Harry R. Halpin's Web Blog

Getting down to work

2006-03-27T01:48:00.000Z

I've been slightly irritated at having no decent RDDL-based XML versioning software to help me maintain my myriad XML vocabularies, and it seems the the best bet may just be to create it myself. So tomorrow I'm going to post up a spec sheet for people to mull over. I'm thinking of basing it off of Simon Yuill's Social Versioning System.

And then, I promise, I will switch blogging software and begin blogging more!

Sorry about not posting more, but I'm switching blogging software...

2006-03-27T01:41:00.000Z

Sorry about not posting more, but to be honest I am becoming increasingly uncomfortable at storing my own private thoughts and public musings on the hard drive of someone I don't know, or more importantly, trust. Trust, some sort of mutual respect, is necessary for to share one's data. And yet, how can you trust someone like Google (or Yahoo!) who is clearly going to be data-mining your data for every cent it's worth. They only reason they give you space for free is so that they own your data and can do whatever they want with it. So, can we estabished a decentralized Web 2.0 where data is more open and free, and where it can be trusted? I think we can. It's called the "Semantic Web" - and the Semantic Web, in combination with decentralized "microformats" really is the way to go once all these Web 2.0 companies finally go the way of the dinosaurs.

It's not just applications that are valuable, it's data. I just wish the Free Software Foundation had some more forward thinking about this. I remember asking Richard Stallman himself about it when I set up his talk in Edinburgh, but he seemed genuinely not interested in the Web. Which is sad, because the times, they are a changing. And that includes for free software.

Complex Systems Summer School and Plans

2006-03-27T01:37:00.000Z

Also, today Sandro Hawke from the Rules Interchange Working Group, whose working on using a sort of first-order logic for the Web, asked me why I wasn't in the group after making some fairly sensible suggestions about the future role of named graph syntax as a replace for reification. After all, most of us find it easier to get our heads around the 1-level RDF reflection of named graphs than the infinite tower of interpreters that can be done in RDF reification, and most libraries already implement named graphs, which is a good sign. So, it looks like I'm going to press for RIF to become my first (official!) W3C working group...

Notes from Last Week

2005-09-11T23:59:00.000Z

OK, fell a bit on my research blogging last week, but overall still maintaining. In summary, I finished the "Little Schemer" and now feel like I have my head around Scheme (although the Y Combinator is till a bit confusing, but I did manage to go through the last chapter and implement a giant table-based interpreted for Scheme in Scheme!). Can't wait to get my hands on the "Seasoned Schemer", and I can already see how lambdaXML will allow a level of flexibility in pipelines neverbefore imagined while relying on the good-old-friendly idioms of LISP and the lambda calculus.

Had an interesting meeting with Ewan in which he told me about the IR stuff he was doing and how his work and Bundy (!) could fit in mine possibly...Bundy apparently can clean up messy propositions, which I have lots of!

I managed to write a mapping from XPMDL to lambdaXML for Henry:

http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin/homepage/notes/lambda.html

Henry at the meeting revealed to me that the MTP actually decompiles to a significantly more powerful langauge that he believes can implement all the basics needed by lambdaXML version 1.0.
Which I'm not sure if I believe, but if he can explain it to me, then I'll implement it in short order.

I also wrote lengthy notes on Dretske and B.C. Smith, and am going through a giant stack of papers related to the philsophy of computation (starting with Chomskey's classic "Rules and Representations"..), but these aren't quite ready for HTML yet. However, I did manage to write down my draft thinking, available here:

http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin/homepage/notes/philosophyabstract.html
The stories from Senga have mysteriously not arrived, which has me worried. Will investigate tomorrow, and will dedicate the rest of next week to finishing the web-interface for the pipeline for Johanna and wrapping up draft one of the philosophy paper for Andy and Henry.

Meeting with Johanna

2005-09-02T15:22:00.000Z

Quick notes. With the stories coming in next week, we should be well on the way to writing a EACL paper. Also, need to finish getting Web interface for the pipeline up, which should occupy me for most of next week. Lastly, it appears we might be able to automate the "pyramid" scheme using the DUC summarization system, since their system essentially grabs "semantic content units" in the same way that we do, just via humans and not by hands, and ranks in a similar manner.

