Posted:May 28, 2012

What is Structure?

Insights from Commonalities and Theory

One of the main reasons I am such a big fan of RDF as a canonical data model is its ability to capture information in structured, semi-structured and unstructured form [1]. These sources are conventionally defined as:

Structured data — information presented according to a defined data model, often found in relational databases or other forms of tabular data
Semi-structured data — does not conform with the formal structure of data models, but contains tags or other markers to denote fields within the content. Markup languages embedded in text are a common form of such sources
Unstructured data — information content, generally oriented to text, that lacks an explicit data model or schema; structured information can be obtained from it via data mining or information extraction.

A major trend I have written about for some time is the emergence of the structured Web: that is, the exposing of structure from these varied sources in order for more information to be interconnected and made interoperable. I have posited — really a view shared by many — that the structured Web is an intermediate point in the evolution of the Web from one of documents to one where meaningful semantics occurs [2].

It is clear in my writings — indeed in the very name of my company, Structured Dynamics — that structure plays a major role in our thinking. The use and reliance on this term, though, begs the question: just what is structure in an informational sense? We’ll find it helpful to get at the question of What is structure? from a basis using first principles. And this, in turn, may also provide insight into how structure and information are in fact inextricably entwined.

A General Definition of Structure

According to Wikipedia, structure is a fundamental notion, of tangible or intangible character, that refers to the recognition, observation, nature, or permanence of patterns and relationships of entities. The concept may refer to an object, such as a built structure, or an attribute, such as the structure of society.

$Koch curve; example of snowflake fractal; from Wikipedia$

Structure may be abstract, or it may be concrete. Its realm ranges from the physical to ideas and concepts. As a term, “structure” seems to be ubiquitous to every domain. Structure may be found across every conceivable scale, from the most minute and minuscule to the cosmic. Even realms without any physical aspect at all — such as ideas and languages and beliefs — are perceived by many to have structure. We apply the term to any circumstance in which things are arranged or connected to one another, as a means to describe the organization or relationships of things. We seem to know structure when we see it, and to be able to discern structure of very many kinds against unstructured or random backgrounds.

In this way structure quite resembles patterns, perhaps could even be used synonymously with that term. Other closely related concepts include order, organization, design or form. When expressed, structure, particularly that of a recognizably ordered or symmetrical nature, is often called beautiful.

One aspect of structure, I think, that provides the key to its roles and importance is that it can be expressed in shortened form as a mathematical statement. One could even be so bold as to say that mathematics is the language of structure. This observation is one of the threads that will help us tie structure to information.

The Patterned Basis of Nature

The natural world is replete with structure. Patterns in nature are regularities of visual form found in the natural world. Each such pattern can be modeled mathematically. Typical mathematical forms in nature include fractals, spirals, flows, waves, lattices, arrays, Golden ratios, tilings, Fibonacci sequences, and power laws. We see them in such structures as clouds, trees, leaves, river networks, fault lines, mountain ranges, craters, animal spots and stripes, shells, lightning bolts, coastlines, flowers, fruits, skeletons, cracks, growth rings, heartbeats and rates, earthquakes, veining, snow flakes, crystals, blood and pulmonary vessels, ocean waves, turbulence, bee hives, dunes and DNA.

Self-similarity in a Mandelbrot set; from Wikipedia

The mathematical expression of structures in nature is frequently repeated or recursive in nature, often in a self-organizing manner. The swirls of a snail’s shell reflect a Fibonacci sequence, while natural landscapes or lifeforms often have a fractal aspect (as expressed by some of the figures in this article). Fractals are typically self-similar patterns, generally involving some fractional or ratioed formula that is recursively applied. Another way to define it is as a detailed pattern repeating itself.

Even though these patterns can often be expressed simply and mathematically, and they often repeat themselves, their starting conditions can lead to tremendous variability and a lack of predictability. This makes them chaotic, as studied under chaos theory, though their patterns are often discernible.

While we certainly see randomness in statistics, quantum physics and Brownian motion, it is also striking how what gives nature its beauty is structure. As a force separate and apart from the random, there appears to be something in structure that guides the expression of what is nature and what is so pleasing to behold. Self-similar and repeated structures across the widest variety of spatial scales seems to be an abiding aspect of nature.

Structure in Language

Such forms of repeated patterns or structure are also inherent in that most unique of human capabilities, language. As a symbolic species [3], we first used symbols as a way to represent the ideas of things. Simple markings, drawings and ideograms grew into more complicated structures such as alphabets and languages. The languages themselves came to embrace still further structure via sentence structures, document structures, and structures for organizing and categorizing multiple documents. In fact, one of the most popular aspects of this blog site is its Timeline of Information History — worth your look — that shows the progression of structure in information throughout human history.

Grammar is often understood as the rules or structure that governs language. It is composed of syntax, including punctuation, traditionally understood as the sentence structure of languages, and morphology, which is the structural understanding of a language’s linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation or context. There is a whole field of linguistic typology that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features. But grammar is hardly the limit to language structure.

Semantics, the meaning of language, used to be held separate from grammar or structure. But via the advent of the thesaurus, and then linguistic databases such as WordNet and more recently concept graphs that relate words and terms into connected understandings, we also have now come to understand that semantics also has structure. Indeed, these very structural aspects are now opening up to us techniques and methods — generally classified under the heading of natural language processing (NLP) — for extracting meaningful structure from the very basis of written or spoken language.

It is the marriage of the computer with language that is illuminating these understandings of structure in language. And that opening, in turn, is enabling us to capture and model the basis of human language discourse in ways that can be codified, characterized, shared and analyzed. Machine learning and processing is now enabling us to complete the virtual circle of language. From its roots in symbols, we are now able to extract and understand those very same symbols in order to derive information and knowledge from our daily discourse. We are doing this by gleaning the structure of language, which in turn enables us to relate it to all other forms of structured information.

Common Threads Via Patterns

The continuation of structure from nature to language extends across all aspects of human endeavor. I remember excitedly describing to a colleague more than a decade ago what likely is a pedestrian observation: pattern matching is a common task in many fields. (I had observed that pattern matching in very different forms was a standard practice in most areas of industry and commerce.) My “insight” was that this commonality was not widely understood, which meant that pattern matching techniques in one field were not often exploited or seen as transferable to other domains.

In computer science, pattern matching is the act of checking some sequence of tokens for the presence of the constituents of some pattern. It is closely related to the idea of pattern recognition, which is the characterization of some discernible and repeated sequence. These techniques, as noted, are widely applied, with each field tending to have its own favorite algorithms. Common applications that one sees for such pattern-based calculations include communications [4], encoding and coding theory, file compression, data compression, machine learning, video compression, mathematics (including engineering and signal processing via such techniques as Fourier transforms), cryptography, NLP [5], speech recognition, image recognition, OCR, image analysis, search, sound cleaning (that is, error detection, such as Dolby) and gene sequence searching and alignment, among many others.

To better understand what is happening here and the commonalities, let’s look at the idea of compression. Data compression is valuable for transmitting any form of content in wired or wireless manners because we can transmit the same (or closely similar) message faster and with less bandwidth [6]. There are both lossless (no loss of information) and lossy compression methods. Lossless data compression algorithms usually exploit statistical redundancy — that is, a pattern match — to represent data more concisely without losing information. Redundancy in information theory is the number of bits used to transmit a message minus the number of bits of actual information in the message. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data has statistical redundancy. In lossy data compression, some loss of information is acceptable by dropping detail from the data to save storage space. These methods are guided by research that indicates, say, how certain frequencies may not be heard or seen by people and can be removed from the source data.

