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

Dear Henry,

What Jack Park and Tom Munnicke have been doing in their different, though not unrelated, ways is most impressive, of great value, and inspiring. Thank you for including the URL for givingspace 
www.givingspace.org 
in your email. It is the sort of project that one would hope many women and men of good will on this list and elsewhere would actively support.

I would like to make a correction as regards the final comment in my last note on etymologies where I (albeit parenthetically) concluded: 
Peirce was solely interested in usage
Peirce scholar and founder of PORT, Mary Keeler, in an email to me noted that not only is this incorrect, but that on the contrary Peirce  
MK: . . .strenuously argued for etymology, especially in his ethics of terminology. . .
A search in the electronic Peirce Collected Works indeed reveals a considerable interest in etymology; and that Peirce employs etymologies to advantage within his ethics of terminology and elsewhere. This would support the considerable value of etymologies, which your concluding comment admirably summarizes:.  
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.
Gary


Henry K van Eyken wrote:
3D525553.7A9819FB@sympatico.ca"> 
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.

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 long
a, vita brevis.

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.

Henry


Gary Richmond wrote:

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 techniq
ue 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 some
thing 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 mysteriousl
y, find ways to do it.




Mei Lin Fung