Pipelines to Functional Programming, KRL to the SemWeb

2005-09-01T14:37:00.000Z

Had another meeting with Henry today, very productive. As for the Semantic Web Science workshop in Cambridge, Henry wrote a very nice little position paper that mentioned me :)

In essence, we went over a number of topics. First, that the f(X) Henry will be presenting as a W3C Member Submission is going to be rather simple (only wrap the outside of an Infoset) and only encode W3C standards, but he thinks this is the easiest way to get the ball rolling so to speak. He's quite interested in how f(X) could solve the PHP embedding code problem (as when random non-Infoset code starts appearing in Infosets!) and so lead to better code modularity, and how it could solve the AJAX problem of scripts just ad-hoc modifying DOM trees ( by letting an XML tree expose itself per se). Since I'm more of a Java hacker than a C hacker, it makes sense for me to modify the Markup Technology pipeline to bootstrap f(X) rather than the LX Toolset or coding it all myself, which I agree. I need to develop a side-by-side comparison of MT pipeline vs. f(X).

The second is that there are a number of lessons for the Semantic Web from old KRL projects. First, that Maturana is right on many counts, but his hardline stance against representation is wrong. Maturana has a hard time explaining how "internal structural changes" that have no connection to the signal, can explain the following Brian Smith parable: "To get through a rapids on a canoe, it actually makes sense to paddle upstream, where a balance in the rapids can be obtained so one can better reach a sort of stasis and get through the rapids safely." - and if you tell this to someone who doesn't know it, that they will try this line of action. It seems that there are quite a few stories that only representation can explain easily! However, if analytic philosophy seems to be coming up against all of these problems, and the obvious other choice to build AI upon is hermeuneutics, why isn't anyone following it up? Barwise never formalized situation semantics, Robin Cooper did note that "misunderstaning doesn't just happen, it's constitutive of natural language", and Brian only got so far. So what happened? Is hermeuneutics not enough, due to its *lack* of a representational story?

Lastly, that the KRL project got really complicated and more or less collapsed (having Rumelhart run away into neural networks!) when to properly update semantic networks they finally had to incorporate both action (such as backward and forward chainining triggers and traps!), and reflection to control. So - what's the main problem for the Semantic Web? When the Semantic representations change.

Maturana Notes finished

2005-08-31T04:32:00.000Z

Got the Maturana notes finished. Also got feedback on the Goodman notes by John Lee, which I am busy incorporating into the latest set of notes.

Scheming

2005-08-30T01:44:00.000Z

Basically, finished corpus work for Johanna and preceded to teach myself Scheme using the excellent "Little Schemer" book, and brushing up on my lambda calculus by reviewing the excellent Barendregt notes. Being familiar with Haskell and a bit of LISP, Scheme is sort of a simplified Haskell or LISP. Still, good to be back in a functional frame of mind!

Corpus work...

2005-08-28T02:14:00.000Z

Almost done spell-checking and recorrecting the corpus for Senga's regrading. Over two hundred children stories categorized...and to be finally done with by the end of the month!

Reading Notes for Johanna

2005-08-27T10:27:00.000Z

Just to keep track of the recommended reading Johanna gave me:

1) Semantic Role Labelling: With the release of Propbank, semantic role labelling is all the rage right now. The real question is should our system do this, and to what extent can it already? I'll have to take a look at what ccg2sem does, but I would guess that unless Johan added WordNet features, it doesn't. The papers "The Necessity of Syntactic Parsing for Semantic Role Labeling" shows that the semantic role-labelling should be divided into two distinct tasks, pruning, which identifies possible arguments, and then matching argument candidates to roles. And as Punyakanok et al. discover, using a full parse helps mainly by identifiying the correct constituents as argument candidates. The other paper about "Semantic Argument Classification Exploiting Argument Interdependence" basically goes even further by saying that any previous semantic roles already idetnfied should be used, but this produces only a one percent increase in recall.

2) The rest of the papers are about the "story comprehension" systems, which basically (using a sample corpus from Remedia which I imagine we could get a hold of, sixty children stories and question and answer sets) just tries to identify the relevant sentence that has the "answer". Basically the systems evolved from "Deep Read" that used prune "bag-of-word" approaches, to a rule-based approach that identified different scores for different levels of "clues" (Riloff and Thelen) to an interesting system (Grois and Wilkins) that uses a word-level transformation (directed by Q-learning) to transform the question ("Who does Nils jump on the back of?") to an answer ("Nils jumps on the back of ____"). This evolution goes from a 30-40-50 percent F-measure basically. It seems like the last method is smart but not hampered by dealing at the word level - after all, could we not do the same matching on using a dependency tree or other semantic representaiton level? One could almost think of a question as an empty semantic representation and one could do a search over available semantic representations to complete the model.

