Googling around I was trying to find a connection between empirical approaches for generating ontologies and I stumbled across one of my old colleagues of the Media Lab community: Carson Reynolds. Recently, he wrote a small prototype that was googleing for a word and then parsing the html pages of the main links obtained by the search engine. Then taking a list of English words with emotional orientation he was trying to mach these words with the boo-horay theory stated by the Cambridge philosoper A. J. Ayer.

An example query: emotemail

Boo Hooray
———————————————-
critical 21 content 102
bored 9 happy 30
confused 7 interested 28
surprised 4 ready 19
angry 3 patient 9
disappointed 3 satisfied 2
rejected 3 accepting 1
annoyed 2 agreeable 1
bitter 2 calm 1
contrary 2 pleased 1
irritated 2 sympathetic 1
suspicious 2
ambivalent 1
awed 1
disgusted 1
jealous 1
uncertain 1

This simple concept reminded me of the paper presented by Massimo Poesio during the FOIS conference. He was using the internet as well for finding semantic relations. Therefore I checked his references and I found that is not a very new approach. In fact, many people tried already to use the net as super-referent to define semantic relations. Some of the links I have to check:

1_ G. Grefenstette. SEXTANT: Extracting semantics from Raw Text. Heuristics, 1993.
2_ F. Keller, M. Lapata. Using the Web to Obtain Frequencies for Unseen Bigrams. Computational Linguistics, 29(3), 2003.
3_ M. Poesio and Abdulrahman Almuhareb, 2004. “Feature-Based vs. Property-based KR: An Empirical perspective”, Proc. of FOIS, Torino, October.

Second day of the FOIS conference. At the beginning there was an opening on how to make the semantic web more semantic by Peter Gandenfors. Nice ideas on how to use conceptual spaces in a practical context. On the forth session there were two interesting contributions: the first by Martin Raubal, on an applied approach on building an ontology with a formalization of a conceptual space and applied to pedestrian navigation. The second by Massimo Poesio on an empirical prospective for shaping an ontology parsing text from google or wordnet.

The running notes in the extended.

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Nice ideas of having a look at the literature on formal interaction analysis. Another interesting pointer is to look at literature on studies that tried a more empirical approach on deriving an ontology from texts or from the road signs. This last study was referenced by Kuhn in one of his paper. It should be on the internet site of Musil.

Second day of the conference in Formal Ontologies in Information Systems held in Torino. Today was completely into the ontology theory and the more academic approaches to the matter. After a beautiful presentation by Amie Thomasson on the Methods of Categorization, we moved on the first session on the definition of the Categories. The following session was on the perspectives of using ontologies followed on some methodological notes. The full report in the extended.

My general impression is that the ontology theory needs some more practical examples; it needs to reflect more on the common sense realism; and also it needs to integrate more some cognitive semantics approach. Generally there is the need for examples, ontologies concrete and applied to specific and detailed fields so to constitute case studies. So far there has been to much attention to trying to find universals and there is a continuos debate on what exactly is an universal and how to categorise things.
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Today I attended this workshop on formal ontologies and cognitive semantics organised in the context of the FOIS 2004: Formal Ontologies in Informatics Systems. There were almost 70 participants, but only 35 of them submitted a position paper. The contributions were organised in three panels around the following themes: Cognitive ontology engineering, Specific Approaches from Cognitive Semantics and Space and Time. Two brilliant keynote during the day: Formalisation and Implementation of Cognitive Semantics presented by Joseph Goguen and Transformations of Image Schemas, presented by Peter Gardenfors. The whole event was chaired by Werner Kuhn.

My running notes on the extended.
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The YellowArrow, a new media street-art project, urban game and tool
for collaborative exploration, creates an interactive forum for people
to leave and discover messages pointing out what counts. Through this
location-based exchange of text messages, the YellowArrow becomes a
symbol for the histories and fantasies that live within our everyday
environment.

www.yellowarrow.org

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I am working on the topic of ‘spatialised communication’ with the aim to see how computational models of grounding can be enriched with spatial information. Example: If I get a message M enriched with information that it has been posted when the emitter was located at P , this contextual information will trigger various inferences that guide my interpretation of M.

The goal of my research would be to build an algorithm that parse and meta-tag the messages of a system in which the users exchange SMS-style mess. attaching them to a 2D map/representation of the city space. This algorithm should be able to give a sense of people interaction into the system knowing the emission contextual information, kind of replicating the cognitive processes of people while exposed in the same acknowledgments of facts. These meta-tags attached should be an ontological categorisation of the message that could be re-used to enhance the message retrieval or re-aggregation for other purposes.

Particularly, my study should demonstrate how providing these automatically-generated descriptors can sustain the communication process economising in some way the content of the messages. The research question I am working on is: Does providing the message receiver with emission contextual information, i.e., the history of locations, enable the receiver to infer more effectively the meaning of the message?

The core literature I am following at this early stage is:

[1] Traum, D. R. (1999). Computational models of grounding in collaborative systems. In working notes of AAAI Fall Symposium on Psychological Models of Communication, pages 124–131.

[2] Clark, H. and Brennan, S. (1991). Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition, chapter Grounding in Communication, pages 127–149. American Psychological Association, Washington.

[3] Dillenbourg, P., Traum, D., and Schneider, D. (1996). Grounding in multi-modal task-oriented collaboration. In Proceedings of the European Conference on AI in Education, pages 415–425, Lisbon, Portugal.

[4] Baker, M. (1994). A model for negotiation in teaching-learning dialogues. Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 5(2):199–245.

Yesterday I was reading this nice post by Cyril Fievet on the question if the journalism is compatible with the collaborative informal approach of the wiki.
I found this idea very intriguing, since several months, I have been thinking about building a community portal in which discussing international and local politics with the idea of giving the possibility to the users of the portal to initiate discussions and to comment on each idea.

I believe that there is an enormous potential in having the possibility of discussing openly political ideas, reporting facts and experimenting with the noble art of arguing and argumenting to support an opinion. This kind of training should be the basis for each democratic society.

More and more we assist to the lost of interest in politics by citizenry and the flattening that common people do on the general ideas as expressed by media or mainstream information.

I believe that we need a new way of reformulating our concept of political participation starting from this simple concepts of providing discussion tools to citizens as this idea of Wikinews.

If you agree with this, please vote here in favor of the creation of wikinews project. Some time ago on of my colleagues, developed a project for photojournalism given to local communities.

Nice link on this project for location based narratives. I think I was attracted because the way they were using maps as the interface to the experience. Waypoints are in a narrative, or a narrative is in the Waypoints?

Another thread here.

Another interesting ubiquitous game, developed by the Intel research lab in Berkeley which is trying to look at the urban tissue with new tools. Here a game is the opportunity for the players to experiment with the space of their city in a different way.

Digital Street Game is a reinterpretation of traditional street games that uses hybrid digital-physical play to spur exploration of players’ relationships to the city and its inhabitants.  The game provides an open-ended platform for research while encouraging creative expression and collaborative play. As part of the game, players generate documentation and commentary that traces their paths through the game – and the city. Different views of these traces create a prismatic portrait of urban places as mediated through technology use and social relationships. The game becomes a methodological experiment in producing a rich environment for community engagement and social research.

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