On Friday 12 September 2008, Mike Tintner wrote: > "to understand a piece of information and its "information objects", > (eg words) , is to "realise" (or know) how they refer to "real > objects" in the real world, (and, ideally, and often necessarily, to > be able to point to and engage with those real objects)."
This is usually called sourcing and citations, and so on. It's not enough to have a citation though, it's not enough to just have a symbolic representation of some part of the world beyond you within your system, you always have to be able to functionally and competently use those references, citations, or links in some useful manner, otherwise you're not grounded and you're off in la-la land. Computers have offered us the chance to encapsulate and manage all of these citations (and so on) but in many cases they are citations that are limited and crude. Look at the difference between these two citations: Tseng, A. A., Notargiacomo A. & Chen T. P. Nanofabrication by scanning probe microscope lithography: A review. J. Vac. Sci. Tech. B 23, 877– 894 (2005). Compared to: http://heybryan.org/graphene.html Both would seem cryptic to any outsider to scientific literature or to the web. The first one is generally variablized across the literature, making OCR very difficult, and making it generally a challenge to always fetch the citations and refs in papers for researchers. Take a look at my attempts at OCR of bibliographies: http://heybryan.org/projects/autoscholar/ "Not good" is an accurate summarization. With the HTTP string, it's not any better at all, *except* the fact that DNS servers are widely implemented, here's how to implement one, here's how the DNS root servers for the internet work, here's why you can (usually) type in any URL on the planet and get to the same site (unless you're on some other NIC of course - but this is very rare). There's a "social context" surprisingly involved for DNS .. which I guess is what you consider to be the "realistics" that everyone overlooks when they just assign symbols to many different things; for instance, I bet you don't know what DNS is, but you know what a dictionary is, even though they refer to more or less the same functional things (uh, sort of). Anyway, it's context that matters when it comes to groundtruthing citations and traces in information ecologies, and not so much the symbolic manipulation thereof. It's the overall groundtruthed process, the instantiated exploding von Neumann probe phylum that will ultimately (not) grey goo you. - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ Engineers: http://heybryan.org/exp.html irc.freenode.net #hplusroadmap ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=114414975-3c8e69 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
