From WWW to GGG

[athanassios]

From WWW, the Uncharted World Wide Web, to GGG, the Charted Giant Global Graph - Part 1 : Introduction
http://neurorganon.org/IgniteAthens

In the history of human mankind, map has always been of primary importance for any kind of human exploration. From the era of great maritime explorers to the era of brain and genome mapping, cartography has continually changed in order to meet the demands of map users.
Nevertheless semantic and concept mapping of data on two or three dimensions has several challenging problems to attack. Naming and complexity of objects on the map, representation of relations, layout and presentation, navigation and editing, are among a few to consider.
Despite the difficulties that arise on the visualisation part of information architecture, the central issue lies elsewhere. We argue, that the cornerstone for building the next generation of information systems, including the internet, is a well defined and standardised unit that will be human readable for measurement and exchange of information.
The equivalent notion of an information unit for machines is indeed one of the most impressive characteristics of our digital information age and it is based on the power of abstraction we apply to a series of two digits only, 0 and 1, in order to conceptualize visually and aurally human information processing. Files and documents, databases, programming languages, web applications and services, email and digital media enhance the way we communicate with others. Our perceptibility for the world around us is strengthened. In computers, information is encoded in binary data format and it is processed accordingly. It has always been the case with technology people, the need to have a corresponding unit of information that is manageable and comprehensible to be used as an interface between the programmer and the machine.
Indeed, in the history of computer science there are numerous examples of handlers that play such a role, i.e. file and folder referring to data stored permanently, URL addresses referring to web resources, primary and foreign keys referring to tables of data, names for classes of objects and their instances referring to the encapsulated data and methods.
In all cases the common ground for representation of information, the vehicle of information communication appears to be some symbol, a"sign" according to Peirce theory, that represents the actual thing itself. Fortunately that "sign" has already been modelled in a standard way that of Topic Maps ISO/IEC 13250.
Nevertheless what has not been realised so far in computer systems is the concept, i.e. topic, centric use of applications. Within this prospective there is a clear distinction between an existing digitised information resource, e.g. web document, and the abstract notion of a concept, e.g. wikipedia, where the first is linked to the second. Instead of this, proponents of semantic web contemplate linking everything as a resource. As a result we are still revolving around web documents with metadata that describe them.
We can escape from this fallacy. Imagine a global network of linked topics and a tour guide from WWW to GGG, from the world of linked documents to the world of linked concepts and subjects. You journey has just begun.

[athanassios]

The next part of the series will deal with a core ontology, the Neurorganon Upper Level Ontology, NULO, that will be fully compatible with Wandora. I plan to release the first version in September 2012. NULO defines a specific use of common topics and relations aiming to create a new standard, it also disambiguates terms, i.e. abstract concepts, from existing digital information resources. NULO is also linked and it is bringing together most popular definitions of terms used in other ontologies. The plan is to create easily other specialised ontologies based on NULO and to provide a basic common and language independent vocabulary for merging data. I envisage that Wandora will play a critical role in such a, hopefully, global movement.

A pre-alpha release of NULO prepared with Wandora tool can now be found at
http://neurorganon.org/NULO

Enjoy and please do comment about it, I need some feedback by the community, especially the topic map one.

[athanassios]

You may view a relevant presentation at Ignite Athens 2012
http://neurorganon.org/IgniteAthens

All comments, especially from the Topic Map community, are welcome.

[athanassios]

This is a public invitation to Steve Newcomb and Michel Biezunski and to anyone else that would like to make some constructive comments and discuss the future of topic maps and GGG.

Although a bit late, well it is never late, I have just discovered the chapter of yours titled "A perspective on the quest for global knowledge interchange". I have just finished reading it !!!

What is the reason I am writing this to you. I would like you to have a look on a highly relevant work of mine called NULO (Neurorganon Upper Level Ontology). I have not finished the final release yet but I would like you to know that I have been inspired by your work on Topic Maps. I think I have discovered many points in your theory that can be expressed in a more concise way, with less effort from the user point of view. There are also other points where I have a different opinion from a philosophical perspective but that will follow. The key idea I would like to share with you is to describe the topic map model from the symbol representation perspective. This is exactly what I did in my last presentation at Ignite Athens 2012, hope you enjoy it.

In many aspects I do also believe that my NULO work extends your topic map model, that is because it is an upper level ontology fully based on the topic map standard, is it the first of its kind ? There are many things I have tried to describe in a standard way, such as abstraction principles predicates, mapping predicates, auditing and annotation predicates, variables and properties. It is better to wait until I publish the ontology itself, where it will include definitions for all these I am referring to in my post.

I would like to end this little introduction to you with what I started writing. This chapter of yours is dynamite, very powerful stuff. Just consider the fact that my presentation at Ignite Athens, included slides and pictures with the Babel and the chasm you are mentioning in the article. What I have been astonished at is the fact that my presentation had been prepared before the reading of your article !!! Somehow I have been driven by the magical power of the stuff you wrote

With kind regards and full respect for you work, hope the guys at W3C will try to understand better what you have been working all these years....

Athanassios I. Hatzis, PhD

PS: NULO is at http://neurorganon.org/NULO