What are the laws of information? Frank van Harmelen proposes seven laws of information science in his keynote to the Semantic Web community at ISWC2011.1
- Factual knowledge is a graph.2
- Terminological knowledge is a hierarchy.
- Terminological knowledge is much smaller3 than the factual knowledge.
- Terminological knowledge is of low complexity.4
- Heterogeneity is unavoidable.5
- Publication should be distributed, computation should be centralized to decrease speed: “The Web is not a database, and I don’t think it ever will be.”
- Knowledge is layered.
What do you think? If they are laws, can they be proven/disproven?
I wish every presentation came with this sort of summary: slides and transcript, presented in a linear fashion. But these laws deserve more attention and discussion–especially from information scientists. So I needed something even punchier to share, (prioritized thanks to Karen).
- He presents them as “computer science laws” underlying the Semantic Web; yet they are laws about knowledge. This makes them candidate laws of information science, in my terminology. [↩]
- “The vast majority of our factual knowledge consists of simple relationships between things,
represented as an ground instance of a binary predicate.
And lots of these relations between things together form a giant graph.” [↩] - by 1-2 orders of magnitude [↩]
- This is seen in “the unreasonable effectiveness of low-expressive KR”: ”the information universe is apparently structured in such a way that the double exponential worse case complexity bounds don’t hit us in practice.” [↩]
- But heterogeneity is solvable through mostly social, cultural, and economic means (algorithms contribute a little bit). [↩]