[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] Indexes: Main | Date | Thread | Author

Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Ontologies and volunteers


Henry K van Eyken wrote:

I was intrigued by Gary's ethymology of education. I believe it to derive from the
Latin educo, -are, originally to mean broadcasting, as in sowing. Checking my Latin
dictionaries, I found also an educo, educere. This last one indeed means to draw
out, but educare means to bring up, rear, educate. Educator means both
foster-father and tutor. The noun educatio, -onis means rearing, training,
education
I stand (somewhat) corrected. Oh, to be bound to the etymologies of my favorite old dictionary from my undergraduate years, Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language, Second College Edition,  1974, where the etymology of educate is as follows:
[ME. educaten < L. educatus, pp. of educare, to bring up, rear, or train < educere < e-, out + ducere , to lead, draw, bring: see DUKE]
This brings us closer to HKvE's etymology, for we find:
duke [ME. duk < OFr. duc < L. dux, leader < ducere, to lead < IE base *deuk- (or course, * = Indo-European base reconstructed), to pull, whence TEAM, TUG]
Well, that's nice too:  leadership actually getting us all pulling together!

OK, but here's a really juicy one, the etymology of communication:
to communicate [<L communicatus, pp. of communicare , to impart, share, lit., to make common < communis, COMMON]

Well, that bring us to:
common [ME. commun < OFR. comun < L communis (OL commoinous), shared by all or many < IE. base *kommoini -, common (<*kon-, COM- + *moini-, achievement < *mei -, to exchange, barter), whence OE gemaene, public, general, G,. gemein: cf. MEAN]

If anyone is still with me:
mean [ME. mene < OFR. meien (Fr. moyen) < L. medianus: see MEDIAN]

And when we (though I'm probably now quite alone here) do see MEDIAN:
median: [L. medianus < medius, middle: see MID]

And I (no doubt now absolutely alone on this list) see:
mid [ME. myd < OE. midd-, akin to Goth. midjis , ON, mithr < IE base *medhjo, whence L. medius, Gr. mesos]

Now being a died in the wool Peircean (you'll find me occasionally active on the Peirce and PORT lists, for example) can't help but associate this with Peirce's category of 3rdness which has associations of mediation, means, continuity, generality, life, evolution, moderation, infinity, growth, diffusion, plurality, tending towards futurity, habit, habit taking, intelligibility, reasonableness, reason, thought, synthesis, representation, transuasion (a Peircean neologism suggesting translation, transaction, transfusion, transcendental, etc.), purposefulness, medisense (a Peircean neologism with three modes, abstraction, suggestion, association), and much else.

Well, all this and more is at least suggested to me by the etymology of communication, which is why I would continue to maintain that etymology ought be as important as usage in the consideration of ontologies (though interestingly Peirce was solely interested in usage).





3D51F5AB.1CD03407@sympatico.ca">
Ah, Mei Lin, a nice change of topic after days devoted to Prof. Weed's
problem-knowledge coupler, topic maps, and the exploration of NexistWiki.

Actually, we had a brief moment with definitions as well. It then struck me that
children surmize the meaning of words by guessing their meaning from personal
contexts, and we may still do so. No dictionary defined words for the benefit of
young children. And in Jack Park's book "XML Topic Maps," he points to the
circularity of some definitions where A is defined as being B, and B is defines as
being A.

I was intrigued by Gary's ethymology of education. I believe it to derive from the
Latin educo, -are, originally to mean broadcasting, as in sowing. Checking my Latin
dictionaries, I found also an educo, educere. This last one indeed means to draw
out, but educare means to bring up, rear, educate. Educator means both
foster-father and tutor. The noun educatio, -onis means r earing, training,
education.






