Chantilly Virginia

The OntologyStream Fable Indexing Project is intrinsically very exciting, as it is oriented towards representing the semantic linkages within and in between 312 Aesop fables.

The notion of semantic linkage is to be determined during the Project and will reflect a Peircean (Charles Sanders Peirce) view of semantic composition. This means that human judgment is needed initially to build a theory of semantic type and valence for the collection.

Once humans have worked out a theory about how semantic linkage reveals itself in the fable collection, then the OntologyStream will allow various technology companies and academic groups to test technology on Indexing, Routing and Retrieval (IRR) related to navigation in the collection.

The “ground truth”, for the tests, will be a hand constructed semantic graph consisting of a collection of syntagmatic units having the form < a, r, b > where a and b are passages in the fables and r is a relational variable. The notion of a syntagmatic unit comes form the work of D. Pospelov in Russia and is consistent with an experimental ontology streaming system using Mill’s logic and Peircean logic.

We are looking for an academic group or literary individual who would go through a specific process in the development of a hypertext document containing 312 fables. In the hypertext document the links are to be categorized so that paths from one fable element to another fable element have quirk properties (color and spin and other differentiators, as in quantum mechanics.)

Quirks should represent the semantic valence between the fable elements.

Perhaps we can call this “quantum linguistics”.

Our methodology for finding all semantic quirks in fables is to descriptively enumerate:

1) first the fable elements, a, b, c, d, ….

and second the

2) the semantic linkage, { r }, between any two pair of these elements

A fable element is any portion of text that is in essence a passage. Passages need not be contiguous and the set of all passages need not partition the text into disjoint passages. The category theory assumes that passages naturally over-lap.

The linkage can be identified as being present without the need to classify. The development of a theory of semantic linkage should be at least as complex as the taxonomy of subatomic particles. The method of descriptive enumeration, however, poses the prospects that a degree of arbitrariness is not only allowed but a necessary part of our process of constructing a simple semantic linkage taxonomy to serve as “ground truth”. Thus we will just do the best we can, and then use the result to classify the linkages.

Later a full set of possible linkage categories will be determined by group judgment and falsification logic. These linkages may form a periodic table of oppositional scales and thus tie into a visualization methodology based on Computer Cognitive Graphs.

The semantic linkage representation will then serve as a benchmark for a worldwide review and testing of Indexing, Routing and Retrieval (IRR) technologies. Several clients will review the results of the test and acquire technologies based on this review.

Our present need (January 2001) is for a scholarly group having an appreciation of the themes within the fable collection. The reward will be the accomplishment of a navigation framework for moving from one fable to another based on what fables have been visited recently and a user profile. It will be a glass bead game, with various navigation engines. The work, and some of the navigation systems, is to be public domain and thus research papers will be possible.

Please communicate this bead to anyone who might wish to be involved in the OntologyStream Fable Indexing Project.

Dr. Paul S. Prueitt

Director BCNGroup

Founder OntologyStream

Knowledge Scientist at Acappella Software