Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Ontologies and volunteers
Re Peirce, I regret I know so little about many important things. This
was much reinforced by listening to some of Jack Park's friends during
his visit to Montreal. One fellow we should be hearing a lot from is Tom
Munnicke ( www.givingspace.org ) who really is re-evaluating his life
and acting on it. Summarizing: Tom took a year off from the ordinary
world of work to devote himself to a a new way of making philantropy
work. And, believe it or not, this ties in strongly with working in XML.
He will be further developing his thinking as a scholar with Stanford.
Hope he will join the discussion forum. (01)
Another item I still have difficulty with is how "ontology" fits into
software architecture (so now you know how really ignorant I am). Of
course, there is plenty to read to put me straight here, but, as we all
are aware and Gary may say: ars longa, vita brevis. (02)
I also regard etymology as more than interesting. It seems to me that it
is important in that it reflects a history of communal mental
development, the way people think. Also how today's words have been
derived from simpler components, each with their own meaning. And
reading such people as Jack and his fellow authors of "XML Topic Maps,"
as well as listening to people such as Tom M., I realize that much of an
editor's task is to unblock public access to their specialties by
decomposing terms into components that a more general public can
understand and think with - and, hence, may form a source of support for
those who lead in thinking. Knowledge workers, like their words, do well
to keep in mind where their roots draw nourishment from. (03)
Henry (04)
Gary Richmond wrote: (05)
> 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).
>
>
>
>
>
>
>> 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
>> >> >
>> >> >
>> >> >
>> >> >
>>
>>
>
> (06)