3) Lastly, the "pyramid model" (Nenkova and Passonneau) is interesting as it shows that basically they are using humans to identify "semantic content units", bits of frequently occuring text that are given a weight by how often human annotators use them. They appear to be fairly stable as the size grows, which is good news for any standard. It seems like this is something else that one might just want to do at the semantic level, as Haltern and Teufel have apparently been up to. However, they do not weight theirs (like we would), nor is it clear why one would want a human to be involved with anyways if one could just straightforwardly count overlap automatically.

Post-meeting with Johanna Notes

2005-08-26T15:16:00.000Z

Overall, Johanna really wants to see more work done on the NLP pipeline to produce semantic represenations. I hope I made it clear that this will be a good example of an applicaton of the framework (both philosophical and technical) that I want to work on with Henry and Andy. However, the conceptual leap is to make the various bits of the thing work as a website. Now off to get the linode server working....

As for the actual capabilities of the server, it should be able to do the following on the text:

1) Optional Morphological Preprocessing
2) Word and Sentence Detection
3) Named Entity and Date Detection
4a) Chunking
4b) CCG-parsing
4c) Dependency Grammar Parsing (based on Optimality Theory)
5a) Coreference Resolution via Syntax
5b) Coreference Resolution via Semantics
6) Temporal Annotation of Semantic Representation
7a) Propositional Semantic Representation
7b) Propositional with Thematic Roles Semantic Representation
7c) Full First-Order Logic form

It will be interesting to see what components I can get up and working by next week. Gotta get
the linode server up to host all of this ASAP, as well as the stuff from Ewan that we had on axon working again.

Post-meeting with Henry Notes

2005-08-25T14:04:00.000Z

In summary, Henry basically approves of my chapter outline and the addition of types to functionalXML, although he admits its ambitious, and he thinks that come October if I make it to the functionalXML chapter I'll have something thesis-worthy to submit. Now once I get approval from Johanna over the general outline and narrative part, and get Andy to inspect the philosophy, I'll be ready to write the thesis plan over next week.

Second, I think I've noticed an interesting aspect of functionalXML that gives it a strong case for use *in conjunction* with other programming paradigms. Wadler has just posted code snippets of Links and they've received a more or less a negative response from the web programming community at large. The main point of critique is that Links as presented is just embedding functional code in HTML, which proves to be a horrible way of doing web programming.

What a good selling point of functionalXML could be is that it is XML-compliant, and can thus be a universal format for "embedding" processes (of whatever kind, be it Javascript/AJAX, Web Services, or even Links 0.2) into XML while keeping the actual process in XML compliant. Unfortunately when using PHP/Links the code that does the work is actually non-XML stuff embedded in XML, while in AJAX/RubyonRails methodology basically generates parts of an Infoset selectively *but* you can't tell what nodes its manipulating without first viewing the javascript code. An approach that abstracted away from the actual programming language details and just said "The content of this node will be changed by a program" and specifies the type and arguments of the program (and optionally its location, such as a http URI for a WebService, or a reference to a piece of client or server side code) would actually make web design and programming much easier. I'll write this point up over the weekend with some example code inline.

In other news, IMC Scotland just got its own office near the Uni. at Forest Cafe, and I'm in charge of installing networks. Also just installed ubuntu on my laptop after doing a thorough house-keeping on ibiblio and my laptop.

As for narrative stuff goes, I went through the corpus picking out the stories that needed to be regraded, and had a great meeting with Johan Bos to help guide him with refactoring the XML representation of ccg2sem.

Chapter Outline for Ph.D. topic

2005-08-24T00:56:00.000Z

Chapter Outline:

Introduction
The intelligent robots envisioned by researchers at the dawn of artificial intelligence have never been created by computer science, and instead what has proved wildly successful is the Web. Informal and undisciplined, the success of the Web challenges both notions of classical artificial intelligence and the analytic philosophy that motivates AI, as well as newer variations of connectionism, dynamic systems theory, and embodied intelligence. The Web is historically situated, and trends in its future development are briefly sketched. There is a noticeable lack of philosophical and formal analysis of the Web, and this thesis will provide both. The main social problem the Web causes is not that of information retrieval but that of information organisation, and a novel solution to the problem in terms of narrative structuring of information is given to demonstrate the value of the philosophical and formal framework proposed.

Computation and the Extended Mind
Although this is so obvious as to be a truism, the computational theory of the mind is realized by computers, not the human brain. If we take the extended mind hypothesis seriously, then the mind is in a real sense distributed amongst not only the brain and the human body, but aspects of the environment, and so by definition the human mind can include computers, and architectures implemented on them such as the Web. Computers are best understood as an inverse reflection of the capacities of humans: computers allow humans to "off-load" tasks the brain has limited capacity for, such as arithmetic and deduction. A parallel example using the development of written language and logic is given. Computation is taken to be given by its classical mathematical definition, and computation is explored more fully from a philosophical standpoint. The Web is then compared and contrasted with traditional models of language and computation. The Web presents a whole challenge for traditional understanding, for the Web primarily for the digital communication of information, distinguishing it from the strict definition of computation and informal linguistic communication.

