Review of TUNES, arrow and the semantic web in the context of the introspector

[James Michael DuPont]

--- Brian T Rice <water@tunes.org> wrote:
> Hello again,
Hi Brian, 

Thanks for the long and intelligent response, I will have to read up
alot before I can answer your valid challenges and questions in detail.

I have no interest in self promotion here, other than to take part in
this great challenge of uncderstanding tunes and helping making it a
great system.

My posting of this details show my small working knowledge, and I can
accept criticism. In fact I am happy that you took your time and
answered in such detail.

 > > I have been reviewing the arrow philosophy file, and for this
> purpose,
> > I converted it to text,
> > http://introspector.sourceforge.net/2003/08/ArrowPhilosophy.txt
> 
> You should have just asked for an alternative format, like HTML. I'll
> dig
> up my sources and export them soon.

Thats great. Please do. 
 
> 
> > PhilosophyText CHUMP entry
> >
> http://rdfig.xmlhack.com/2003/08/30/2003-08-30.html#1062208848.959835
> 
> Would you mind asking me before re-publishing my work? At least you
> could
> inquire to compare your interpretation with mine.

I think that my caching of the file in a format that I need is fair use
and does not require permission,  just like google stores a *bad*
conversion of your document in text form, or the way 
I did not change it in any way, except re-hyphination. I ran ispell
over it to extract wordlists.

See also the citeceer that has an broken link to your page,
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/rice00arrow.html

I have resubmitted the correct webpages to it for you, to try and help.

Point is that there are many caches around.

But, If you dont mind, I would like to maintain a cleaned text  version
there, may I please have you permission?

> Why didn't you bother to actually ask me what the relationship
> between the
> code and paper was? 

I am just starting my review process.

>The Arrow code was just a tiny prototype that
> didn't
> express even a tiny percentage of the whole idea. 

I found the class hierachy in arrow, and that mini rdf document that
contained the hierarchy, very interesting as such. It at least allows
your classes and documents to be adressed as resources in an rdf
framework.

When I convert your document into rdf later on, then I can relate the
two directly, the code and the docs.

>And Squeak was a
> really
> poor means to do it in, but it's something average people could at
> least
> hope to understand.

I need to review the code in more detail.

> Equational semantics, proper closures, and other
> things are at the minimum needed to express it. Probably my next
> version
> would be in Maude or some equivalent.

I am compiling maude as we speak.

> Representing that code is foolish, and as the author, I do not
> condone it.

Do you want to take it down? It is just and index and I find you arrow
and graph class hierarchies interesting. When you have a better
version, I will replace it. Tunes and arrow is for me very vaporous, I
have finally found some fines I can sink my teeth into. If you dont
want them to be review and the reviews to be published, why to you have
the project linked from tunes? Please allow me to review what you have,
even if it is old. 

It is very frustrating learning about tunes and arrow because I dont
understand so much of it, and there is so little code to download. Now
you are telling me that you dont even suppport your older code.... that
is very frustrating.

> 
> > When I am finished reviewing arrow, then I can make the connection
> > between the semantic web and the arrow system. This will put the
> > introspector in context.
> 
> You should have asked me first. The arrow concept occurred to me
> first in
> 1994, when I had first studied and grasped category theory, and had
> already learned Lisp and the basics of formal logic and inference
> calculi
> and been programming for about 9 years.  Now, the Semantic Web and
> Arrow
> both make use of the term "ontology", but there is a different
> heritage
> among them...

Yes, I am reading sowas "knowledge representation", it shows the
history of logic and all that. Point is that there is still an analogy
between the semantic web and arrow. I want to review arrow in great
detail and look for similar concepts, and document them.

> Arrow's use of the term "ontology" relates to the philosophy of
> Martin
> Heidegger, and is more poetic than technical. The Semantic Web's turn
> on
> it is related to "formal ontologies"  whose research started in the
> 1980's
> on knowledge representation and is basically a really limited, fairly
> useless perversion of the idea.

useless perversion? that is quire harsh. I am going to document this
properly and find out the real connection.

> A readily accessible interview about Heidegger that might help those
> of
> you allergic to serious philosophy is here:
>
http://archive.salon.com/books/feature/2000/11/13/heidegger/print.html

I am not allergic to serious philosophy, and I am reading alot in that
direction, not as much as you I suppose.