On a different level, there is a close connection between machine learning and compression: a system that predicts the posterior probabilities of a sequence given its entire history can be used for optimal data compression (by using arithmetic coding on the output distribution), while an optimal compressor can be used for prediction (by finding the symbol that compresses best, given the previous history). This equivalence has been used as justification for data compression as a benchmark for “general intelligence.” On a still different level, one major part of cryptography is the exact opposite of these objectives: constructing messages that pattern matching fails against or is extremely costly or time-consuming to analyze.

When one stands back from any observable phenomena — be it natural or human communications — we can see that the “information” that is being conveyed often has patterns, recursion or other structure that enables it to be represented more simply and compactly in mathematical form. This brings me back to my two favorite protagonists in my recent writings — Claude Shannon and Charles S. Peirce.

Information is Structure

Claude Shannon‘s seminal work in 1948 on information theory dealt with the amount of information that could be theoretically and predictably communicated between a sender and a receiver [7] [8]. No context or semantics were implied in this communication, only the amount of information (for which Shannon introduced the term “bits”) and what might be subject to losses (or uncertainty in the accurate communication of the message). In this regard, what Shannon called “information” is what we would best term “data” in today’s parlance.

A cellular automaton based on hexagonal cells instead of squares (rule 34/2); from Wikipedia

The context of Shannon’s paper and work by others preceding him was to understand information losses in communication systems or networks. Much of the impetus for this came about because of issues in wartime communications and early ciphers and cryptography and the emerging advent of digital computers. But the insights from Shannon’s paper also relate closely to the issues of data patterns and data compression.

A key measure of Shannon’s theory is what he referred to as information entropy, which is usually expressed by the average number of bits needed to store or communicate one symbol in a message. Entropy quantifies the uncertainty involved in predicting the value of a random variable. The Shannon entropy measure is actually a measure of the uncertainty based on the communication (transmittal) between a sender and a receiver; the actual information that gets transmitted and predictably received was formulated by Shannon as R, which can never be zero because all communication systems have losses.

A simple intuition can show how this formulation relates to patterns or data compression. Let’s take a message of completely random digits. In order to accurately communicate that message, all digits (bits) would have to be transmitted in their original state and form. Absolutely no compression of this message is possible. If, however, there are patterns within the message (which, of course, now ceases to make the message random), these can be represented algorithmically in shortened form, so that we only need communicate the algorithm and not the full bits of the original message. If this “compression” algorithm can then be used to reconstruct the bit stream of the original message, the data compression method is deemed to be lossless. The algorithm so derived is also the expression of the pattern that enabled us to compress the message in the first place (such as a*2+1).

We can apply this same type of intuition to human language. In order to improve communication efficiency, the most common words (e.g., “a”, “the”, “I”) should be shorter than less common words (e.g., “disambiguation”, “semantics”, “ontology”), so that sentences will not be too long. As they are. This is an equivalent principal to data compression. In fact, such repeats and patterns apply to the natural world as well.

Shannon’s idea of information entropy has come to inform the even broader subject of entropy in physics and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics [10]. According to Koelman, “the entropy of a physical system is the minimum number of bits you need to fully describe the detailed state of the system.” Very random (uncertain) states have high entropy, patterned ones low entropy. As I noted recently, in open systems, structures (patterns) are a means to speed the tendency to equilibrate across energy gradients [8]. This observation helps provide insight into structure in natural systems, and why life and human communications tend toward less randomness. Structure will always continue to emerge because it is adaptive to speed the deltas across these gradients; structure provides the fundamental commonality between biological information (life) and human information.

In the words of Thomas Schneider [11], “Information is always a measure of the decrease of uncertainty at a receiver.” Of course, in Shannon’s context, what is actually being measured here is data (or bits), not information embodying any semantic meaning or context. Thus, the terminology may not be accurate for discussing “information” in a contemporary sense. But it does show that “structure” — that is, the basis for shortening the length of a message while still retaining its accuracy — is information (in the Shannon context). In this information there is order or patterns, often of a hierarchical or fractal or graph nature. Any structure that emerges that is better able to reduce the energy gradient faster will be favored according to the 2nd Law.

Still More Structure Makes “Information” Information

The data that constitutes “information” in the Shannon sense still lacks context and meaning. In communications terms, it is data; it has not yet met the threshold of actionable information. It is in this next step that we can look to Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 – 1914) for guidance [9].

The core of Peirce’s world view is based in semiotics, the study and logic of signs. In his seminal writing on this, “What is in a Sign?” [10], he wrote that “every intellectual operation involves a triad of symbols” and “all reasoning is an interpretation of signs of some kind”. A sign of an object leads to interpretants, which, as signs, then lead to further interpretants. Peirce’s triadic logic of signs in fact is a taxonomy of sign relations, in which signs get reified and expanded via still further signs, ultimately leading to communication, understanding and an approximation of “canonical” truth. Peirce saw the scientific method as itself an ultimate example of this process. The key aspect of signs for Peirce is the ongoing process of interpretation and reference to further signs.

Information is structure, and structure is information.

Ideograms leading to characters, that get combined into sentences and other syntax, and then get embedded within contexts of shared meanings show how these structures compound themselves and lead to clearer understandings (that is, accurate messages) in the context of human languages. While the Shannon understanding of “information” lacked context and meaning, we can see how still higher-order structures may be imposed through these reifications of symbols and signs that improve the accuracy and efficiency of our messages. Though Peirce did not couch his theory of semiosis on structure nor information, we can see it as a natural extension of the same structural premises in Shannon’s formulation.

In fact, today, we now see the “structure” in the semantic relationships of language through the graph structures of ontologies and linguistic databases such as WordNet. The understanding and explication of these structures are having a similarly beneficial effect on how still more refined and contextual messages can be composed, transmitted and received. Human-to-machine communications is (merely!) the challenge of codifying and making explicit the implicit structures in our languages.

The Peirceian ideas of interpretation (context) and compounding and reifying structure are a major intellectual breakthrough for extending the Shannon “information” theory to information in the modern sense. These insights also occur within a testable logic for how things and the names of things can be understood and related to one another, via logical statements or structures. These, in turn, can be symbolized and formalized into logical constructs that can capture the structure of natural language as well as more structured data (or even nature, as some of the earlier Peirce speculation asserts [13]).

According to this interpretation of Peirce, the nature of information is the process of communicating a form from the object to the interpretant through the sign [14]. The clarity of Peirce’s logic of signs is an underlying factor, I believe, for why we are finally seeing our way clear to how to capture, represent and relate information from a diversity of sources and viewpoints that is defensible and interoperable.

Structure is Information

Common to all of these perspectives — from patterns to nature and on to life and then animal and human communications — we see that structure is information. Human artifacts and technology, though not “messages” in a conventional sense, also embody the information of how they are built within their structures [15]. We also see the interplay of patterns and information in many processes of the natural world [16] from complexity theory, to emergence, to autopoiesis, and on to autocatalysis, self-organization, stratification and cellular automata [17]. Structure in its many guises is ubiquitous.

We, as beings who can symbolically record our perceptions, seem to innately recognize patterns. We see beauty in symmetry. Bilateral symmetry seems to be deeply ingrained in the inherent perception by humans of the likely health or fitness of other living creatures. We see beauty in the patterned, repeated variability of nature. We see beauty in the clever turn of phrase, or in music, or art, or the expressiveness of a mathematical formulation.

We also seem to recognize beauty in the simple. Seemingly complex bit streams that can be reduced to the short, algorithmic expression are always viewed as more elegant than lengthier, more complex alternatives. The simple laws of motion and Newtonian physics fit this pattern, as does Einstein’s E=mc². This preference for the simple is a preference for the greater adaptiveness of the shorter, more universal pattern to messages, an insight indicated by Shannon’s information theory.

