Prof. Pierre Lévy
, CRC, FRSC1The semantic interoperability problem
The universe of communication opened up to us by the interconnection of digital data and automatic manipulators of symbols—in other words, cyberspace—henceforth constitutes the virtual memory of collective human intelligence. Yet, at the symbolic level, important obstacles hinder digital memory from working fully in the service of an optimal management of knowledge. These obstacles can be decomposed into two interdependent sub- groups.
The first one concerns the multiplicity and the incompatibility of symbolic systems:
• plurality of natural languages;
• incompatibility and inadaptation of the numerous indexation and cataloguing systems inherited from the print era (that were not designed to exploit the general interconnection and computing power of cyberspace);
• multiplicity and incompatibility of taxonomies, thesaurus, terminologies, ontologies and classification systems.
1 Pierre Lévy is a philosopher who devoted his professional life to the understanding of
the cultural and cognitive implications of the digital technologies, to promote their best social uses and to study the phenomenon of human collective intelligence. Additional biographic and reference information is on the last page of this chapter.
The second sub-group of obstacles concerns the difficulties encountered by computer science when it tries to take into account the meaning of documents by means of general methods.
Current commercial search engines base their search on strings of
characters and not on concepts. For example, for example, when a user enters
the request « dog», this word is processed as the string of characters « d, o, g » and not as a concept that could be translated in several languages (chien, kelb,
cane...), belonging to the sub-classes of mammals and pets, and constituting
(for example) the super class of bull-dogs and dobermans.
The so-called semantic web, despite its technical sophistication, still does not foster the practical progress in the organization and retrieval of collective memory that is expected from it. It suffers from the same limitation of perspective as the artificial intelligence. For its leaders, the task of exploiting the computers for the augmentation of human intelligence is restricted to the automation of logical operations on standard data formats. The design of original symbolic systems for the notation of meaning that could take advantage of the new possibilities of automatic processing at the service of human collective intelligence is not addressed by the semantic web.
The IEML initiative
In order to overcome the contemporary obstacles to a full exploitation of the new opportunities opened up by cyberspace to human collective intelligence, the Canada Research Chair in collective intelligence at the University of Ottawa has undertaken the task of designing and implementing a metalanguage for semantic addressing. The metalanguage is called IEML for Information Economy MetaLanguage.
The Information Economy MetaLangage (IEML) is a formal language for the expression of semantic sets. It is designed to denote formally—or to address—concepts as semantic sets. Concepts, and networks of concepts, of whatever complexity, can be formalized and uniquely identified—or addressed—by semantic sets expressed in IEML.
Thanks to the regularity of IEML grammar (that is designed in such a way that semantic structures are mirrored by syntactic structures); many
computable functions can be applied to IEML expressions, including ordering,
TECHNICAL PREFACE
To avoid any misunderstanding, I want to stress here that IEML is not supposed to replace or compete with any data format like XML, RDF or OWL. IEML has been designed to replace natural language expressions in whatever data format. The use of IEML expressions to tag semantic metadata on digital documents may be preferred to the use of natural language expressions because semantic sets expressed formally in IEML allow a larger range of computable functions. So, the IEML initiative is not competing with the semantic web: it prepares the erection of the next layer of cyberspace.
IEML grammar is a singular abstract structure that can be expressed by different syntaxes (or notation systems) according to different purposes. For example, there is an XML-IEML syntax (XML: eXtended Mark-up Language) and a STAR-IEML syntax (STAR: Symbolic Tool for Augmented Reasoning). In STAR syntax, the semantic addresses begins by a "*" end are closed by a "**". There is an objective relationship between semantic addresses expressed in STAR-IEML and semantic addresses expressed in XML-IEML. In general, automatic translations can be provided between different IEML syntaxes because they share the same grammar. For practical purposes:
• IEML expressions of semantic sets can be used as semantic metadata; • IEML is the basis for the expression of IEML ontologies, that can be
defined as functions on semantic sets, including relations between semantic sets;
• IEML paves the way for a generation of semantic search engines and tagging machines that can be customized according to their original semantic perspectives but can also cooperate by a collective
intelligence protocol for the standard exchange of semantic metadata.
An on-line IEML-natural languages dictionary establishes the correspondence between the expressions of the metalanguage and their interpretation in natural languages. The grammar, dictionary and various software modules based on the use of the metalanguage are open-source and available for free.