> 
> ``what do we mean by "is," and how does it come to pass that "is"
> means
> anything to us at all?'' -- This kind of question is what Being and
> ontology are about, and encoding this in the nature of a textual
> format
> and placing primacy on the text is the mistake of the knowledge
> representation groups and the Semantic Web in terms of philosophy.
> Basically, it's an unsound idea.

So you point me to a text from heidegger, are you placing "primacy" on
his text? now you are saying that the semantic web cannot do that as
well?
I dont know if you have read about the 

various logical representations in n3, but that offers a great
expressive power 
http://www.openhealth.org/RDF/RDFxtAbstractSyntax.html

here is a great comparison of sowas context graphs to the semantic web
:
http://mirrors.webthing.com/view=Medium/www.w3.org/DesignIssues/CG.html

I hope to produce such a thing for arrow.


> 
> The fundamental difference between the Arrow system's handling of
> this
> question and the Semantic Web may seem trivial to your perspective,
> but
> really are profound.

I am looking forward to understanding that.


 
> If you look for comments about Arrow over the years on the TUNES 
> mailing list,   you  will see a lot of background information for the
before > and after periods relating to my writing the paper:

I will download the mailing list archives and review them in detail.

> So, reviewing that paper is not very productive. 

Funny that it is sited by a couple of people on citeseer. 

I am going to review it as well.

> > Specifically  : Based on the definition of MetaText,
> > my hypothesis  is so far :
> > This is very similar to the work being done now by the introspector
> > project. The de/re-composable objects are in the introspector
> handled
> > by RDF gateways and de-reassemblers, not by rewriting everything in
> > lisp/smalltalk or someother funky language.
> 
> Sure, but TUNES MetaText is not an idea you can isolate from the rest
> of TUNES. It's the idea of applying the HLL and its philosophy to
human
> expressions. That means that the reflective means has to be very
> direct,  succinct, and malleable (and multi-paradigm).
> 
> Therefore, if you don't accept HLL ("funky language"?), you're
> missing the
> point of MetaText. 

I dont understand metatext or hll %100 yet. My feeling is that is is
expressible as an application of the semantic web. I would be suprised
by anything else. 
 
> The Semantic Web is one possible reification, within an inefficient
> (less-expressive in a few ways) XML format (or syntactic equivalent),
> and
> is only one standard, even if it is a meta-standard. Yes, it's
> useful, but
> it's not of the same scale or scope.

I have yet to see the hll in some form of machine processsable form.

 
> Why don't you bring up the points of MetaText explanations and
> explain why
> you think each is satisfied by the Semantic Web? 

When I find the MetaText  explanations, i will. Can you point me in the
right direction please?

> Here's a source to cite: http://tunes.org/Interfaces/tunesvswww.html
> 
> A horrible source, but it's Fare's writing and I only cleaned it up
> as
> much as occurred to me to be possible. I definitely know much more
> than
> this page implies, but I don't have a concrete plan to rewrite it
> accordint to, or time to develop one.

I dont agree with this at all. It is igoring about 5 years of
development. 
Look at REST, webservices. He is doing a disservice to perl. 


> Finally, the "funky language" comment is incredibly rude. 

Two wrongs dont make a right, but your comments on c, c++, c# and perl
are also rude.

Please accept my apology, I wont make any more statements like that.

> If you don't  understand why languages like those would be preferred
by > the TUNES project, then I suggest you go try to use them and learn
from 
> them or  just  leave. 

Thats right, I am learning them. I see the need for a high level
language in the core of the system. 

> If you can't understand why language needs to be malleable and
> flexible,
> then you're hypocritical, since you trumpet XML standards and such,
> which
> are a reaction to the limitations of "non-funky languages". In Lisp
> or
> Smalltalk or related languages, there are fewer barriers between the
> base
> language and data-representation schemes or validators or even
> meta-standards. Lisp and Smalltalk as they are certainly need a lot
> of
> improvement, but you are hypocritical not to acknowledge the
> applicability
> of our reasoning in this matter.

Well, the CWM and n3 notation is also a 'funky' programming language.


Thanks for your time,
peace ,

mike

=====
James Michael DuPont
http://introspector.sourceforge.net/

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