In the more prosaic terms of my vocation in the Web and information technology, these insights point to the importance of finding and deriving structured representations of information — including meaning (semantics) — that can be simply expressed and efficiently conveyed. Building upon the accretions of structure in human and computer languages, the semantic Web and semantic technologies offer just such a prospect. These insights provide a guidepost for how and where to look for the next structural innovations. We find them in the algorithms of nature and language, and in making connections that provide the basis for still more structure and patterned commonalities.

Ideas and algorithms around loseless compression and graph theory and network analysis are, I believe, the next fruitful hunting grounds for finding still higher-orders of structure, which can be simply expressed. The patterns of nature, which have emerged incrementally and randomly over the eons of cosmological time, look to be an excellent laboratory.

So, as we see across examples from nature and life to language and all manner of communications, information is structure and structure is information. And it is simply beautiful.

[1] I discuss this advantage, among others, in M. K. Bergman, 2009. “Advantages and Myths of RDF,” AI3:::Adaptive Innovation blog, April 8, 2009. See https://www.mkbergman.com/483/advantages-and-myths-of-rdf/.

[2] The structured Web is object-level data within Internet documents and databases that can be extracted, converted from available forms, represented in standard ways, shared, re-purposed, combined, viewed, analyzed and qualified without respect to originating form or provenance. See further M. K. Bergman, 2007. “What is the Structured Web?,” AI3:::Adaptive Innovation blog, July 18, 2007. See https://www.mkbergman.com/390/what-is-the-structured-web/. Also, for a diagram of the evolution of the Web, see M. K. Bergman, 2007. “More Structure, More Terminology and (hopefully) More Clarity,” AI3:::Adaptive Innovation blog, July 22, 2007. See https://www.mkbergman.com/391/more-structure-more-terminology-and-hopefully-more-clarity/.

[3] Terrence W. Deacon, 1997. The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain, W. W. Norton & Company, July 1997 527 pp. (ISBN-10: 0393038386)

[4] Communications is a particularly rich domain with techniques such as the Viterbi algorithm , which has found universal application in decoding the convolutional codes used in both CDMA and GSM digital cellular, dial-up modems, satellite, deep-space communications, and 802.11 wireless LANs.

[5] Notable areas in natural language processing (NLP) that rely on pattern-based algorithms include classification, clustering, summarization, disambiguation, information extraction and machine translation.

[6] To see some of the associated compression algorithms, there is a massive list of “codecs” (compression/decompression) techniques available; fractal compression is one.

[7] Claude E. Shannon, 1948. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, Bell System Technical Journal, 27: 379–423, 623-656, July, October, 1948. See http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf.

[8] I first raised the relation of Shannon’s paper to data patterns — but did not discuss it further awaiting this current article — in M. K. Bergman, 2012. “The Trouble with Memes,” AI3:::Adaptive Innovation blog, April 4, 2012. See https://www.mkbergman.com/1004/the-trouble-with-memes/.

[9] I first overviewed Peirce’s relation to information messaging in M. K. Bergman, 2012. “Give Me a Sign: What Do Things Mean on the Semantic Web?,” AI3:::Adaptive Innovation blog, January 24, 2012. See https://www.mkbergman.com/994/give-me-a-sign-what-do-things-mean-on-the-semantic-web/. Peirce had a predilection for expressing his ideas in “threes” throughout his writings.

[10] For a very attainable lay description, see Johannes Koelman, 2012. “What Is Entropy?,” in Science 2.0 blog, May 5, 2012. See http://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/what_entropy-89730.

[11] See Thomas D. Schneider, 2012. “Information Is Not Entropy, Information Is Not Uncertainty!,” Web page retrieved April 4, 2012; see http://www.lecb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/information.is.not.uncertainty.html.

[12] Charles Sanders Peirce, 1894. “What is in a Sign?”, see http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/ep/ep2/ep2book/ch02/ep2ch2.htm.

[13] It is somewhat amazing, more than a half century before Shannon, that Peirce himself considered “quasi-minds” such as crystals and bees to be sufficient as the interpreters of signs. See Commens Dictionary of Peirce’s Terms (CDPT), Peirce’s own definitions, and the entry on “quasi-minds”; see http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/terms/quasimind.html.

[14] João Queiroz, Claus Emmeche and Charbel Niño El-Hania, 2005. “Information and Semiosis in Living Systems: A Semiotic Approach,” in SEED 2005, Vol. 1. pp 60-90; see http://www.library.utoronto.ca/see/SEED/Vol5-1/Queiroz_Emmeche_El-Hani.pdf.

[15] Kevin Kelley has written most broadly about this in his book, What Technology Wants, Viking/Penguin, October 2010. For a brief introduction, see Kevin Kelly, 2006. “The Seventh Kingdom,” in The Technium blog, February 1, 2006. See http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2006/02/the_seventh_kin.php.

[16] For a broad overview, see John Cleveland, 1994. “Complexity Theory: Basic Concepts and Application to Systems Thinking,” Innovation Network for Communities, March 27, 1994. May be obtained at http://www.slideshare.net/johncleveland/complexity-theory-basic-concepts.

[17] For more on cellular automata, see Stephen Wolfram, 2002. A New Kind of Science, Wolfram Media, Inc., May 14, 2002, 1197 pp. ISBN 1-57955-008-8.

Posted:May 21, 2012

New UMBEL Release Gains schema.org, GeoNames Capabilities

Modularization Also Leads to Big Graph Visualization

We are pleased to announce the release of version 1.05 of UMBEL, which now has linkages to schema.org [6] and GeoNames [1]. UMBEL has also been split into ‘core’ and ‘geo’ modules. The resulting smaller size of UMBEL ‘core’ — now some 26,000 reference concepts — has also enabled us to create a full visualization of UMBEL’s content graph.

The first notable change in UMBEL v. 1.05 is its mapping to schema.org. schema.org is a collection of schema (usable as HTML tags) that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers. schema.org was first developed and organized by the major search engines of Bing, Google and Yahoo!; later Yandex joined as a sponsor. Now many groups are supporting schema.org and contributing vocabularies and schema.

I was one of the first to hail schema.org hours after its announcement [7]. It seemed only fair that we put our money where our mouth is and map UMBEL to it as well.

The UMBEL-schema.org mapping was manually done by, firstly, searching and inspecting the current UMBEL concept base for appropriate matches. If that mapping failed to find a rather direct correspondence between existing UMBEL concepts and the types in schema.org, the source concept reference of OpenCyc was then inspected in a similar manner. Failing a match from either of these two sources, the decision was to add a new concept to the ‘core’ UMBEL. This new concept was then appropriately placed into the UMBEL reference concept subject structure.

The net result of this process was to add 298 mapped schema.org types to UMBEL. This mapping required a further three concepts from OpenCyc, and a further 78 new reference concepts, to be added to UMBEL. Along with the new updates to UMBEL and its mappings, the section of Key Files below provides further explanatory links. We are reserving the addition of schema.org properties for a later time, when we plan to re-organize the Attributes SuperType within UMBEL.

Modularization of the UMBEL Vocabulary

Even in the early development of UMBEL there was a tension about the scope and level of what geographic information to include in its concept base. The initial decision was to support country and leading-country province and state concepts, and some leading cities. This decision was in the spirit of a general reference structure, but still felt arbitrary.

GeoNames is devoted to geographical information and concepts — both natural and human artifacts — and has become the go-to resource for geo-locational information. The decision was thus made to split out the initial geo-locational information in UMBEL and replace it with mappings to GeoNames. This decision also had the advantage of beginning a process of modularization of UMBEL.

Two sets of reference concepts were identified as useful for splitting out from the ‘core’ UMBEL in a geo-locational aspect:

Geopolitical places and places of human activities and facilities
Natural geographical places and features.

These removed concepts were then placed into a separate ‘geo’ module of UMBEL, including all existing annotations and relations, resulting in a module of 1,854 concepts. That left 26,046 concepts in UMBEL ‘core’. Because of some shared parent concepts, there is some minor overlap between the two modules. These are now the modular splits in UMBEL version 1.05.

