PHILOWEB

Présentation de SemanticPedia (le DBpedia Francophone) à SemWebPro 2012

Alexandre Monnin — Thu, 17 May 2012 22:47:22 +0000

Présentation de SemanticPedia à SemWebPro 2012

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Merci aux organisateurs (Logilab) !

Post-scriptum séminaire Philosophie du Web (12-13 mai 2012) : slides de Yorick Wilks “Meaning and the Semantic Web”

Alexandre Monnin — Thu, 17 May 2012 22:31:01 +0000

Meaning and the Semantic Web

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Séance du Séminaire “Philosophie du Web” : François Rastier & Yorick Wilks (12-13 mai 2012)

Alexandre Monnin — Mon, 07 May 2012 18:21:54 +0000

Nous aurons le privilège d’accueillir François Rastier et Yorick Wilks pour confronter la vision du Web Sémantique/Web de données à des approches davantage inspirées par la linguistique (notamment la linguistique des corpus).

Sémantique et idéologie du Web sémantique
François Rastier
INALCO (CNRS)

Les ontologies sont le produit d’une théorie de la connaissance et d’une métaphysique concrétisée par leur sémantique. Le Web sémantique leur a donné un domaine d’application majeur. En passant du web des documents au web des données, il a affirmé la prééminence des métadonnées sur les données.

Les extensions au web des objets en témoignent et l’on doit souligner leurs implications économiques et militaires. De même pour le web des individus : la dualité entre ontologies et réseaux sociaux, web sémantique et socio-sémantique semble devenir une complémentarité. Les conséquences politiques et éthiques doivent évidemment être débattues.

The Semantic Web: meaning and annotation
Yorick Wilks
Florida Institute of Human and Machine Cognition.

The lecture discusses what kind of entity the Semantic Web (SW) is, in terms of the relationship of natural language structure to knowledge representation (KR). It argues that there are three distinct views on the issue: first, that the SW is basically a renaming of the traditional AI knowledge representation task, with all the problems and challenges of that task. If that is the case, as many believe, then there is no particular reason to expect progress in this new form of presentation, as all the traditional problems of logic and representation reappear and it will be no more successful outside the narrow scientific domains where KR seems to work even though the formal ontology movement has brought some benefits. The paper contains some discussion of the relationship of current SW doctrine to representation issues covered by traditional AI, and also discusses issues of how far SW proposals are able to deal with difficult relationships in parts of concrete science.

Secondly, there is a view that the SW will be the WorldWideWeb with its constituent documents annotated so as to yield their content or meaning structure more directly. This view of the SW makes natural language processing central as the procedural bridge from texts to KR, usually via a form of automated Information Extraction. This view is discussed in some detail and it is argued that this is in fact the only way of justifying the structures used as KR for the SW. There is a third view, possibly Berners- Lee’s own, that the SW is about trusted databases as the foundation of a system of web processes and services, but it is argued that this ignores the whole history of the web as a textual system, and gives no better guarantee of agreed meanings for terms than the other two approaches. The lecture also touches on the basic issues of how the above viewpoints relate to the basic issue of how elements of the SW gain meaning, and the views of Halpin and others are discussed. There are also some reflections of the origins of the SW in Berners-Lee’s own thinking and whether the SW was what he intended all along when the WWW was first set up.

De nouvelles images de PhiloWeb 2012 / New pictures of PhiloWeb 2012

Alexandre Monnin — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 11:20:51 +0000

Merci à Michalis Vafopoulos !

Elles sont accessibles ici.

Article : “L’ingénierie philosophique comme design ontologique : retour sur l’émergence de la « ressource »”

Alexandre Monnin — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 12:12:26 +0000

Parution du numéro 3 (avril 2012) de la revue Réel-Virtuel: enjeux du numérique.

Intitulé “Archéologie des nouvelles technologies”, j’y publie un article ayant pour titre :

L’ingénierie philosophique comme design ontologique : retour sur l’émergence de la « ressource ».

Sommaire du numéro :

En complément des recherches mettant à jour les spécificités innovantes des « nouvelles technologies », ce troisième numéro propose d’éprouver l’hypothèse d’un enracinement de ces dispositifs récents, au-delà des limites d’une « ère du numérique ». Cette démarche archéologique croise des réflexions pluridisciplinaires et est particulièrement éclairée par des références à des démarches artistiques, à la fois contemporaines et inactuelles, rendant visibles des liens avec d’autres temps.

Creation of a Philosophy of the Web Community Group @W3C!

Alexandre Monnin — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 22:17:44 +0000

Presentation of the group (co-written by Alexandre Monnin, Henry Story and Harry Halpin):

Many philosophical issues have arisen in the technical design of Web standards over the years. Philosophical conundrums sometimes seem out of context in the light of seemingly more pressing technical problems. Yet, the very fact that these philosophical problems are constantly raised indicates that they are not easily dispensed with, but should instead be the focus of serious and ongoing long-term discussions.

This is why this CG aims at undertaking such discussions, even outsourcing them to alleviate the task of other groups. To clarify the goal of this CG: it should not be a place to do unconstrained philosophical research but rather a forum to examine issues arising from the W3C technical community. Open discussion and precise descriptions of the minutiae of the Web will help guide the work in the CG, which should output short guides on precise topics to help case progress and discussions in other groups. The PhiloWeb Community group aims to undertake such discussions by bringing together experts from the web and the philosophical community to help the task of “philosophical engineering”, a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee.

