Monthly Archives: July 2007

Black Iron Prison

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I was brows­ing the National Sec­u­lar Soci­ety site, and from there Con­cordat Watch site and other art­icles — includ­ing the fact that the Pope Benedict’s plans to revive the Latin Mass. And I recalled a dread­ful truth: “The Empire Never Ended” from ‘Valis,’ the book of rev­el­a­tions by Philip K. Dick…

Ah, and what about the post title? The Black Iron Prison is a concept of an all-​pervasive sys­tem of social con­trol pos­tu­lated in the Tract­ates Cryptica Scrip­tura, a sum­mary of an unpub­lished Gnostic exegesis included in VALIS.

“Once, in a cheap sci­ence fic­tion novel, Fat had come across a per­fect descrip­tion of the Black Iron Prison, but set in the far future. So if you super­im­posed the past (ancient Rome) over the present (Cali­for­nia in the twen­ti­eth cen­tury) and super­im­posed the far future world of The Android Cried Me a River over that, you got the Empire, as the supra– or trans-​temporal constant. Everyone who had ever lived was lit­er­ally sur­roun­ded by the iron walls of the prison; they were all inside it and none of them knew it.”

Philip K. Dick, Valis, Lon­don; Gol­lancz, 2001, pp. 54 – 55

We Won!

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So, in days four and five we man­aged to build a team (thanks to Helen): me, Rabeeh Abasi, Sofia Ange­l­etou, Aurona Ger­ber and Alta van der Merwe. We star­ted think­ing on an two-​day imple­ment­able pro­ject, we argued a lot on what a per­son needs when is trav­el­ling to another coun­try, and the solu­tion come at the bar (thanks to Asun, who chased us out of the school build­ing) where we star­ted dis­cuss­ing cul­tural dif­fer­ences — as we were a het­ero­gen­eous group: two south afric­ans, one greek, one romanian and one pakistani. In the end we decided to build an onto­logy that can model what are the social norms that gov­ern dif­fer­ent situ­ations (such as vis­it­ing some­body, court­ship, etc.) in dif­fer­ent cultures.

We also focused (and argued a lot) on the use of some onto­logy pat­terns, such as situ­ation, agent-​role and role-​task. We were on Sat­urday the second group to present our mini-​project, all the other present­a­tions had a sig­ni­fic­ant fun factor and imple­ment­a­tion plans, and couple of them had real pro­to­typ­ical implementations.

And we won! it seems that the com­plex­ity of the mod­el­ling effort and the san­ity of the open research ques­tions we launched did this. I’m per­son­ally still puzzled about it.

SSSW07 — Days Four & Five

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On day four, the invited speaker was Dieter Fensel, who presen­ted “Ser­vice Web 3.0″ — from ser­vices ubi­quity (the milk bottle in the fridge becomes a ser­vice), what’s miss­ing in SOA and to how to bring to it the web prop­er­ties (scalab­il­ity, des­cent­ral­isa­tion, inter­op­er­ab­il­ity, open­ness, etc.). He under­lined the major break­throughs of Web 2.0: blur­ring the dis­tinc­tion between content/​service con­sumers and pro­viders, the move from media for indi­vidu­als to media for com­munit­ies and integ­ra­tion of human and machine com­put­ing in novel ways. Next he presen­ted the Semantic Ser­vice Bus, WSMO and MicroWSMO, and the semantic space: TripleSpace.

On day five, Enrico Motta spoke about “A Research Pro­gramme for the Semantic Web,” where he under­lined that the clas­sical prob­lem of know­ledge aquis­i­tion
(KA) bot­tle­neck can be solved by using the whole semantic web as an infra­struc­ture and also as back­ground know­ledge provider. The gaved examples were about semantic web back­ground know­ledge usage in onto­logy matching.

The rest of these two days were ded­ic­ated to the work for “mini-​projects.” Most of the meet­ings for these pro­jects employed more or less formal places, such as the pool and the bar.…