Mapping to GeoNames

GeoNames has a different structure to UMBEL. It has few classes and distinguishes its geographic information on the basis of some 671 feature codes. These codes span from geopolitical divisions — such as countries, states or provinces, cities, or other administrative districts — to splits and aggregations by natural and human features. Types of physical terrain — above ground and underwater — are denoted, as well as regions and landscape features governed by human activities (such as vineyards or lighthouses) [1]. We wanted to retain this richness in our mappings.

We needed a bridge between feature codes and classes, a sort of umbrella property generally equivalent to owl:sameAs in nature, but with some possible inexactitude or degree of approximation. The appropriate choice here is umbel:correspondsTo, which was designed specifically for this purpose [2]. This predicate is thus the basis for the mappings.

The 671 GeoNames feature codes were manually mapped to corresponding classes in the UMBEL concepts, in a manner identical to what was described for schema.org above. The result was to add another further three OpenCyc concepts and to add 88 new UMBEL reference concepts to accommodate the full GeoNames feature codes. We thus now have a complete representation of the full structure and scope of GeoNames in UMBEL.

There are three modes in which one can now work with UMBEL:

With UMBEL ‘core’ alone, recommended when your concept space is not concerned with geographical information
UMBEL ‘core’ plus the UMBEL ‘geo’ module — equivalent to prior versions of UMBEL, or
UMBEL ‘core’ plus GeoNames, recommended where geographical information is important to your concept space.

In the latter case, you may use SPARQL queries with the umbel:correspondsTo predicate to achieve the desired retrievals. If more logic is required, you will likely need to look to a rules-based addition such as SWRL [3] or RIF [4] to capture the umbel:correspondsTo semantics.

New Big Graph Visualization

Because of the UMBEL modularization, it has now become tractable to graph the main ontology in its entirety. The core UMBEL ontology contains about 26,000 reference concepts organized according to 33 super types. There are more than 60,000 relationships amongst these concepts, resulting in a graph structure of very large size.

It is difficult to grasp this graph in the abstract. Thus, using methods earlier described in our use of the Gephi visualization software [5], we present below a dynamic, navigable rendering of this graph of UMBEL core:

Note: at standard resolution, if this graph were to be rendered in actual size, it would be larger than 34 feet by 34 feet square at full zoom !!! Hint: that is about 1200 square feet, or 1/2 the size of a typical American house !

Note: If you are viewing this in a feed reader, click here to see the interactive graph.

This UMBEL graph displays:

All 26,000 concepts (“nodes”) with labels, and with connections shown (though you must must zoom to see)
The color-coded relation of these nodes to the 33 or so major SuperTypes in UMBEL, as well as the relative position of these clusters with respect to one another, and
When zooming (use scroll wheel or + icon) or panning (via mouse down moves), wait a couple of seconds to get the clearest image refresh:

You may also want to inspect a static version of this big graph by downloading a PDF.

Key Files and Links

The main UMBEL Web site: http://umbel.org
The basic UMBEL v. 1.05 release: https://github.com/structureddynamics/UMBEL
Full UMBEL specifications and annexes: http://techwiki.umbel.org/index.php/Category:Specification
The UMBEL ‘core’ module: https://github.com/structureddynamics/UMBEL/blob/master/Reference%20Structure/umbel_reference_concepts.n3/
The UMBEL-schema.org mapping file: https://github.com/structureddynamics/UMBEL/blob/master/External%20Ontologies/schema.org.n3
schema.org mapping methodology: Annex I: schema.org Mapping
The UMBEL ‘geo” module: https://github.com/structureddynamics/UMBEL/blob/master/Modules/geo/umbel_geo.n3
The UMBEL-GeoNames mapping file: https://github.com/structureddynamics/UMBEL/blob/master/External%20Ontologies/geonames.n3
Geo methodology: Annex J: Geo Module and GeoNames Mapping
The interactive UMBEL ‘big graph’: http://umbel.org/content/umbel-graph.

Lastly, we fully updated the UMBEL Web site and re-released the UMBEL wiki.

[1] For more information on GeoNames, see http://www.geonames.org/. The complete mapping to GeoNames is based on its 671 feature codes, which describe natural, geopolitical, and human activity geo-locational information; see further http://www.geonames.org/statistics/total.html

[2] Approximate relationships are discussed in M.K. Bergman, 2010. “The Nature of Connectedness on the Web,” AI3:::Adaptive Information blog, November 22, 2010; see https://www.mkbergman.com/935/the-nature-of-connectedness-on-the-web/. One option, for example, is the x:coref predicate from the UMBC Ebiquity group; see further Jennifer Sleeman and Tim Finin, 2010. “Learning Co-reference Relations for FOAF Instances,” Proceedings of the Poster and Demonstration Session at the 9th International Semantic Web Conference, November 2010; see http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/_file_directory_/papers/522.pdf. In the words of Tim Finin of the Ebiquity group:

The solution we are currently exploring is to define a new property to assert that two RDF instances are co-referential when they are believed to describe the same object in the world. The two RDF descriptions might be incompatible because they are true at different times, or the sources disagree about some of the facts, or any number of reasons, so merging them with owl:sameAs may lead to contradictions. However, virtually merging the descriptions in a co-reference engine is fine — both provide information that is useful in disambiguating future references as well as for many other purposes. Our property (:coref) is a transitive, symmetric property that is a super-property of owl:sameAs and is paired with another, :notCoref that is symmetric and generalizes owl:differentFrom.

When we look at the analog properties noted above, we see that the property objects tend to share reflexivity, symmetry and transitivity. We specifically designed the umbel:correspondsTo predicate to capture these close, nearly equivalent, but uncertain degree of relationships.

[3] SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) combines sublanguages of the OWL Web Ontology Language (OWL DL and Lite) with those of the Rule Markup Language (Unary/Binary Datalog). SWRL has the full power of OWL DL, but at the price of decidability and practical implementations. See further http://www.w3.org/Submission/SWRL/.

[4] The Rule Interchange Format (RIF) is a W3C Recommendation. RIF is based on the observation that there are many “rules languages” in existence, and what is needed is to exchange rules between them. RIF includes three dialects, a Core dialect which is extended into a Basic Logic Dialect (BLD) and Production Rule Dialect (PRD). See further http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wiki/RIF_FAQ.

[5] See further, M.K. Bergman, 2011. “A New Best Friend: Gephi for Large-scale Networks,” AI3:::Adaptive Information blog, August 8, 2011.

[6] schema.org lists its various contributing schema and also provides an OWL ontology of the system.

[7] See further, M.K. Bergman, 2011. “Structured Web Gets Massive Boost,” AI3:::Adaptive Information blog, June 2, 2011.

Posted:May 18, 2012

Deconstructing the Google Knowledge Graph

Some Quick Investigations Point to Promise, Disappointments

It has been clear for some time that Google has been assembling a war chest of entities and attributes. It first began to appear as structured results in its standard results listings, a trend I commented upon more than three years ago in Massive Muscle on the ABox at Google. Its purchase of Metaweb and its Freebase service in July 2010 only affirmed that trend.

This week, perhaps a bit rushed due to attention to the Facebook IPO, Google announced its addition of the Knowledge Graph (GKG) to its search results. It has been releasing this capability in a staged manner. Since I was fortunately one of the first to be able to see these structured results (due to luck of the draw and no special “ins”), I have spent a bit of time deconstructing what I have found.

