{"id":1994,"date":"2011-11-01T15:54:34","date_gmt":"2011-11-01T15:54:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/?p=1994"},"modified":"2011-11-01T15:54:34","modified_gmt":"2011-11-01T15:54:34","slug":"frank-van-harmelens-laws-of-information","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/2011\/11\/01\/frank-van-harmelens-laws-of-information\/","title":{"rendered":"Frank van Harmelen&#8217;s laws of information"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What are the laws of information?\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.vu.nl\/~frankh\">Frank van Harmelen<\/a> proposes seven <strong>laws of information science<\/strong> in his <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.vu.nl\/~frankh\/spool\/ISWC2011Keynote\/\">keynote to the Semantic Web community at ISWC2011<\/a>. ((He presents them as &#8220;computer science laws&#8221; underlying the Semantic Web; yet they are laws about knowledge. This makes them candidate\u00a0<strong>laws of information science<\/strong>, in my terminology.))<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Factual knowledge is a graph. ((&#8220;The vast majority of our factual knowledge consists of simple relationships between things,<br \/>\nrepresented as an ground instance of a binary predicate.<br \/>\nAnd lots of these relations between things together form a giant graph.&#8221;))<\/li>\n<li>Terminological knowledge\u00a0is a hierarchy.<\/li>\n<li>Terminological knowledge\u00a0is much smaller ((by 1-2 orders of magnitude)) than the factual knowledge.<\/li>\n<li>Terminological knowledge\u00a0is of low complexity. ((This is seen in &#8220;the unreasonable effectiveness of low-expressive KR&#8221;:\u00a0&#8220;the information universe is apparently structured in such a way that the double exponential worse case complexity bounds don&#8217;t hit us in practice.&#8221;))<\/li>\n<li>Heterogeneity is unavoidable. ((But heterogeneity is solvable through mostly social, cultural, and economic means (algorithms contribute a little bit). ))<\/li>\n<li>Publication should be distributed, computation should be centralized to decrease speed: &#8220;The Web is not a database, and I don&#8217;t think it ever will be.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Knowledge is layered.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<div>What do you think? If they are laws, can they be proven\/disproven?<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.vu.nl\/~frankh\/spool\/ISWC2011Keynote\/Slide32.JPG\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/tower-of-babel-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Semantic Web vocabularies in the Tower of Babel\" title=\"tower-of-babel\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-2001\" srcset=\"https:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/tower-of-babel-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/tower-of-babel.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I wish every presentation came with this sort of summary: slides and transcript, presented in a linear fashion.\u00a0But these laws deserve more attention and discussion&#8211;especially from information scientists. So I needed something even punchier to <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/jschneider\/status\/131378853145870336\">share<\/a>, (prioritized <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/karenwickett\/status\/131380664401526784\">thanks to Karen<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What are the laws of information?\u00a0Frank van Harmelen proposes seven laws of information science in his keynote to the Semantic Web community at ISWC2011. ((He presents them as &#8220;computer science laws&#8221; underlying the Semantic Web; yet they are laws about knowledge. This makes them candidate\u00a0laws of information science, in my terminology.)) Factual knowledge is a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,85,64,174,176],"tags":[458,455,456,457],"class_list":["post-1994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-science","category-information-ecosystem","category-library-and-information-science","category-phd-diary","category-semantic-web","tag-frank-van-harmelen","tag-iswc","tag-iswc2011","tag-keynotes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1994"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2021,"href":"https:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1994\/revisions\/2021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}