The Web and Network Intelligence
Artificial intelligence and the philosophy of the mind both begin from a premises that have in recent years been shown to be incorrect: intelligence emerges from the mind, which is assumed a unitary organization encased in the brain of an individual. This highly influenced artificial intelligence, which conceived that intelligence could be created by having a computer, as a unitary organization, be given the correct programs and code. However, intelligence can be conceived of as emerging from the "extended mind", defined as a dense network of interconnections between various machines. This is called "network intelligence" to contrast it with the more traditional artificial intelligence. What is traditionally conceived of as the "mind" behind intelligence is the narrative that the network produces to describe itself historically, and the narrative is not necessarily stored in any one component of the system. The Web can be taken as a primary example of network intelligence due to its definition as a "universal" network. The success of the Web is due to it being a manifestation of the extended mind that takes into account network intelligence.

Information and Encoding
The main traffic of the Web, information, is notoriously hard to analyse. We first begin with a reformulation of Brian Cantwell Smith's theory on the origin of objects in order to lay the grounds for the notion of objects and identity. His theory is extended by a notion of information. We analyse information as a two-fold phenomena consisting of "information content" (Dretske and Barwise) and as a methodology of "encoding"(Shannon).

Digital Representation
Building upon the definition of information previously given, the ideas of presentation and representation are separated. From the work of Haugeland and Goodman, a new definition of digitality is given. The notion of computation is tied to that of causation, and the ideas of syntax and and semantics are distinguished in terms of information, digitality, and computation.

Principles of Web Architecture
The architecture of the Web are explained, as given by previously developed concepts of digital representation and the principles of universality, extensibility, least power, and the network effect. Close inspection is given to the "Architecture of the World Wide Web" document produced by the W3C, and the current functioning of the Web is contrasted with the REST model.

The Semantic Web as Types
The Semantic Web is defined as a Web with machine-readable semantics. The current state of the Semantic Web is explained, and the Semantic Web is explained as giving a uniform encoding of identity and representation to information on the Web. This leads to two distinct notions of semantics: semantics as given by the allowed operations of a given computer program, and semantics as given by the information content of a given representation. The Semantic Web is then shown to be a distributed type system, giving a model-theory for the former and a way for users of the Web to formulate the latter. A XML-only solution to binding Semantic Web types to XML is demonstrated. This data is dual-typed, once with a "data type" and encoding specific to computational use, and once again with a "semantic type" and encoding specific to the informational content of the data.

Web Services as Functions
Web Services are programs that can be called over the Web, and are formally equivalent to functions. Web Services given Semantic Web typing can then be shown to be functions that compute over both semantic and data typing. Given that Web Services are functions and the Semantic Web a type system, a formal analysis of the next generation of the Web can be given: a distributed, truly universal computer.

Computation on the Web: functionalXML
If the next generation of the Web is a computer, it needs a programming language. Currently a simple XML-based programming language (entitled functionalXML) has been proposed by Henry S. Thompson. The language can be formally characterized by the lambda calculus, and then how the language can be extended to deal with Web Services and Semantic Web typing via the typed lambda calculus, and how such an extension can be realised in practice.

Personalized Webs
The question is then what type of information does the Web traffic in? The Web, as evidenced by the growth of blogs and other personalized forms of information creation and delivery, is the antithesis of the ontologies proposed by projects such as Cyc. Instead of delivering universal "common-sense" information, information is structured to be relevant to the highly personalized environment of the agent. We present a framework in which such information can be displayed in both a machine-readable manner compatible with the Semantic Web using a format entitled Web Proper Names.

Narration and Cognition
Blogs are how the narratives of human agents on the Web are extended computationally. The work on personalized ontologies is extended to deal with linguistic narratives. The cognitive development and aspects of narratives are explored, with examples from a corpus of stories generated by children being used.

Computational and Narration
A formal model of narratives, the narrative calculus, is expressed in terms of a propositional calculus that is optionally enriched by ontologies, temporal ordering, and a probabilistic weighting of its importance in the narrative.

Narrative Detection
A pipeline for the extraction of the narrative calculus is created using a series of Web Service NLP components, composed using functionalXML and storing the results as Semantic Web types stored using Web Proper Names. The results of detecting narratives are shown both using children stories and using the activity of Web users.