Apparent Coverage

What you get (see below) when you search on particular kinds of entities is in essence an “infobox“, similar to the same structure as what is found on Wikipedia. This infobox is a tabular presentation of key-value pairs, or attributes, for the kind of entity in the search. A ‘people’ search, for example, turns up birth and death dates and locations, some vital statistics, spouse or famous relations, pictures, and links to other relevant structured entities. The types of attributes shown vary by entity type. Here is an example for Stephen King, the writer (all links from here forward provide GKB results), which shows the infobox and its key-value pairs in the righthand column:

Reportedly these results are drawn from Freebase, Wikipedia, the CIA World Factbook and other unidentified sources. Some of the results may indeed be coming from Freebase, but I saw none as such. Most entities I found were from Wikipedia, though it is important to know that Freebase in its first major growth incarnation springboarded from a Wikipedia baseline. These early results may have been what was carried forward (since other contributed data to Freebase is known to be of highly variable quality).

The entity coverage appears to be spotty and somewhat disappointing in this first release. Entity types that I observed were in these categories:

People
Chemical Compounds
Directors
Some Companies
Some National Parks

Places
Musicians/Musical Groups
Actors
Some Government Agencies
Many Local Businesses

Animals
Movies
Albums
Notable Landmarks
Who Knows What Else

Entity types that I expected to see, but did not find include:

Products
Most Companies
Who Knows What Else

Songs
Most Government Agencies

Concepts
Non-government Organizations

This is clearly not rigorous testing, but it would appear that entity types along the lines of what is in schema.org is what should be expected over time.

I have no way to gauge the accuracy of Google’s claims that it has offered up structured data on some 500 million entities (and 3.5 billion facts). However, given the lack of coverage in key areas of Wikipedia (which itself has about 3 million entities in the English version), I suspect much of that number comes from the local businesses and restaurants and such that Google has been rapidly adding to its listings in recent years. Coverage of broadly interesting stuff still seems quite lacking.

The much-touted knowledge graph is also kind of disappointing. Related links are provided, but they are close and obvious. So, an actor will have links to films she was in, or a person may have links to famous spouses, but anything approaching a conceptual or knowledge relationship is missing. I think, though, we can see such links and types and entity expansions to steadily creep in over time. Google certainly has the data basis for making these expansions. And, constant, incremental improvement has been Google’s modus operandi.

Deconstructing the URL

For some time, and at various meetings I attend, I have always been at pains to question Google representatives whether there is some unique, internal ID for entities within its databases. Sometimes the reps I have questioned just don’t know, and sometimes they are cagey.

But, clearly, anything like the structured data that Google has been working toward has to have some internal identifier. To see if some of this might now have surfaced with the Knowledge Graph, I did a bit of poking of the URLs shown in the searches and the affiliated entities in the infoboxes. Under most standard searches, the infobox appears directly if there is one for that object. But, by inspecting cross-referenced entities from the infoboxes themselves, it is possible to discern the internal key.

The first thing one can do in such inspections is to remove that stuff that is local or cookie things related to one’s own use preferences or browser settings. Other tests can show other removals. So, using the Stephen King example above, we can eliminate these aspects of the URL:

https://www.google.com/search?~~num=100&hl=en&safe=off&~~q=stephen+king&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgVuLQz9U3MCvIKwQAcT1q1AwAAAA~~&sa=X&ei=Q-S2T6e1HYOw2wXR2OXOCQ&ved=0CPMGEJsTKAA&biw=1280&bih=827~~

This actually conformed to my intuition, because the ‘&stick’ aspect was a new parameter for me. (Typically, in many of these dynamic URLs, the various parameters are separated by one another by a set designator character. In the case of Google, that is the ampersand &.)

By simply doing repeated searches that result in the same entity references, I was able to confirm that the &stick parameter is what invokes the unique ID and infobox for each entity. Further, we can decompose that further, but the critical aspect seems to be what is not included within the following: &stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONg . . [VuLQz9U3] . . AAAA. The stuff in the brackets varies less, and I suspect might be related to the source, rather than the entity.

I started to do some investigation on types and possible sources, but ran out of time. Listed below are some &stick identifiers for various types of entities (each is a live link):

Type	Entity	Infobox Identifier
Place	Los Angeles	&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgVuLSz9U3MDYoTDIuAQD9ON7KDgAAAA
Place	Brentwook	&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgVuLUz9U3MKwsNEkDAN6nm-sNAAAA
Person	Arthur Miller	&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgVmLXz9U3qEwrAADRsxaaCwAAAA
Person	Joe DiMaggio	&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgVuLQz9U3SDFMqwAAAy8zdQwAAAA
Person	Marilyn Monroe	&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgVuLQz9U3MCkvLAIAW7x_LwwAAAA
Movie	Shawshank Redemption	&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgVuLQz9U3MM_KKwEAPYgNDQwAAAA
Movie	The Green Mile	&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgVuLUz9U3MC62zC4AAGg8mEkNAAAA
Movie	Dr. Strangelove	&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgVuLQz9U3MEopzwIAfsFCUQwAAAA
Animal	Toucan	&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgVuLQz9U3MM8wNAcA4g1_3AwAAAA
Animal	Wolverine	&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgUeLQz9U3sDAryQIAhJ3RUwwAAAA
Musicians/Groups	The Beatles	&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgVuLQz9U3ME82yAIAC_7r3AwAAAA
Albums	The White Album	&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgVuLSz9U3MMxIN0nKAADnd5clDgAAAA

You can verify that this ‘&stick‘ reference is what is pulling in the infobox by looking at this modified query that has substituted Marilyn Monroe’s &stick in the Stephen King URL string: Note the standard search results in the lefthand results panel are the same as for Stephen King, but we now have fooled the Google engine to display Marilyn Monroe’s infobox.

I’m sure over time that others will deconstruct this framework to a very precise degree. What would really be great, of course, as noted on many recent mailing lists, is for Google to expose all of this via an API. The Google listing could become the de facto source for Webby entity identifiers.

Some Concluding Thoughts

Sort of like when schema.org was first announced, there have been complaints from some in the semantic Web community that Google released this stuff without once saying the word “semantic”, that much had been ripped off from the original researchers and community without attribution, that a gorilla commercial entity like Google could only be expected to milk this stuff for profit, etc., etc.

That all sounds like sour grapes to me.

What we have here is what we are seeing across the board: the inexorable integration of semantic technology approaches into many existing products. Siri did it with voice commands; Bing, and now Google, are doing it too with search.

We should welcome these continued adoptions. The fact is, semWeb community, that what we are seeing in all of these endeavors is the right and proper role for these technologies: in the background, enhancing our search and information experience, and not something front and center or rammed down our throats. These are the natural roles of semantic technologies, and they are happening at a breakneck pace.

Welcome to the semantic technology space, Google! I look forward to learning much from you.

Posted:April 30, 2012

Pragmatic Approaches to the Semantic Web

Linked Data is Sometimes a Useful Technique, but is an Inadequate Focus

While in Australia on other business, I had the great fortune to be invited by Adam Bell of the Australian War Memorial to be the featured speaker at the Canberra Semantic Web Meetup on April 23. The talk was held within the impressive BAE Systems Theatre of the Memorial and was very well attended. My talk was preceded by an excellent introduction to the semantic Web by David Ratcliffe and Armin Haller of CSIRO. They have kindly provided their useful slides online.

Many of the attendees came from the perspective of libraries, archives or museums. They naturally had an interest in the linked data activities in this area, a growing initiative that is now known under the acronym of LOD-LAM. Though I have been an advocate of linked data going back to 2006, one of my main theses was that linked data was an inadequate focus to achieve interoperability. The key emphases of my talk were that the pragmatic contributions of semantic technologies reside more in mindsets, information models and architectures than in ‘linked data’ as currently practiced.