You can join it here.

Retrouvez les images de PhiloWeb 2012 / Pictures of PhiloWeb 2012

Alexandre Monnin — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 22:03:34 +0000

http://web-and-philosophy.org/philoweb-2012-www-2012-workshop/pictures/

Séminaire Philosophie du Web 14-15 avril 2012 : Christopher Menzel & Patrick J Hayes

Alexandre Monnin — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 17:55:36 +0000

Séminaire “Philosophie du Web”

(une initiative soutenue par le Collège des Ecoles doctorales de Paris 1, l’Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation (IRI) du Centre Pompidou et la revue Implications Philosophiques)
Dirigé par Alexandre Monnin (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne/IRI/INRIA) et Harry Halpin (IRI/W3C)

Samedi 14 avril (14h00-17h00) et Dimanche 15 avril (10h00-14h00)

Logic and the Web

Patrick J. Hayes
Institute for Human & Machine Cognition
(Sunday only)

RDF with Contexts

Christopher Menzel
(Texas A&M University)
Department of Philosophy

Common Logic: An Evolutionary Tale

Traditional first-order logic (TFOL) combines a clean, well-defined, highly expressive syntax with a clear, simple semantics and any number of semantically complete proof theories. It is not without good reason, then, that TFOL is the most popular and widely used framework for representing information. As is well known, much of first-order logic can be traced back to the work of Frege (among others). Somewhat ironically, even though many of Frege’s ontological doctrines are out of fashion, certain prominent features of the syntax and semantics of TFOL bear the unmistakable imprint of these doctrines — most notably, the idea that there is an inviolable gulf between concept and object. Interestingly, however, regardless of any independent merits of Frege’s ontology, the corresponding features of TFOL are a positive liability when faced with the challenge of representing and exchanging information in an anarchic environment like the World Wide Web. The topic of my talk discusses how some of these representational challenges led to evolutionary changes in the syntax and semantics of TFOL resulting in a first-order framework (now also an ISO international standard) known as Common Logic that embodies a decidedly non-Fregean ontology.

In a bit more technical detail: In Common Logic, the traditional TFOL syntactic categories of variables, individual constants, n-place predicates and n-place function symbols are dissolved in favor of a single category of names; and the polarized ontology of concept and object is replaced by a single category of things. The traditional syntactic categories reappear only as syntactic roles that names can play in one context or another. As any string of names in this language is both a well-formed function term and a well-formed atomic formula, predication and function application are variably polyadic (e.g., “pa”, “pab”, “pabc” with the same name in predicate/function position are all well-formed), self-predication and self-application are possible (e.g., “pp” and “f(f,a)” are well-formed), and quantification is syntactically second-order (e.g., “∃p∀x(px ↔ ~xx)”, and indeed “∃f f(a)x” (where “f(a)” is in predicate position) are both well-formed). Time permitting, I will also discuss some of the more advanced features of Common Logic and will briefly touch on some metatheoretic results for the logic, notably a completeness proof and a method of translating from this logic into a TFOL framework.

Cette séance aura lieu salle Lalande (17 rue de la Sorbonne, escalier C, 1er étage droite) le samedi, de 14h00 à 17h00, et dans la salle Triangle du Centre Pompidou (à droite de l’entrée) le dimanche, de 10h00 à 17h00.

A focus on… Theorizing the Web 2012 (April 14, College Park, MD)

Alexandre Monnin — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 11:34:44 +0000

Another event dedicated to the study of the Web (and there aren’t so many!) will take place right before PhiloWeb 2012. Looks very nice!

“The second annual Theorizing the Web conference aims to expand the range and depth of theory used to help us make sense of how the Internet, digitality, and technology have changed the ways humans live. We will bring together researchers from a range of disciplines, including sociology, communications, anthropology, philosophy, economics, English, history, political science, information science, the arts and many more.”

You will find the program here.

Prochaine séance du séminaire philosophie du Web (Andy Clark-Michael Wheeler)

Alexandre Monnin — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 17:36:02 +0000

Séminaire “Philosophie du Web”

(une initiative soutenue par le Collège des Ecoles doctorales de Paris 1, l’Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation du Centre Pompidou et la revue Implications Philosophiques)

Dirigé par Alexandre Monnin (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne/IRI/INRIA) et Harry Halpin (IRI/W3C)

Samedi 31 mars et Dimanche 1er avril

Andy Clark
(Univ. of Edinburgh),
Michael Wheeler
(Univ. of Stirling),

Cognitive prosthetics and the Web

Andy Clark and Mike Wheeler will give interlocking talks designed to investigate the relationship between recent work on embodied cognition and the technological opportunities opened up by the Web and (more generally) by pervasive, mobile computing. A special focus is on the claim that certain forms of technological scaffolding might act as ‘cognitive prosthetics’, extending the physical basis of the human mind itself. Beginning with a general picture of ourselves as ‘natural born cyborgs’ – creatures who continually engineer and re-engineer their own behavioural and mental capacities by means of technology – Clark and Wheeler identify and explore the issues that connect and divide these recent accounts of thought and it’s relation to the complex weave of technology in which we live and work. Using some Web-oriented test-cases, Clark and Wheeler open up a new space for discussion, not only of the Web and human nature, but also of the nature and future of the Web itself.