http://www.open-meta.com/index2.html Open-Meta-Computing. en-ca Open-Meta Computing Inc. 2006 drdodds@open-meta.com drdodds@open-meta.com Wed, 9 August 2006 21:00:00 PST http://open-meta.com/8834-05a.jpeg http://www.open-meta.com/index2.html Sat, 22 July 2006 20:19:00 PST http://www.open-meta.com/whatsnew.html The Open-Meta Computing -- What's New Page -- typically changes every few days. Near the bottom of the open-meta.com website main page (aka HOME page) you will see an RSS/XML button. This indicates that an RSS file has been linked into this main page. If you have an RSS reader (such as the SAGE reader you can get for Firefox) you will be able to "subscribe" to this news feed. To get the RSS Feed (represented by that RSS button) into Sage just click on Sage's magnifying-glass icon while you are looking at the main page of the site in your browser and the news feed will be automatically added to Sage's list of things it can get for you via RSS feeds. Sat, 22 July 2006 20:18:00 PST http://www.open-meta.com/spacemap.html An experimental map system from Google is implemented on the site. It provides a means for anyone in North America to find where Vancouver BC Canada is relative to where they live. Also provides a means for locating any business on a street map of Vancouver. Click on [SpaceMap] in the HOME page of our open-meta.com site. http://www.open-meta.com/index2.html Zombiac and The Semantic Web - Part One On August 9 2006 I gave a presentation titled "Metaprogramming, Ontologies and Still Nobody's Home". I showed some slides to start off with and then showed two demos. They were both SVG files. I actually showed the text of the files on the screen using a program editor and explained salient parts of the text. Then I ran the demo by opening the same SVG text file in a Firefox browser. A "picture" immediately appeared on the screen in both demos. The point of showing the SVG file text was to show that there was no binary content in the file only text, and also to show that even though the bulk of the text in both SVG files was embedded metadata, SVG rendered its visual output immediately and well. David Dodds The bulk of the text was ontology material. I will cover the import of ontology in another posting: Zombiac - The Semantic Web Super Computer; subtitled It's About Implementation. drdodds@open-meta.com Wed, 9 August 2006 19:00:00 PST Podcast http://www.open-meta.com/index2.html Zombiac and The Semantic Web Part Two The slides and the two SVG files are available for viewing at open-meta.com. A podcast of the nocturne will also appear on the site. My poster paper and a podcast to accompany it are already available on the site. Before we get back to continuing the discussion from part one let us spend a moment and consider what Zombiac is. Philosophical Zombie (see Wikipedia) is a hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except that it lacks conscious experience or qualia or sentience. Zombiac, then, is a metaphor of a "mechanical contrivance" like Edsac, Ordvac, Univac, Illiac (computers) and zombie-homunculus-in-a-box. It is a play on words and a metaphor. A metaphor for what one may ask. The focus of the nocturne presentation is that "nobody is home" in the modern computer. Said another way it points out that computers are lacking in common-sense, even horse sense. Tim Berners-Lee instigated the Semantic Web by virtue of his discussion in a Scientific American article. To-date people's implementation of this semantic web has no common-sense yet and has not progressed yet to the level of zombie-homunculus-in-a-box as these are at least holistic in their planning and execution (behaviour). Tim Berners-Lee's Semantic Web is a system of zombies ('in a box') and does not have the behavioural capability that a situated, understanding agent or system has. The holistic ("organic") inter-activity is missing. The two SVG demos show that often what we experience seems to be the world but is really the output result of some below-level-of-consciousness processing which taps consciousness on the shoulder and then holds up a cue-card (for it to clue in with). "Seeing" a bar-chart is an example and the first demo SVG code and podcast explaining it provide interesting discussion. SVG demo two shows a round wall clock picture with a red-coloured sweep-second-hand and black hour and minute hands showing the current time, as it passes, second by second. The ontology metadata in the first SVG picture convey spatial relationships between SVG elements like rectangle and text. This allows a content-based semantic search of SVG pictures, finding in this case a bar-chart, a second order thing which is actually nowhere in the picture. ("The bar-chart is in the eye of the beholder" not on the screen or page.) The second SVG file has the time-ontology from JPL's SWEET (15 ontology set) embedded in the SVG metadata element in the picture. Looking at the code we see how a reasoning program can detect ("see") that the three hands of the picture (of the operating clock) depict time and the passage of time. Also the ontology "allows the clock picture to know that not only do its hands show the passage of time but also knowledge of time related things, such as seasons, etc." drdodds@open-meta.com Wed, 9 August 2006 19:15:00 PST http://www.open-meta.com/index2.html Zombiac and The Semantic Web, Part Three An activation record monitor (not shown in the SVG code presented at the nocturne) is able to perform "plan detection" (and, hence, goal inference as well). The clock picture shows the actual time and passage of time second by second and the SVG clock picture also has knowledge of time domain things (by virtue of the embedded ontology) BUT the clock (picture) does not KNOW that it has this knowledge. It is not situated and does not have the "organic" holistic inter-knowledge that a biological system has. This is the crux behind why even though the clock can answer questions about time (things) it does not "appreciate" or "apprehend" what it is doing or what it knows and this is the basis for "nobody at home". [In this regard it would be useful to read Peirce: "Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness".] The material in my presentation and discussed here was previously copyrighted. [It is also interesting to read Lady Ada Augusta Countess of Lovelace, and her work with Charles Babbage and his Analytical Engine. See http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html for an interesting sketch about her. Found there, in part: "Lovelace writes: "The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths." "]. In case you are brain dead or just extremely arrogant, Babbage had a description of his Difference Engine published in 1834 !!! Hello?! 1834. Does your brain work as good now as his did 172 years ago? Ada Lovelace had a far superior understanding of what "computing" is than you do (now), she was a female and that was a century and a half ago. It is only your arrogance that makes you think you have a clue. drdodds@open-meta.com Wed, 9 August 2006 19:30:00 PST