Disappointments and Successes

The semantic Web and its most recent branding of linked data has antecedents going back to 1945 via Vannevar Bush’s memex and Ted Nelson’s hypertext of the early 1960s. The most powerful portrayal of the potential of the semantic Web comes in Douglas Adams’ 1990 Hyperland special for the BBC, a full decade before Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues first coined the term ‘semantic web’ [1]. The Hyperland vision of obsequious intelligent agents doing our very bidding has, of course, not been fully realized. The lack of visible uptake of this full vision has caused some proponents to back away from the idea of the semantic Web. Linked data, in fact, was a term coined by Berners-Lee himself, arguably in part to re-brand the idea and to focus on a more immediate, achievable vision. In its first formulation linked data emphasized the RDF (Resource Description Framework) data model, though others, notably Kingsley Idehen, have attempted to put forward a revisionist definition of linked data that includes any form of structured data involving entity attribute values (EAV).

No matter how expressed, the idea behind all of these various terms has in essence been to make meaningful connections, to provide the frameworks for interoperability. Interoperability means getting disparate sources of data to relate to each other, as a means of moving from data to information. Interoperability requires that source and receiver share a vocabulary about what things mean, as well as shared understandings about the associations or degree of relationship between the items being linked.

The current concept of linked data attempts to place these burdens mostly on the way data is published. While apparently “simpler” than earlier versions of the semantic Web (since linked data de-emphasizes shared vocabularies and nuanced associations), linked data places onerous burdens on how publishers express their data. Though many in the advocacy community point to the “billions” of RDF triples expressed as a success, actual consumers of linked data are rare. I know of no meaningful application or example where the consumption of linked data is an essential component.

However, there are a few areas of success in linked data. DBpedia, Freebase (now owned by Google), and GeoNames have been notable in providing identifiers (URIs) for common concepts, things, entities and places. There has also been success in the biomedical community with linked data.

Meanwhile, other aspects of the semantic Web have also shown success, but been quite hidden. Apple’s spoken Siri service is driven by an ontological back-end; schema.org is beginning to provide shared ways for tagging key entities and concepts, as promoted by the leading search engines of Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Yandex; Bing itself has been improved as a search service by the incorporation of the semantic search technologies of its earlier Powerset acquisition; and Google is further showing how NLP (natural language processing) techniques can be used to extract meaningful structure for characterizing entities in search results and in search completion and machine language translation. These services are here today and widely used. All operate in the background.

What Lessons Can We Derive?

These failures and successes help provide some pragmatic lessons going forward.

While I disagree with Kingsley’s revisionist approach to re-defining linked data, I very much agree with his underlying premise: effective data exchange does not require RDF. Most instance records are already expressed as simple entity-value pairs, and any data transfer serialization — from key-value pairs to JSON to CSV spreadsheets — can be readily transformed to RDF.

Semantic technologies are fundamentally about knowledge representation, not data transfer.

This understanding is important because the fundamental contribution of RDF is not as a data exchange format, but as a foundational data model. The simple triple model of RDF can easily express the information assertions in any form of content, from completely unstructured text (after information extraction or metadata characterization) to the most structured data sources. Triples can themselves be built up into complete languages (such as OWL) that also capture the expressiveness necessary to represent any extant data or information schema [2].

The ability of RDF to capture any form of data or any existing schema makes it a “universal solvent” for information. This means that the real role of RDF is as a canonical data model at the core of the entire information architecture. Linked data, with its emphasis on data publishing and exchange, gets this focus exactly wrong. Linked data emphasizes RDF at the wrong end of the telescope.

The idea of common schema and representations is at the core of the semantic Web successes that do exist. In fact, when we look at Siri, emerging search, or some of the other successes noted above, we see that their semantic technology components are quite hidden. Successful semantics tend to work in the background, not in the foreground in terms of how data is either published or consumed. Semantic technologies are fundamentally about knowledge representation, not data transfer.

Where linked data is being consumed, it is within communities such as the life sciences where much work has gone into deriving shared vocabularies and semantics for linking and mapping data. These bases for community sharing express themselves as ontologies, which are really just formalized understandings of these shared languages in the applicable domain (life sciences, in this case). In these cases, curation and community processes for deriving shared languages are much more important to emphasize than how data gets exposed and published.

Linked data as presently advocated has the wrong focus. The techniques of publishing data and de-referencing URIs are given prominence over data quality, meaningful linkages (witness the appalling misuse of owl:sameAs [3]), and shared vocabularies. These are the reasons we see little meaningful consumption of linked data. It is also the reason that the much touted FYN (“follow your nose”) plays no meaningful information role today other than a somewhat amusing diversion.

Shifting the Focus

In our own applications Structured Dynamics promotes seven pillars to pragmatic semantic technologies [4]. Linked data is one of those pillars, because where the other foundations are in place, including shared understandings, linked data is the most efficient data transfer format. But, as noted, linked data alone is insufficient.

Linked data is thus the wrong starting focus for new communities and users wishing to gain the advantages of interoperability. The benefits of interoperability must first obtain from a core (or canonical) data model — RDF — that is able to capture any extant data or schema. As these external representations get boiled down to a canonical form, there must be shared understandings and vocabularies to capture the meaning in this information. This puts community involvement and processes at the forefront of the semantic enterprise. Only after the community has derived these shared understandings should linked data be considered as the most efficient way to interchange data amongst the community members.

Identifying and solving the “wrong” problems is a recipe for disappointment. The challenges of the semantic Web are not in branding or messaging. The challenges of the semantic enterprise and Web reside more in mindsets, approaches and architecture. Linked data is merely a technique that contributes little — perhaps worse by providing the wrong focus — to solving the fundamental issue of information interoperability.

Once this focus shifts, a number of new insights emerge. Structure is good in any form; arguments over serializations or data formats are silly and divert focus. The role of semantic technologies is likely to be a more hidden one, to reside in the background as current successes are now showing us. Building communities with trusted provenance and shared vocabularies (ontologies) are the essential starting points. Embracing and learning about NLP will be important to include the 80% of content currently in unstructured text and disambiguating reference conflicts. Ultimate users, subject matter experts and librarians are much more important contributors to this process than developers or computer scientists. We largely now have the necessary specifications and technologies in place; it is time for content and semantic reconciliation to guide the process.

It is great that the abiding interest in interoperability is leading to the creation of more and more communities, such as LOD-LAM, forming around the idea of linked data. What is important moving forward is to use these interests as springboards, and not boxes, for exploring the breadth of available semantic technologies.

For More on the Talk

Below is a link to my slides used in Canberra:

Pragmatic Approaches to the Semantic Web

View more presentations from Mike Bergman.

Also, as mentioned, the intro slides are online, a video recording of the presentations is also available, and some other blog postings occasioned by the talks are also online.

[1] Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila, 2001. “The Semantic Web”. Scientific American Magazine; see http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-semantic-web.

[2] See further, M.K. Bergman, 2009. “Advantages and Myths of RDF,” AI3:::Adaptive Innovation blog, April 8, 2009. See https://www.mkbergman.com/483/advantages-and-myths-of-rdf/.

[3] See, among many, M.K. Bergman, 2010. “Practical P-P-P-Problems with Linked Data,” AI3:::Adaptive Innovation blog, October 4, 2010. See https://www.mkbergman.com/917/practical-p-p-p-problems-with-linked-data/.

[4] M.K. Bergman, 2010. “Seven Pillars of the Open Semantic Enterprise,” AI3:::Adaptive Innovation blog, January 12, 2010. See https://www.mkbergman.com/859/seven-pillars-of-the-open-semantic-enterprise/.

Posted:April 4, 2012

The Trouble with Memes

Adaptive Information is a Hammer, but Genes are Not a Nail

Since Richard Dawkins first put forward the idea of the “meme” in his book The Selfish Gene some 35 years ago [1], the premise has struck in my craw. I, like Dawkins, was trained as an evolutionary biologist. I understand the idea of the gene and its essential role as a vehicle for organic evolution. And, all of us clearly understand that “ideas” themselves have a certain competitive and adaptive nature. Some go viral; some run like wildfire and take prominence; and some go nowhere or fall on deaf ears. Culture and human communications and ideas play complementary — perhaps even dominant — roles in comparison to the biological information contained within DNA (genes).