Narrative Generation on the Web
A reverse pipeline for the generation of natural language texts from the narrative calculus is given, again composed using functionalXML. These texts can be considered the automatic generation of "blogs" documenting the Web activity of the browsers of the Web. Since they are expressed in the informal language of everyday life, they are simpler for humans to understand that mere lists, and since these narratives are augmented with Semantic Web types and are open for extension, they offer a level of versatility unique to the Web.

Conclusion
This thesis analyzes the Web from both a philosophical and formal standpoint, explaining the challenge presented by the Web to artificial intelligence. It demonstrates the value of both the philosophical and formal framework by using the example application of personalized narrative generation for the management of Web information. The final chapter concludes by looking at the embedding of the Web in society and sketching out future avenues of research.

Post-ESSLLI Musings

2005-08-20T01:11:00.000Z

First, Hans Kamp's lecture on DRTs and temporal relations was great, he basically merged an event-calculus (i.e. of the type I use!) into DRTs via constraint logic programming. No implementation though, but the theory seems fine. The idea of C-OWL
seems also much more feasible than OWL, and had a great lunch talk with the fellow who gave a talk on Making the Semantic Web More Semantic, where he supports grounding out in some psychophysical dimensions. Still, maybe I've been reading too much Maturna recently - but how do we know even those are reliably objectives ("for humans" I might add being very important), and even then - what use would those be for most of the things such as abstractions like business transactions and very real cultural items like the Eiffel Tower. He also claimed that communication does not need to have "reference" anywhere, but the pattern of communication "itself" can determine the meaning of communication. Maybe for some...but when in doubt and in a foreign country, the gesticulate and point trick always seems to work. Good ending to ESSLLI, and I'm off again for camping this weekend.

One-line and One-paragraph Ph.D. Thesis Proposal

2005-08-18T18:22:00.000Z

I'll be honest: it's been hard to craft a Ph.D. thesis proposal that fits the following constraints:

Manages to combine such diverse areas as Web architecture, narratives, and philosophy of the mind, but I think I may have just done it. Note that these three requirements are covered by my three Ph.D. thesis supervisors, Henry Thompson, Johanna Moore, and Andy Clark.

Has a coherent strand of thought....the Web embodies parts of the human mind that our biological brain is not too good at, and so to use the Web we need to back-up to tools that focus on what we're good at. Just like the visual desktop is a better metaphor for data for most people than the black hole of the command prompt, a narrative (blog) is a better way to organise data than a big list.

Has three gee-whiz factors "This guy is doing the philosophy of the Web", "That sure looks a lot like Scheme for Web Services in XML", and "A blog that writes itself...cool!"

I already have substantial parts of it done...so it's just a matter of finishing the work I already started! And each of my advisors also has relevant interests and work in the area.

Title:
The Semantics and Significance of the Web: From Information to Narrative

One Sentence:
This thesis analyzes the philosophical and computational architecture of the Web, to analyse and generate personal narrative texts on the Web.

One Paragraph:

This thesis analyzes the philosophical and computational architecture of the Web, and uses the resultant framework to analyze and generate ontology-rich narrative texts on the Web. The Web is treated as an extension of the human mind, one that is successful because it allows this extension to take place using universally accessible digital representations. The Web benefits from the sharing of information with a universal network, yet the most useful information being that which is easily accessible and personalized. This "network intelligence" shown to be diametrically opposed to both the classical and embodied traditions in artificial intelligence, as both assume a single cognitive agent, while network intelligence takes into account how intelligence is developed through the flow of information through a Web of connections without sacrificing the embodied and personalized nature of all information. The Web is characterised as a universal information space, and a philosophically rigorous model of information, embodiment, encoding, and representation on the Web is developed. The next stage of Web development as presented by the Semantic Web and Web Services is then conceived as the transformation from the Web from a universal information space to a universal computation space, since the Semantic Web can be considered a particular kind of typing and Web Services as functions that operate over those types. To return from abstraction to grounding, the problem of organising information on the Web is difficult, and one of the earliest solutions developed by humans for organising their personal information is the narrative. We use the Web framework developed earlier to construct a program that detects and analyses narrative texts on the Web through the detection of both narrative structure and the use of ontologies. This program consists of a complex Web Service-based NLP pipeline for analysis and generation of narratives, based on an empirical study done with children's stories. This program allows the automatic detection of narrative texts in free text, and can therefore be used to automatically generate a Web-based personal narratives from text gathered by users in the Web.

