ArticleRead (3): A Definition of Information

A Definition of Information , By A.D. Madden, Aslib Proceedings vol. 52, No.9, p.343-, 2000.10.

In his article A.D. Madden has drawn some attention to the interpretation of information in the aspect of context.

After reviewing literatures defining information: as a representation of knowledge; as data in the environment; as part of the communication process; as a resource or commodity, the author has an attempt to further defining “information” in a perspective of “informing contexts”.

Three major elements in his Information-in-Context Model are defined as: “authorial context” which is a message being originated, “readership context” which is a message being received and interpreted, as well as “the message” which is the information being transmitted.

The idea of taking information reception and interpretation within personal and community paradigms in social-cultural contexts is valuable for most understating of the definition of information. However, the author rephrases the definition of information for the context-reliant model of information reception in the conclusion without clear explanation about “stimulus”, “system” and “system relationship” . The rephrases of the definition makes the information more blur in the end.

The general idea of Madden’s definition of information can be summarized as the figure shown.

Note: This review was mainly completed as a homework while taking the Humanity Informatics Class lectured by Professor Ching-Chun Hsieh in December 2006.

ArticleRead (1): The pragmatic web: a manifesto

The pragmatic web: a manifesto, By Mareike Schoop, Aldo de Moor, and Jan L.G. Dietz, Communications of the ACM, May 2006 Vol.49, No.5

This article is composed of 7 paragraphs. From a context driven perspective, the authors support some preliminary thoughts of Pragmatic Web of Munindar Singh (2002). A similar sense of pragmatics in essential issues of context-based, community as well as collaboration structure has advanced two International Conferences on the Pragmatic Web with this Manifesto in 2006 and 2007, and is supposed to be further advanced at the 3rd Conference in Uppsala, Sweden, 2008.

In the first place, the article starts with existing Semantic Web problems such as complex format of RDF and ontology, as well as the insufficient context-free assumption which may not satisfy Web functions in communication, consensus building, and cooperatively modifying ontologies. It then shifts towards the crucial challenge of how to build a socio-technical infrastructure to leverage the Web from Semantics to Pragmatics.

In particular, authors are devoted to the concept which ontologies co-evolve with their communities of use, and within conversation between communities in practice. Thus, the aim of Pragmatic Web is to increase human collaboration effectively by proper technologies. Some proposals for the implementation of this Pragmatic Vision has been drawn on, for instance, building systems :
(1) for ontology negotiation
(2) for ontology-based business interaction
(3) for pragmatic ontology building efforts in communities of practice, in other words, for goal-oriented discourses in communities.
This is maybe the strongest part of the article, and it was later then the most cited Pragmatic Vision for scholars of interests.

It is somewhat, however, not clear that the conclusion part brought out a theoretical foundation in the language-action perspective as an analysis approach for the Pragmatic Web. By contrast, Singh (2002) did go back to the original pragmatic scholarship for its foundations of the theory of Signs by Charles Morris. However, it is not possible to do justice to whether the importance of Sign theory (Semiotics) should be or should not be in the Pragmatic Web research agenda in only one sentence or one paragraph. Instead, the pragmatic research should draw attentions to questions such as: how the Semiotic School find a place for the Web Science, and how the Web Science Community re-negotiate and collaborate with the Semiotic communities to work out the definition of Pragmatic Web in practice.