I think there are two bases for why the “meme” idea sticks in my craw. The first harkens back to Dawkins. In formulating the concept of the “meme”, Dawkins falls into the trap of many professionals, what the French call déformation professionnelle. This is the idea of professionals framing problems from the confines of their own points of view. This is also known as the Law of the Instrument, or (Abraham) Maslow‘s hammer, or what all of us know colloquially as “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail“ [2]. Human or cultural information is not genetics.

The second — and more fundamental — basis for why this idea sticks in my craw is its mis-characterization of what is adaptive information, the title and theme of this blog. Sure, adaptive information can be found in the types of information structures at the basis of organic life and organic evolution. But, adaptive information is much, much more. Adaptive information is any structure that provides arrangements of energy and matter that maximizes entropy production. In inanimate terms, such structures include chemical chirality and proteins. It includes the bases for organic life, inheritance and organic evolution. For some life forms, it might include communications such as pheromones or bird or whale songs or the primitive use of tools or communicated behaviors such as nest building. For humans with their unique abilities to manipulate and communicate symbols, adaptive information embraces such structures as languages, books and technology artifacts. These structures don’t look or act like genes and are not replicators in any fashion of the term. To hammer them as “memes” significantly distorts their fundamental nature as information structures and glosses over what factors might — or might not — make them adaptive.

I have been thinking of these concepts much over the past few decades. Recently, though, there has been a spate of the “meme” term, particularly on the semantic Web mailing lists to which I subscribe. This spewing has caused me to outline some basic ideas about what I find so problematic in the use of the “meme” concept.

A Brief Disquisition on Memes

As defined by Dawkins and expanded upon by others, a “meme” is an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. It is proposed as being able to be transmitted through writing, speech, gestures or rituals. Dawkins specifically called melodies, catch-phrases, fashion and the technology of building arches as examples of memes. A meme is postulated as a cultural analogue to genes in that they are assumed to be able to self-replicate, mutate or respond to selective pressures. Thus, as proposed, memes may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution.

However, unlike a gene, a structure corresponding to a “meme” has never been discovered or observed. There is no evidence for it as a unit of replication, or indeed as any kind of coherent unit at all. In its sloppy use, it is hard to see how “meme” differs in its scope from concepts, ideas or any form of cultural information or transmission, yet it is imbued with properties analogous to animate evolution for which there is not a shred of empirical evidence.

One might say, so what, the idea of a “meme” is merely a metaphor, what is the harm? Well, the harm comes about when it is taken seriously as a means of explaining human behavior and cultural changes, a field of study called memetics. It becomes a pseudo-scientific term that sets a boundary condition for understanding the nature of information and what makes it adaptive or not [3]. Mechanisms and structures appropriate to animate life are not universal information structures, they are simply the structures that have evolved in the organic realm. In the human realm of signs and symbols and digital information and media, information is the universal, not the genetic structure of organic evolution.

The noted evolutionary geneticist, R.C. Lewontin, one of my key influences as a student, has also been harshly critical of the idea of memetics [4]:

“The selectionist paradigm requires the reduction of society and culture to inheritance systems that consist of randomly varying, individual units, some of which are selected, and some not; and with society and culture thus reduced to inheritance systems, history can be reduced to ‘evolution.’ . . . we conclude that while historical phenomena can always be modeled selectionistically, selectionist explanations do not work, nor do they contribute anything new except a misleading vocabulary that anesthetizes history.”

Consistent with my recent writings about Charles S. Peirce [5], many logicians and semiotic theorists are also critical of the idea of “memes”, but on different grounds. The criticism here is that “memes” distort Peirce’s ideas about signs and the reification of signs and symbols via a triadic nature. Notable in this camp is Terrence Deacon [6].

Information is a First Principle

It is not surprising that the concept of “memes” arose in the first place. It is understandable to seek universal principles consistent with natural laws and observations. The mechanism of natural evolution works on the information embodied in DNA, so why not look to genes as some form of universal model?

The problem here, I think, was to confuse mechanisms with first principles. Genes are a mechanism — a “structure” if you will — that along with other forms of natural selection such as the entire organism and even kin selection [7], have evolved as means of adaptation in the animate world. But the fundamental thing to be looked for here is the idea of information, not the mechanism of genes and how they replicate. The idea of information holds the key for drilling down to universal principles that may find commonality between information for humans in a cultural sense and information conveyed through natural evolution for life forms. It is the search for this commonality that has driven my professional interests for decades, spanning from population genetics and evolution to computers, information theory and semantics [8].

But before we can tackle these connections head on, it is important to address a couple of important misconceptions (as I see them).

Seque #1: Information is (Not!) Entropy

In looking to information as a first principle, Claude Shannon‘s seminal work in 1948 on information theory must be taken as the essential point of departure [9]. The motivation of Shannon’s paper and work by others preceding him was to understand information losses in communication systems or networks. Much of the impetus for this came about because of issues in wartime communications and early ciphers and cryptography. (As a result, the Shannon paper is also intimately related to data patterns and data compression, not further discussed here.)

In a strict sense, Shannon’s paper was really talking about the amount of information that could be theoretically and predictably communicated between a sender and a receiver. No context or semantics were implied in this communication, only the amount of information (for which Shannon introduced the term “bits” [10]) and what might be subject to losses (or uncertainty in the accurate communication of the message). In this regard, what Shannon called “information” is what we would best term “data” in today’s parlance.

The form that the uncertainty (unpredictability) calculation that Shannon derived:

$\displaystyle H(X) = - \sum_{i=1}^np(x_i)\log_b p(x_i)$

very much resembled the mathematical form for Boltzmann‘s original definition of entropy (as elaborated upon by Gibbs, denoted as S, for Gibb’s entropy):

$S = - k_B \sum p_i \ln p_i \,$

and thus Shannon also labelled his measure of unpredictability, H, as entropy [10].

After Shannon, and nearly a century after Boltzmann, work by individuals such as Jaynes in the field of statistical mechanics came to show that thermodynamic entropy can indeed be seen as an application of Shannon’s information theory, so there are close parallels [11]. This parallel of mathematical form and terminology has led many to assert that information is entropy.

I believe this assertion is a misconception on two grounds.

First, as noted, what is actually being measured here is data (or bits), not information embodying any semantic meaning or context. Thus, the formula and terminology is not accurate for discussing “information” in a conventional sense.

Second, the Shannon methods are based on the communication (transmittal) between a sender and a receiver. Thus the Shannon entropy measure is actually a measure of the uncertainty for either one of these states. The actual information that gets transmitted and predictably received was formulated by Shannon as R (which he called rate), and he expressed basically as:

R = H_before – H_after

R, then, becomes a proxy for the amount of information accurately communicated. R can never be zero (because all communication systems have losses). H_before and H_after are both state functions for the message, so this also makes R a function of state. So while there is Shannon entropy (unpredictability) for any given sending or receiving state, the actual amount of information (that is, data) that is transmitted is a change in state as measured by a change in uncertainty between sender (H_before) and receiver (H_after). In the words of Thomas Schneider, who provides a very clear discussion of this distinction [12]:

Information is always a measure of the decrease of uncertainty at a receiver.

These points do not directly bear on the basis of information as discussed below, but help remove misunderstandings that might undercut those points. Further, these clarifications make consistent theoretical foundations of information (data) with natural evolution while being logically consistent with the 2nd law of thermodynamics (see next).