Autopoesis

2005-08-10T18:36:00.000Z

Also just finished "Autopoesis" by Maturna and Varela that Henry recommended I read earlier, reading in between ESSLLI classes. Overall, the book's project is impossible - trying to describe a world using language without a third-person "objective" perspective, but a lot of ideas - including ideas of invariance and embodiment, are crucially here. Interesting enough, their idea of an autopoetic system as a system where all the components have no "input" or "output", but function as a co-ordinated whole (although the individual components may have allopoetic input and outputs, these do not interface with the system as a whole) in order to maintain and recreate the system. Seems like the best definition of "life" I've heard yet. However, it does have difficulties. For example, how can one realistically draw the line between invariant components of the system and those that are not? For example, I eat food. It maintains me, and is part of my life. However, I am not eating all the time, but only some of the time. Yet I need food to prevent dying, and must have physical contact with it. To what extent does is physical connection needed for something to count as a component of an autopoetic system? Three times a day as with food? How about the Web? How much do I have to surf for the Web to it to be part of my autopoetic existence? And how long till I become a component of the autopoetic existence of the Web? Again, I think these things are more fuzzy than Maturna makes them out to be...

And at ESSLLI, Cem Bozsahin gave an excellent intro to CCG, and the summarization class has been great! Took a brief trip over the weekend...

Enjoying surprisingly good Scottish weather near Elgol

ESSLLI 2005 and Ph.D. Thoughts.

2005-08-09T15:48:00.000Z

For the next two weeks I'm going to be at ESSLLI, the European Summer School for Logic, Language, and Information, which is Heriot-Watt. It's a good hour trip there and back everyday, and it lasts from 9 in the morning to at least 6:30, so I'm not sure how much I'm going to be able to do in my spare time. The classes look interesting, I should be taking classes on summarisation, information retrieval, metaphor processing, as well as reasoning on the Semantic Web and NLP for Multimedia applications, as well as attending a workshop on the logical foundations of grammar. There should also be great talks on statistics and NLP as well as "Why the Semantic Web isn't Semantic".

However, while I took a brief trip in the highlands to unwind post-G8, I started to really hash over ideas about being the Ph.D. thesis together. Basically, I have an all-star team of advisors, and now have to pull together my three favorite topics in philosophy, Web architecture, and NLP together. I'm thinking that I could write up how the web effects our ideas on information, representation, and digitality (thus putting the subject matter of the Web on firm philosophical ground with regards to AI), and then proceed to use that terminology to formalize a theory of the Web (Semantic Web/XML Schema as types, Web Services as functions) and then finally make the whole thing concrete by using a combination of Henry Thompson's lambdaXML (It appears that Wadler's Links just won't happen in time, and it's a much more ambitious project than the rather simple one I need!) and the GridNLP stuff I used to work on with Ewan Klein to make a program that analyzes web caches and searches, creating narratives out of them using techniques pioneered by Johanna Moore. That's no small amount of stuff - but I already have bits and pieces of it done, and most of it just needs to be tied together.

G8 and Indymedia take over

2005-06-18T23:34:00.000Z

I'm going to apologise to my academic advisors for this, but I'm going to have to temporarily slacken my academic duties in order to deal with Indymedia and the upcoming G8 protests. For news about the G8, check out the site I help run Scotland Indymedia, and the main site G8 reporting on Indymedia UK.

The G8 protests...and Indymedia..take over Edinburgh, setting up their centre in the Forest Cafe right north of the University!

W3C Semantic Web Services Workshop

2005-06-09T12:17:00.000Z

Surprise, surprise - I'm the opening speaker at the W3C Semantic Web Services workshop in Innsbruck, Austria! My presentation (with commentary too!) and paper are online, both a sort of abbreviated and clarified take on my YR-SOC 2005 paper.

My point is rather simple: the Web needs a good unifying framework to connect the ordinary hypertext Web we all know and love, with the rather visionary if not entirely working correctly Web Services and Semantic Web visions. My vision is rather simple The Web can be unified as a universal computation space, and to do this one needs just two things: functions and types for Web-distributed computing. Luckily for us, the Semantic Web ontologies are actually useful for something: specifying the real-world denotations of data in a consistent model-theoretic manner, and so can serve in conjunction with XML Schema data-types as a type system, and Web Services are clearly functions.

