[ticker-dev] new revision of ticker v3 spec

[Bill Segall]

Ian> I have also detected a significant anti-ontology feeling at various
Ian> times

I'm one of the local anti-ontologists :-) I'm of the belief that language
is a sufficiently complex system to hit the Goedel's proof point of
complexity and that a complete ontology for a real language is a doomed
exercise. I think it's doubly doomed by evolution and dynamicism of
language but that's a different ideological set of objections about
language and the need for it to fluid.

Theoretical beliefs aside, it is remarkable what can be achieved
heuristically and by a small set of definitions, examples include
google/guidebeam (syntactic matching) and some work in the health sector of
defining standards (semantic subsetting).

By a strange coincidence, I was looking earlier in the week at the
Worldwide Lexicon Project at:
http://picto.weblogger.com/stories/storyReader$156

I think that's worth looking at although they're working at the how
(protocols) end of the problem rather than the build (lexicon, dictionary,
encyclopedia, translations), end.

I think it's plausible that at some future point enough data may have been
collected to allow something like an automated mapping from arbitrary data
to a specific template (like the tickertape notions of users, group, and
text) or perhaps just fields 1, 2 and 3) including translations etc.

Being of the pragmatic type, I have always felt that the best approach to
this was to provide a standardised set of fields as in a specification, and
to provide an client interface that allowed arbitrary mapping of data to
those fields. This mechanism allows a standardised defined approach, the
ability for a user to add to their own personalised ontology, and leaves
scopes for bots or agents that could automatically provide mappings (ala
correlation).

etiks is an example of a client that allows the user to map arbitrary
messages onto the defined fields. There is still some thought going about
this for xtickertape, I'm not really sure about the other clients.

Bill.