Peter Jones wrote:

I did a little ruminating on the problem of auto-generating knowledge structures
from ordinary text a while back. My specific intent was to ascertain whether the
conceptual structures of a work written in say 1650C.E. had lost coherence (or
gained a different coherence perhaps) from updating and translation etc.
My thinking led me to the need to be able to autogenerate reference thesauri
from a corpus of the era concerned in order to statistically detect shifts.
Can computers detect synonymous terms automatically?
My thinking on that was no, mostly because I was unable to turn up anything that
said
I could at the time. Anyone out there ever tried it?
Any information much appreciated.

I just made another sweep on google though, in which I incidentally pulled up
http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla62/62-qiyz.htm (1996) which contains this
r evealing passage on a different but related topic:
"Automatic language processing, i.e. automatic term extraction is taken as core
of the use of natural language in information retrieval. Unlike the sentences in
English, French, German and Russian, there is no separation marks in Chinese
sentences. A Chinese character can be combined with many other Chinese
characters to form words and phrases which are different in meaning. It is
difficult for computer to recognize which is a Chinese character or which is a
word made up of several characters, thus to separate them automatically, and it
is difficult t o draw a distinction exactly between useful word and useless
word. In the retrieval using Chinese natural language directly, therefore, it is
necessary to solve the technique that the words can be separated automatically
from Chinese sentences by computer. This technique is called Chinese word
separation technique. Researches in this field h a v e been made, and many
proposals on term separation hav e been offered in the recent years. Generally
speaking, some of them can meet actual needs, thus have been used in the system.
One of the practical systems is Word Extraction by Component Dictionary. Most of
them, however, are still in the stage of experiments. It is because automatic
Chinese term extraction is difficult, contrary to Euro-American, there are few
keyword indexes created automatica lly by computers and information retrieval
systems on the basis of technique of automatic term extraction in China. It can
be said, however, that it is not too far to solve the problem of automatic
Chinese term extraction. "

Makes one realise how powerful the human brain is.

--
Peter

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gary Richmond" <garyrichmond@rcn.com>
To: <ba-unrev-talk@bootstrap.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2002 8:05 PM
Subject: Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Ontologies and volunteers

Thank you for reminding me of The Professor and the Madman, which I read
very favorable reviews of a few years back. I agree with you that the
discussion of ontologies would benefit from reflecting on the evolution
of dictionaries. You wrote:

They took the position that in relation to the definition of words,
there is value in recording and citing "usage" and that there is no
"right" definition, because that would kill any living language.

In addition to "usage," etymologies (which might be seen as a kind of
Ur-usage) work to achieve a good balance in relation to definition of
words IMO (and, of course, the OED includes them, though they are not
its special thrust). I've been fascinated with etymologies since as I
boy I discovered such interesting facts as that the Latin root altus
figures in words meaning both high (e.g., altitude) and low (e.g. alto,
the lower female voice), and that indeed any number of ontologies point
to a broader spectrum of original meaning for particular words than much
of the later usage might suggest.

Indeed the usage of some words have taken us far from their "roots." For
example, education (from Latin, ducere, to draw, and e- out) which seems
first to have meant something like the drawing out of the native
potential of a person, has since come to mean something closer to
"putting in." (There is a variant of this et ymology that suggests the
"drawing out" was of a child at its birth by a midwife--but that
birthing idea seems rather apt for education as well.)

Again, thanks for getting me to think about these matters again,
something I haven't done for quite some time.

Gary Richmond

Mei Lin Fung wrote:

Has anyone read the Professor and the Madman? About the making of the
Oxford English Dictionary? I found it very inspiring. Perhaps our
discussion of ontologies might reflect on the history of dictionaries?
Taking lessons from the evolution of dictionaries as an early
knowledge artifact?



They took the position that in relation to the definition of words,
there is value in recording and citing "usage" and that there is no
"right" definition, because that would kill any living language.



About the recruitment of many many volunteers to contribute to this
massive 44+ year project. That it took 27 years from the first
suggestion of a dictionary to record all English words, to the actual
beginning of the project,.... Yes, to get to just the beginning! Our
human systems do not evolve easily, but inexorably, they work out what
needs to work and mysteriously, find ways to do it.




Mei Lin Fung