The Phaneron

I can see it now. Its in the future, probably two years out, maybe more, but its clear to me even Today. I met some folks. I listened to what they said. I made a few choices with a multi-year pay off. So far, so good.

Technology trends, at least in my small corner of the world, appear stable for at least the next five years.

I didn’t follow hardware trends much until a few months ago when one of my machines went down. Hardware trends are pretty easy to read. I have a new Nehalem i7 720 on order. It cost a few bucks, but my private cloud in a box is on a UPS truck somewhere.

Scale it? you bet. Haswell: double the cores, double the threads by default in 2013.

Luckily a year ago I made a good choice in programming languages: Haskell. Language trends are harder to read. Think there’s a practical use for Second order Lambda Calculus with Polymorphism? I do. Category theory is embedded in the core libraries of the language which makes incorporating information flow and the logical environment of the Information Flow Framework a natural fit.

I’ve been active recently on the Object Management Group’s Architecture Ecosystem Special Interest Group (AE-SIG) as well as the Ontolog Forum’s Sharing and Integrating Ontologies (SIO-Dev) activity.

I’ll take type inference, theorems for free and the EU funded CASL in HETS.

But wait, there’s more.

Software transactional memory and shared memory parallelism in a pure functional programming language.

In the immortal words of Hannibal Smith: “I love it when a plan comes together.”

Winter has passed here in Alexandria and I wanted to reflect on a rich and productive Winter of readings in philosophy and logic. Early this Winter my friend and colleague Ralph Hodgson recommended Sting’s new work If On A Winter’s Night. As if awakening from that long dark night, I have much to share about a time of deep contemplation and thoughtful reflection.

If you follow my tweets, you saw some of it unfolding. Readings from and about Russell’s theory of types provided insight into ramified type hierarchies that remain central to much of the Object Management Group and the World Wide Web Consortium’s standards development. Proceeding through the development of type theory since Russell, constructive and intuitionistic logic became the central focus of my readings. I am very pleased with the amount of original material I was able to find on this subject. Brouwer’s Intuitionism and Formalism is just one example. My bookmarks are worth browsing for these original materials.

A longer journey into type theory took me through Martin-Lof’s impredicative and predicative type systems, Girard’s Paradox and Coquand’s Calculus of Constructions. These readings brought into focus as sharp as one might get at noon on a hot Summer’s day, the past five years of our team’s work on Model Driven Architecture and the Semantic Web. Following on Coquand’s work, I progressed deeper into algebraic specifications with the EU’s Common Algebraic Specification Language.

Most importantly, I made very good progress with tooling in each of these areas. Proof General is showing itself a very useful proof assistant. Haskell, Isabelle, oCAML and Coq all provide open source licensing that made it possible for me to get my hands dirty. It’s all free. Free as in Freedom !

I’m confident enough with what I was able to accomplish this Winter that I registered the methodeutic.com domain name.

But Winter has passed and it’s a warm Spring morning here in Alexandria. I’ll talk more about this work over the next few months. Right now the Spring weather’s so nice, I’m heading outside !

“The system of expressing propositions which is called Existential Graphs was invented by me late in the year 1896, as an improvement upon another system published in the Monist for January 1897.”

-Charles Peirce 1906

If you didn’t attend this year’s International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009) the good news is that you now have the chance to see the Pat Hayes invited keynote called BLOGIC or Now What’s in a Link?.

Pat’s keynote is a must watch video. His keen insights into Web Portability, Names and Identification, the Horatio Principle, SameAs and Death by Layering will shape the future of the Web for the better. After Pat’s talk I had the pleasure of speaking with Dame Wendy Hall and Wendy believed Pat’s talk was precisely what Web Science is about.

In this post I won’t reiterate the main points of Pat’s talk. Be sure to watch the video. Regular readers on The Phaneron will recognize similar points already made here over the past few years. I will take the opportunity to elaborate on what I believe to be a few important lessons from Pat’s talk that are revealed through his incidental comments. These incidental comments speak volumes about what many of us experience throughout our careers whether in the workplace or working with standards organizations.

The lessons are these:

1. The question we’re asking has, in some surprising cases, already been answered. As computer scientists we have little opportunity to dedicate the time required to study the important work of the giants that came before us. Philosophy, logic and mathematics have a very large body of literature that takes years to truly understand. Peirce is just one of many whose writings contain answers to questions that we could otherwise ponder for decades only to arrive at the same answer. As Pat says to Tim in the video, Peirce solved the same problem as RDF with Existential Graphs in 1896. And he did it right!
2. Our feelings really are useful indicators of when something is or isn’t right. Pat talks about having a sense that Bnodes weren’t quite right during the specification of RDF. In hindsight Pat had the right intuition and he has proposed a backward compatible solution based on Peirce’s Sheets of Assertion. There’s a Myers-Briggs story to be told that’s especially meaningful to me. I’m an INFJ. Over the last few years I’ve come to recognize many occasions where my feelings were good indicators of the truth. Although a cursory reading of Myers-Briggs may lead one to believe feeling (F) and Thinking (T) are in opposition, they are not. Our feelings are as good indicators of the truth as is logic.
3. We often overlook advice only to learn later of its immense value. This happens when we’re just not ready to learn something. What I learned from Pat’s story that “John Sowa showed me Peirce, then he showed me Peirce again, then he showed me Peirce again” is that sometimes we’re just not ready to hear the advice we’re offered. I’ve been overlooking the advice to take Common Logic seriously for a few years now and Pat’s talk convinced me its time to take a serious look.

There’s another relevant point from Pat’s talk that should not go unmentioned. Pat’s talk was given at ISWC, but could equally well have been given to the Object Management Group. The OMG recently issued a request for proposals for a MOF to RDF Structural Mapping in Support of Linked Data. The contents of the RFP imply that the OMG faces many of the same challenges as W3C. The OMG would do well to study W3C’s lessons learned from RDF.