Presentation by the ever-enjoyable Bijan Parsia

Everyone seemed to enjoy the presentation from "the guy whose so loud he doesn't need a microphone" (much like Henry Thompson!), although I did get sniped at for two angles: one for not using "process algebra" and instead using pi-calculus (although I believe this was a disguised jump to get FLOWS on board, and my noticeable lack of mention of OWL-S, although I might add that OWL-S has no model-theoretic semantics anyways, although I think Barry Norton just retrofitted one) and for not mentioning non-functional properties. I would respond that non-functional properties could just be included as a constraint on the input. For example, if one wants a Web Service in North Dakota that takes names and gives credit histories, one should just have the Web Service as f(name, (location="NorthDakota"))=>creditHistory. Or one could conceive of the Web Service as a triple. The important thing is that non-functional properties are a misnomer, these properties clearly function to constrain what type of service one invokes. Lastly, the results of the workshop are going my way, and here's me after an enjoyable dinner with the workshop participants, looking over the top of a mountain overlooking the Alps!

Yes, that's the Alps behind me!

Digitality, Goodman, and Greece

2005-05-28T15:16:00.000Z

I've spent a few days in Greece with a good friend of mine, and while on the airplane finished re-reading Goodman, producing some notes for perusal by Henry. For those who are interested they are here. The most interesting thing about Goodman is his notion of a "notation" system and his strict separation from semantics and syntax, and he defines a notation as something where every syntactic marking has a distinct semantic marking, much like either music or computer programs (Goodman being more interested in music than computer programs). However, both fail on a level as notation systems, since the syntax of both can be ambiguous. While his general concept of notational system may be simply too fanciful for any real system, the ideas he propounds are wonderfully suited to an analysis of the Web and representation in general.

His idea of notation is fascinating. A notation is a symbolic language where every syntactic marking has a distinct semantic class, much like either music or computer programs (Goodman being more interested in music than computer programs). It is also a fairly sensible idea that has never been carried out in practice. Even in music and computer programming, one of the few fields where syntax has a clear incarnation in the physical world (this quarter note means play this, this piece of code means move this to a register, write something in standard output!), there is still syntactic forms of code with the same semantics (for and while loops) and in music (two half-note rests and a full rest). However, I think his ideas do apply very well to digitality.

The Weather in Thessaloniki

W3C Rules Workshop

2005-05-07T18:05:00.000Z

Just spent the last week and a half in the United States at the W3C Rule Workshop, and had a great time. My input was a position paper about data integration, in which I make the elementary yet important observation that people are using XML primarily as a syntax for data transfer - and the natural corollary for data transfer is data integration. To do data integration, people need a coherent sense of global identity, and the Semantic Web (via its use of URIs) is one good attempt at providing it - although I am the first to point out the philosophical problems. However, to determine if two URIs can be merged or related, we need rules - after all, how else are we to determine the criteria?

Tim Berners-Lee rapping on the Semantic Web

The W3C Rule Workshop was the usual odd mixture of academics, W3C Web heads, and members of the business community. Large companies such as Oracle and iLOG seemed very pleased at a W3C standard for rules, and were somewhat surprisingly interested in the Semantic Web There was two main poles: those such as KIF and the gigantic (and perhaps overly complex but nonetheless impressive) RuleML effort, who were using XML to encode first-order logic and slight variants, and efforts such as SWRL and N3 who are trying to build a rule-language directly on top of OWL and RDF. The main points of confusion and debate seemed to be if RDF should just be an encoding format for rules, or should somehow the formal semantics of FOL could be grafted on top of RDF just as OWL-DL grafted description logics on RDF. Tim Berners-Lee noted I was "making trouble up in the front" on these points, but I'm not clear exactly what is the best path forward. I prefer the latter, but am unclear if it is possible. And does the Web really need Prolog 2.0 with URIs? I actually think the Semantic Web needs a programming language in the style of logical-functional programming, and am hoping this is a step in the right direction.

Pat Hayes presenting KIF

The second debate centered around negation-as-failure (to negate a proposition we try to prove it via executing the proposition, and if it is proved, then its negation fails. Conversely, if the proposition fails during execution, it's negation will succeed). TimBL believes that since the Web is essentially open, and negation-as-failure works operates via a closed world assumption, that the Web should not use negation-as-failure. However, the academic community and anyone who actually implements rule engines knows that negation-as-failure is useful, since although its empiricism violates the a priori concept of negation, it is unclear how else one could possibly implement negation. What TimBL needs to realize is that every inference secretly encodes the closed-world assumption, since every logical operation is operating with a limited knowledge-base. Only in non-temporal monotonic reasoning without negation the closed-world assumption does not practically matter. With negation, it matters. What is more important than the "closed vs. open world" is that each proof should carry via its provenance its full proof and links to the knowledge-base that made it possible. While more ambitious than named graphs, with FOL for the SW this is actually possible.

Lastly, had dinner with Pat Hayes and discussed how a more example-driven approach to solving httpRange-14 would work and could clarify the use owl:import.

