Today I have been reading lots of stuff concerning RDF and all sorts of XML dialects. The results of this surfing is that I found tons of projects that looks at ways to integrate a semantic geographical description of space and SVG. One above all, Jo Walsh’s spacenamespace is an attempt to build an XML/RDF Namespace to describe places and relations among them. She was using at the more general GML that she found terribly complicated, and I agree with her. This Namespace or the connected schema is in principle the ontology I have to build about the relationship among places. She came out with a description which is not so well defined.
To this extent would be great to make some readings on how to realise an ontology or a formal ontology from a philosophical perspective.
Most of the effort I could track on the internet try to build a schema out of the box, something that can be applied to many different cases, something that is defined once and for all. My approach takes a different direction. I am interested in the way people can define the relationship by themselves and how an intelligent bot can restructure the namespace on the fly to structure a dynamic representation of the relationships.
The mean by which this bot should restructure the namespace should be a combination of the user/group behavior, communication intent, statistical analysis based on different sorts of data taken by the system.
So, as the user live with the system, they are not just inputing data into the system, but their action, their moves into the city space, their communication defines new links and EVENTUALLY restructures the grammar itself of these relationships.
To find the algorithm of this bot will be the ultimate goal of my PhD thesis.
In addition the theme of the thesis will be the definition of Dynamic Resources Descriptor framework, languages able to be more accustomed to the variability of the human language and communication, able, to some extent, to support human argumentation.
The ultimate extent of this is not producing a machine readable version of people’s fruition of the space, but is to produce such model because in this way can be propagated and ultimately read and understood by other humans. But this is philosophy …