Things understood by computers

What is the Semantic Web?

The Semantic Web is a web that is able to describe things in a way that computers can understand.

• The Beatles was a popular band from Liverpool.
• John Lennon was a member of the Beatles.
• "Hey Jude" was recorded by the Beatles.

Sentences like the ones above can be understood by people. But how can they be understood by computers?

Statements are built with syntax rules. The syntax of a language defines the rules for building the language statements. But how can syntax become semantic?

This is what the Semantic Web is all about. Describing things in a way that computers applications can understand it.

The Semantic Web is not about links between web pages.

The Semantic Web describes the relationships between things (like A is a part of B and Y is a member of Z) and the properties of things (like size, weight, age, and price)

"If HTML and the Web made all the online documents look like one huge book, RDF, schema, and inference languages will make all the data in the world look like one huge database"

Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1999

Asyndeton

A writing style that omits conjunctions between words, phrases, or clauses (opposite of polysyndeton).

Etymology:From the Greek, "unconnected"

Examples:

"They dove, splashed, floated, splashed, swam, snorted."
(James T. Farrell, Young Lonigan)

"Why, they've got ten volumes on suicide alone. Suicide by race, by color, by occupation, by sex, by seasons of the year, by time of day. Suicide, how committed: by poisons, by firearms, by drowning, by leaps. Suicide by poison, subdivided by types of poison, such as corrosive, irritant, systemic, gaseous, narcotic, alkaloid, protein, and so forth. Suicide by leaps, subdivided by leaps from high places, under the wheels of trains, under the wheels of trucks, under the feet of horses, from steamboats. But Mr. Norton, of all the cases on record, there's not one single case of suicide by leap from the rear end of a moving train."
(Edward G. Robinson as insurance agent Barton Keyes in Double Indemnity)

"He was a bag of bones, a floppy doll, a broken stick, a maniac."
(Jack Kerouac, On the Road)

"I have found the warm caves in the woods,filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,closets, silks, innumerable goods"
(Anne Sexton, "Her Kind")

"In some ways, he was this town at its best--strong, hard-driving, working feverishly, pushing, building, driven by ambitions so big they seemed Texas-boastful."(Mike Royko, "A Tribute")
"Anyway, like I was saying, shrimp is the fruit of the sea. You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, saute it. Dey's uh, shrimp-kabobs, shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo. Pan fried, deep fried, stir-fried. There's pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp soup, shrimp stew, shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich. That--that's about it."
(Bubba in Forrest Gump)

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts-Enter Jean-Philippe Pastor

Where is the lexia in the hypertext ?

The author's current work in progress carries the concept of simultaneity still further in the idea of a nested simultaneity.

In some cases this work carries the simultaneity inside the sentence. Hypertext is carried into the fine structure of language. Where is "the lexia" now? Is there really a concept of lexia when we are inside the sentence?

A hypertext may be thought of as a kind of virtual diagram, with software for navigating the diagram. If the diagram is small enough it may be presented in a single graphical space, without the aid of software. The author's Diagram Poems are examples of such works. These present an explicitly relational syntax notation, still used in Intergrams and Diffractions through. The structural atoms in the Diagram Poems are small clusters of words; the relational (i.e. hypertext-on-paper) structure is the sentence structure. What shall we say is "the lexia" here? In the Diagram Poems, the diagram notation carries syntax itself. Executed on a larger scale, this concept leads to the use of hypertext to carry the very infrastructure of language. Such works would have hypertext infrawhere: a structural underneath so fine and so pervasive, a lexia so completely fragmented, that the concept of lexia ceases to have any meaning: a completely dematerialized lexia, as in [Mou92b] after all.

In [Mou92b] Stuart Moulthrop asks: "Why does the hypertext research community publish its work in print?" At the risk of seeming glib, the answer is obvious: because hypertext is not our native tongue. Many will surely balk at the idea that this needn't be so, that there can exist a natural language in which hypertext carries the very structure of syntax itself: hypertext not as a medium of organizing thoughts, but as a medium of thought. Perhaps in the end this will turn out to be unachievable, but as a focus for poetic experimentation it provides this author with a sustaining vision.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts-Enter Jean-Philippe Pastor

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Rhetoric and grammar

The difference between metaphorical substitutions and metonymic combinations (rhetoric and grammar) can be seen as a kind of repetition of a deeper and older opposition: between rhetoric and logic.

But (a big, big but) metonymy is not a grammatical category. It is no less figurative than metaphor. The predicative structure of a sentence (noun/verb/phrase) cannot guarantee its meaning.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/
See that post with different algorithms in metabole
See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

Simple propositions

Suppose we require that meaning be as simple and transportable as possible.

We could break a sentence into simple units (propositions) which conform to a simple assertions of fact. And we can remove the context: the who, why, how, etc. of its application. The result will assuredly be simplistic, but the sentences will rest on assured foundations and can be built in logically correct ways. There are many advantages in this approach: clarity, certainty, universality. Once expressions are reduced to propositions with truth values, it becomes harder to dally with relativism. Truth and falsity are universals, and apply across the different worlds of individuals, cultures and times.

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See that post with different algorithms in metabole

See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

Meaning and truth

In semantics, the truth condition of a sentence is almost universally considered to be distinct from its meaning.

The meaning of a sentence is conveyed if the truth conditions for the sentence are understood. Additionally, there are many sentences that are understood although their truth condition is uncertain. One popular argument for this view is that some sentences are necessarily true--that is, they are true whatever happens to obtain. All such sentences have the same truth conditions, but arguably do not thereby have the same meaning.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/
See that post with different algorithms in metabole
See the journal French Metablog with today different posts