Also submitted the infamous Web Proper Names proposal to ISWC 2005, and had such a great time at this W3C workshop that I submitted another position paper to the next workshop on semantics for Web Services.

Managed to sneak in a quick trip to visit my family as well in North Carolina as well, and sorted out various horrific visa issues with the embassy.

My brother, sister and I

Post-meeting with Johanna

2005-04-25T13:44:00.000Z

Had an excellent meeting with Johanna. In essence, she saw a way around the main bottleneck I'm having with the corpus (our rather erratic annotators) by simply sampling the reliable annotators.
She also clarified that we should have a "mid-level" semantic representation between propositional and full-scale predicate calculus for our machine learners. Now if I can just get SVMTorch to work :)

Argh!

2005-04-25T10:09:00.000Z

Too much to do right now....currently trying to get this corpus of children's stories working, and while there definitely seems to be progress, I'm having issues with SVMTorch and LSA. And I'm not really sure how to do statistics for this data. Hopefully Johanna will have some ideas.

Young Service-Oriented Researchers Conference

2005-04-23T20:07:00.000Z

I gave a paper yesterday in Leicester at YR-SOC 2005, given the somewhat dramatic title of "The Ties that Bind: XML, the Semantic Web, and Web Services"

Here's the slides for those that are truly interested.

Note that I do not use preventing in my slides...even my slides are REST friendly and Web compliant.

Yours truly at YR-SOC 2005

My fundamental thesis is that the Web is moving from a "universal information space" to a "universal computation space". To be a universal computation space, you need a universal (i.e. commonly accepted and standardized) way of doing things that one needs to do to actually compute. To compute, one needs state (and a serialization encoding for that state) and functions to transform state, and types for the state . One also might want to distinguish between the semantics of the state that are internal to the computer and those that are about the external world beyond the computer.

What I believe is that XML fundamentally provides the state, Web Services are functions (or at least should appear to be so to end-users!), and the Semantic Web can be used to model the world (ontological typing) while XML Schema can be used to type the state (syntactic typing).

Me speaking again, looking rather bedraggled

The talk got people quite excited, and I had such witty one-liners as "Reasoning over just XML is like reasoning over ASCII!" and "Let's face it, no one is using the Semantic Web because there's no data out there in RDF, so why not just use XML." I seemed to convince about everyone, and had a great lunch with Stefan Decker. Stefan explained to me some key differences between the original RDF vision (loose data connections) and OWL (strict knowledge modeling, doesn't scale). He also agreed that my vision was good, even if he would prefer people to just exchange straight RDF. Lastly, he made some encouraging comments about his idea of semantic desktop - which is exactly what I want to do for my Ph.D. thesis, show that the Web should be used to organize the locally rich semantic space of everyday users.

Links Meeting in Edinburgh

2005-04-10T15:53:00.000Z

The Links meeting in Edinburgh was very interesting indeed. Somehow Phil Wadler had got a few dozen of the world's brightest programming language theorists (including Benjamin Pierce and Xavier Leroy) in the same room. The goal was simple: to create the next big programming language: Links. The presentations were excellent, but it felt like the people had yet to even be sold on the concept, yet prepared to co-ordinate working on it. However, if anyone could create the next programming language, these people could.

Who's that man in black lurking in the background?

Phil's goal is admirable: we need a programming language that takes the traditional three tiers
of Web development (database->script->XHTML) and replace them with a single unifed programming language based on the latest and greatest results in functional programming theory. Links seems at first glance like HaskellPHP, but Phil has greater plans. I think overall the vision is great, but the web development crowd already uses scripting languages, so we'd have to sell them on something else. I think the magic answer is Web Services.

The cake for Links

Phil cuts the cake.

Web Services are nothing but functions on the Web, and obviously a functional programming language would be better than composing them. The alternatives seem to be BPEL, which is huge, has no formal semantics, and is not even coherently implemented, and OWL-S, which is rather academic and also seems not to be catching on. Because to make Links work we need not only the academic community, but the hacker community to jump on board. And the hacker community is currently just toying with Web Services, and upset at the standards bloat. A simple, clean, and functional solution would sell it, and do something PHP can't do!

My Links links are here:
http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin/homepage/notes/links.html

And here's my original comments on Links on Phil's blog: LISP for the Web!
http://wadler.blogspot.com/2005/04/links-meeting-at-etaps-enter-comments.html

In other news, I volunteered at ETAPS, heard some talks, and got a free hat.

Me in my free hat...would you trust this man with your conference?

First post

2005-04-05T04:36:00.000Z

I would prefer to host this on my own server, but accidently created this in a fit of late night blog posting, so will keep it till I get my own server. Testing, testing....anyone out there?