The Phaneron

I noticed a similarity recently in posts from Chris Anderson and Nicholas Carr. Over the past few months both of these widely read authors published a thought provoking post that calls into question humanity’s stewardship of knowledge in today’s 2.0 world. And each post contains signs of the singularity. Read on brave traveler, but don’t forget to bring your towel !

Anderson, in The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete, postulates a world of technological utopianism without realism.

Danny Ayers made a request for comments on the state of the semantic web a few weeks ago. I’ll preface this post by saying the state of the semantic web is very good by which I mean some very good design decisions were made early on that ensured a vibrant academic research base, a broad marketplace for technology transfer and an eager community of technology providers to realize the vision of a web of meaning. I’m personally very positive overall on the state of the semantic web. The semantic web is now pretty close to the best of all possible worlds. (ha, ha, ha) All that being said it’s time to sharpen my pencil a bit and offer a critique on a few of the finer points of the state of the semantic web: representation and realism.

A few days ago our team reviewed some ongoing work in which we’re developing a better approach to sharing information. Today, model driven architecture and the semantic web are widely accepted approaches to sharing information. Despite the acceptance of these approaches, their underlying model theory is not well understood as was evident from our review. So, I’ll spend the next few posts (or more) explaining truth and meaning in model theory.