October 11th, 2006
SF has inspired many researchers, but when will the media stop reporting research as though it were SF? Here’s a feature from the Sunday Herald about Professor Tim O’Shea, now Principal of Edinburgh University:
Back in the mid-1970s, Timothy O.Shea had a vision of the future which he has lived to see come to pass. In those far off days he was based at the University of Edinburgh, of which he is presently Principal, in the department of artificial intelligence. “People just thought we were crazy,” he says. He is not exaggerating. The way he and his colleagues were portrayed in the media you might have thought Dr Who had been given an academic chair with Batman and Robin as research students. “And now,” says O.Shea, resisting the urge to indulge in smugness, “a lot of the stuff we thought of as being crazy then is there in your mobile phone”.
I found this via the AAAI Science Fiction page. This mentions other SF-inspired researchers, and has a nice quote at the top by Frederik Pohl about the proper function of SF.
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October 11th, 2006
Following my original blog entry about this, the implementors have posted some details on the Semantic Wiki Interest Group list, swikig. See the thread called “Multi-way relationships?“.
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October 3rd, 2006
“Still having a hard time with that monster?” Jean asked.
“Monster?”
“You know. The bureaucracy.”
He nodded, smiling — then, remembering, said “Yeah. Always the same story, day in, day out.”
Jean snorted. “I’m still not convinced that thing even exists, you know. I checked the library for a slightly less wonky definition, but now I think you and the library are both screwed in the head.”
He winced at the epithet; it was certainly nothing he’d ever taught her. “How so?”
“Oh, right, Stav. Like natural selection would ever produce a hive-based entity whose sole function is to sit with its thumb up its collective butt being inefficient. Tell me another one.”
– Peter Watts and Derryl Murphy, in their short story Mayfly.
The story is available on-line at the above link.
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September 27th, 2006
Going on from yesterday’s post BOWiki: Semantic MediaWiki with n-ary relations, I wonder whether anyone has implemented a semantic wiki in Prolog? Most semantic wikis restrict themselves to binary relations, I assume, because RDF does so. Prolog predicates, however, can take any number of arguments.
But I haven’t yet found any Prolog semantic wiki engines. The Semantic Web research wiki ontoworld.org has a page Semantic Wiki State Of The Art. This lists semantic wiki engines classified by implementation language. None are in Prolog.
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September 27th, 2006
I used to think the brain was the most important organ in the body, until I realised who was telling me that.
– Emo Philips.
Quoted by Daryl Gregory in his short story Second Person, Present Tense.
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September 26th, 2006
I’m experimenting with semantic wikis as a front end to my Excelsior spreadsheet generator. I’ll say more about this in another posting, but the point here is that some of my semantic annotations need to be relations with more than two arguments. Most semantic wiki engines don’r implement general n-ary relations: if you need them, you have to fudge up a representation using binary relations. Various means of doing so are recommended in the W3C paper Defining N-ary Relations on the Semantic Web.
Yesterday, I found a semantic wiki engine that does implement n-ary relations. It’s BOWiki, described by its authors as a collaborative editor for biomedical ontologies. According to the “About this wiki” box on that page, BOWiki is based on Semantic MediaWiki 0.4, with heavy changes to the code and database structure. These enable n-ary relations to be used in editing, displaying, and searching, without “having to introduce a relation-class containing the n-ary relations as suggested by the W3C”.
BOWiki is described in The design of a wiki-based curation system for the Ontology of Functions by Robert Hoehndorf, Kay Prüfer, Michael Backhaus, Johann Visagie, and Janet Kelso.
The word “function” in the Ontology of Functions, incidentally, is not used in its mathematical sense but in the sense that the function of the heart is to pump blood. To quote the above paper: “The Ontology of Functions (OF) is based on the assumption that functions can be specified using requirements and a goal. An entity, e.g. a gene product, plays the role specified in the function – it has the function. A biological process is, in turn, the realization of the described function”. This is nicely explained in the presentation A top-level ontology of functions and its application in the Open Biomedical Ontologies by Burek, Hoehndorf, Loebe, Visagie, Herre, and Kelso.
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