Iberian Peninsula DQ:
DD: Germany Switzerland
DE: Mediterranean DR: Balkan Peninsula • Designed to Optimize for Space.
DF: Greece DS: Asia
DG: Italy DT: Africa
• One Entry can only be at one
DH: Low Countries DU: Oceania place
DJ: Netherlands • Who decides the Categories?

• Different functions

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


• Expert Designed
Directory
Web 1.0 • Cross References
(One Url can be at
most at 3 places)

• Storage and linking
are delinked
Web 2.0

• Only Tags, content is
not stored
• Community
Web Organization of
2.0/3.0 Content

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 A Semantic Specification
l  Company has Employees l  Company is owned by promoters
l  Company has promoters (Power)
l  Company has a management team l  Company is controlled by the
l  Company has a board of directors management team/founders
(control)
l  Managers are employees
l  Employees are the company
l  Employees have name, address, role, (existence)
designation, Salary
l  Company is engaged in a certain
l  Company has temporary staff. business operations. (function)
l  Company has a certain number of l  Company needs certain support
business units functions (quality)
l  Company has a certain operational, l  Company makes profit (causal)
support functions
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


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

Greek Indian

Māhābhās)ya
‘X becomes Y’ presupposes ‘X was not What are you doing? All verbs can
Y’, ‘X will be Y’ or ‘X begins to be Y’ etc. come as answers – cooking, going,
staying, knowing etc.
But ‘X is Y’ does not presuppose or imply
any sentence with ‘become’. na hi bhavati kim karoti astīti –

Pātañjali (200BC, on 1.3.1)
“It does not happen – what are you
doing? I am.”
This proves that ‘X is Y’ is a primitive
verb which shows up even in the
meaning of ‘X becomes Y’ but its asti, vidyate, bhavati
atomicity does not permit assimilation being, presence, happening
of its meaning in any other verbal form.
Atomicity vs. Pervasion
ον, being, is a universal verb ‘happening’ is a universal verb


Comprehensive
Foundational Ontologies

Aristotelian Ontology Vaiśes)ika Ontology

relation among real entities are relation among real entities are
logical real entities

different categories of reals have hierarchy of universals is valid across
different highest universal categories of reals

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

Declarative Categories Differentiated Categories

Descriptive Ontologies

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
Buddha
Mahavira
Kapila

Aryabhatta
Dignaga
Prasastapada (Ontology)

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

Gangesa (Logic)
Jyesthdeva
Nilakantha


Age of Turbulence


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