During my weekly meeting with Pierre, I tried to understand from which approach to tackle the PhD work I am involved with. At first we defined the approaches we did not want to pursue further: a) the Mental Representation of Space; b) the cognitive Navigation of space; c) the forming of the idea of the city.

Instead we decided to focus on the language and psycho-linguistic studies, particularly the mutual modeling which happen through the language and the dialogue. Language uses context, in particular space and history, following the principle of the least collaborative effort (Clark)

However other approaches and theoretical branches will be needed, like the cognitive understanding of maps.

Description Logics for Information Modeling and Access

presented by Enrico Franconi, Open University of Bolzano

what is an Ontology? It is a formal conceptualization of the world: a conceptual schema, a set of constraints.

an ontology language introduces concepts (classes/entities), properties of concepts (slots/attributes/roles), relationships (associations) and additional constraints. [it may be simple, frame-based, logic-based]

UML is a kind of ontology
—–

The database technology widely available today relies on the assumption of the completeness of the dataset. This structure is designed in a logical schema (tables, relations) that enables for queries at a logical level. An ontology expands of one level this framework, enabling for conceptual schema, which give the user the ability to use constraints for deductions. The ontology has a richer vocabulary than the database and enables for conceptual query on the dataset.

[see also DLR description logic]

Enrico Franconi is associate professor at the Open University of Bolzano, Italy. His interests are in Description Logic, Knowledge Representation, Ontologies and Conceptual Modelling, Artificial Intelligence.

[More…]

D. Goldberg, D. Nichols, B. Oki, and D. Terry. Using collaborative filtering to weave an information tapestry. Communications of the ACM, 35(12):61–70, December 1992.
——————————-

This paper illustrates a simple intelligent mechanism by which people collaborate to help one another perform filtering by recording they reactions to the document they read. These reactions, called annotations, can be accessed by other’s filters.

Buddyspace is an instant messaging system which combines a map visualization system to see where are the other partners:

BuddySpace is an instant messenger with four novel twists: (1) it allows optional maps for geographical & office-plan visualizations in addition to standard ‘buddy lists’; (2) it is built on open source Jabber, which makes it interoperable with ICQ, MSN, Yahoo and others; (3) it is implemented in Java, so it is cross-platform; (4) it is built by a UK research lab, so it is 100% free with full sources readiily available. But BuddySpace is about more than just ‘messaging’, as we explain below.

[more…]

I. T. Vogiazou, M. Dzbor, J. Komzak, and M. Eisenstandt. Buddyspace: Large-scale presence for communities at work at play. In Inhabiting Virtual Places, Workshop at E-CSCW-03, Helsinki, Finland, September 2003.
———————————–

This paper describe the author’s concern towards the spontaneous establishments of human groups and interaction, which they think leads to a powerful collaboration. The framework in which they develop their research is based on some fuzzy ideas of how providing people location is useful in terms of their collaboration. Two points are interesting: the grounding in familiar visual metaphor enables people to focus on the content rather then incurring in the cognitive overhead to make sense of what is shown. The second is that context matters for interacting meaningfully. The testbed they used to explore these concept is an instant messaging client for Jabber that was specifically redesigned to give the user the ability to see the partners on a customized map. Finally, this study was not grounded into a strong experimental framework.

Sometimes it is difficult to collaborate over the network, if not impossible. This recent project, developed at university of North Carolina, helps users to interact over distance sharing the same desktop. In fact, a transparent image of a desktop computer is blended into a video-conference feed, allowing two colleagues to work on the same document, while communicating face to face.

[more…]

TagandScan is a mobile service that enables our members to digitally tag real physical locations with text and images. Although only mobile subscribers in the UK can currently tag locations, anyone can signup and join the TagandScan community to view tags and be prepared for the day when TagandScan is available in their area.

[More …]

Research question

Q_ What are the cognitive processes by which people infer elements of the communication, subsequently economizing the process, only considering the history of the receiver/emitter position and the connected communication content?

Sub1_ Can we build an Agent that will build a semantic description of the communication content based on an algorithm constructed on these cognitive processes?

Sub2_Is this autonomous agent able to maximize contextual spatial cues through providing this semantic description of the spatialized communication between peers?

Sub3_How is this description/knowledge reflecting in the way people use the space in their daily life?

After reading the paper by Tom Gruber, I decided to put visually all the terms he used for describing what is an ontology. Basically an Ontology is the statement of a logical theory, or a specification of a conceptualization. Therefore of interests seems to be the role of the Agents, which operates the translation from the real world to the conceptual one. This agent commits to the ontology if its discoverable actions are consistent with the definitions of the ontology.