Seque #2: Entropy is (Not!) Disorder

The 2nd law of thermodynamics expresses the tendency that, over time, differences in temperature, pressure, or chemical potential equilibrate in an isolated physical system. Entropy is a measure of this equilibration: for a given physical system, the highest entropy state is one at equilibrium. Fluxes or gradients arise when there are differences in state potentials in these systems. (In physical systems, these are known as sources and sinks; in information theory, they are sender and receiver.) Fluxes go from low to high entropy, and are non-reversible — the “arrow of time” — without the addition of external energy. Heat, for example, is a by product of fluxes in thermal energy. Because these fluxes are directional in isolation, a perpetual motion machine is shown as impossible.

In a closed system (namely, the entire cosmos), one can see this gradient as spanning from order to disorder, with the equilibrium state being the random distribution of all things. This perspective, and much schooling regarding these concepts, tends to present the idea of entropy as a “disordered” state. Life is seen as the “ordered” state in this mindset. Hewing to this perspective, some prominent philosophers, scientists and others have sometimes tried to present the “force” representing life and “order” as an opposite one to entropy. One common term for this opposite “force” is “negentropy” [13].

But, in the real conditions common to our lives, our environment is distinctly open, not closed. We experience massive influxes of energy via sunlight, and have learned as well how to harness stored energy from eons past in further sources of fossil and nuclear energy. Our open world is indeed a high energy one, and one that increases that high-energy state as our knowledge leads us to exploit still further resources of higher and higher quality. As Buckminster Fuller once famously noted, electricity consumption (one of the highest quality energy resources found to date) has become a telling metric about the well-being and wealth of human societies [14].

The high-energy environments fostering life on earth and more recently human evolution establish a local (in a cosmic sense) gradient that promotes fluxes to more ordered states, not lesser unordered ones. These fluxes remain faithful to basic physical laws and are non-deterministic [15]. Indeed, such local gradients can themselves be seen as consistent with the conditions initially leading to life, favoring the random event in the early primordial soup that led to chemical structures such as chirality, auto-catalytic reactions, enzymes, and then proteins, which became the eventual building blocks for animate life [16].

These events did not have preordained outcomes (that is, they were non-deterministic), but were the result of time and variation in the face of external energy inputs to favor the marginal combinatorial improvement. The favoring of the new marginal improvement also arises consistent with entropy principles, by giving a competitive edge to those structures that produce faster movements across the existing energy gradient. According to Annila and Annila [16]:

“According to the thermodynamics of open systems, every entity, simple or sophisticated, is considered as a catalyst to increase entropy, i.e., to diminish free energy. Catalysis calls for structures. Therefore, the spontaneous rise of structural diversity is inevitably biased toward functional complexity to attain and maintain high-entropy states.”

Via this analysis we see that life is not at odds with entropy, but is consistent with it. Further, we see that incremental improvements in structure that are consistent with the maximum entropy production principle will be favored [17]. Of course, absent the external inputs of energy, these gradients would reverse. Under those conditions, the 2nd law would promote a breakdown to a less ordered system, what most of us have been taught in schools.

With these understandings we can now see the dichotomy as life representing order with entropy disorder as being false. Further, we can see a guiding set of principles that is consistent across the broad span of evolution from primordial chemicals and enzymes to basic life and on to human knowledge and artifacts. This insight provides the fundamental “unit” we need to be looking toward, and not the gene nor the “meme”.

Information is Structure

Of course, the fundamental “unit” we are talking about here is information, and not limited as is Shannon’s concept to data. The quality that changes data to information is structure, and structure of a particular sort. Like all structure, there is order or patterns, often of a hierarchical or fractal or graph nature. But the real aspect of the structure that is important is the marginal ability of that structure to lead to improvements in entropy production. That is, processes are most adaptive (and therefore selected) that maximize entropy production. Any structure that emerges that is able to reduce the energy gradient faster will be favored.

However, remember, these are probabilistic, statistical processes. Uncertainties in state may favor one structure at one time versus another at a different time. The types of chemical compounds favored in the primordial soup were likely greatly influenced by thermal and light cycles and drying and wet conditions. In biological ecosystems, there are huge differences in seed or offspring production or in overall species diversity and ecological complexity based on the stability (say, tropics) or instability (say, disturbance) of local environments. As noted, these processes are inherently non-deterministic.

As we climb up the chain from the primordial ooze to life and then to humans and our many information mechanisms and technology artifacts (which are themselves embodiments of information), we see increasing complexity and structure. But we do not see uniformity of mechanisms or vehicles.

The general mechanisms of information transfer in living organisms occur (generally) via DNA in genes, mediated by sex in higher organisms, subject to random mutations, and then kept or lost entirely as their host organisms survive to procreate or not. Those are harsh conditions: the information survives or not (on a population basis) with high concentrations of information in DNA and with a priority placed on remixing for new combinations via sex. Information exchange (generally) only occurs at each generational event.

Human cultural information, however, is of an entirely different nature. Information can be made persistent, can be recorded and shared across individuals or generations, extended with new innovations like written language or digital computers, or combined in ways that defy the limits of sex. Occasionally, of course, loss of living languages due to certain cultures or populations dying out or horrendous catastrophes like the Spanish burning (nearly all of) the Mayan’s existing books can also occur [18]. The environment will also be uncertain.

So, while we can define DNA in genes or the ideas of a “meme” all as information, in fact we now see how very unlike the dynamics and structures of these two forms really are. We can be awestruck with the elegance and sublimity of organic evolution. We can also be inspired by song or poem or moved to action through ideals such as truth and justice. But organic evolution does not transpire like reading a book or hearing a sermon, just like human ideas and innovations don’t act like genes. The “meme” is a totally false analogy. The only constant is information.

Some Tentative Implications

The closer we come to finding true universals, the better we will be able to create maximum entropy producing structures. This, in turn, has some pretty profound implications. The insight that keys these implications begins with an understanding of the fundamental nature — and importance — of information. According to Karnani et al [19]:

“. . . the common contemporary consent, the second law of thermodynamics, is perceived to drive disorder. Therefore, it may appear, at first sight, inconceivable that this universal law could possibly account for the existence and orderly characteristics of information, as well as for its meaningful content. However, the second law, or equivalently the principle of increasing entropy, merely states that difference among energy densities tends to vanish. When the surrounding energy density is high, the system will evolve toward a stationary state by increasing its energy content, e.g, by devising orderly machinery for energy transduction to acquire energy. . . . Syntax of information, when described by thermodynamics, is associated with the entropy of the physical representation, and significance of information is associated with the entropy increase in the receiver system when it executes the encoded information.”

All would agree that the evolution of life over the past few billion years is truly wondrous. But, what is equally wondrous is that the human species has come to learn and master symbols. That mastery, in turn, has broken the bounds of organic evolution and has put into our hands the very means and structure of information itself. Via this entirely new — and incredibly accelerated — path to information structures, we are only now beginning to see some of its implications:

Unlike all other organisms, we dominate our environment and have experienced increasing wealth and freedom. Wealth increases and their universal applicability continue to increase at an exponential rate [20]
We no longer depend on the random variant to maximize our entropy producing structures. We can now do so purposefully and with symbologies and bit streams of our own devising
Potentially all information variants can be recorded and shared across all human individuals and generations, a complete decoupling from organic boundaries
Key ideas and abstractions, such as truth, justice and equality, can operate on a species-wide basis and become adopted without massive die-offs of individuals
We are actively moving ourselves into higher-level energy states, further increasing the potential for wealth and new structures
We are actively impacting our local environment, potentially creating the conditions for our species’ demise
We are increasingly engaging all individuals of the human species in these endeavors through literacy, education and access to global information sources. This provides a still further multiplier effect on humanity’s ability to devise and manipulate information structures into more adaptive and highly-ordered states.

The idea of a “meme” actually cheapens our understanding of these potentials.

Ideas matter and terminology matters. These are the symbols by which we define and communicate potentials. If we choose the wrong analogies or symbols — as “meme” is in this case — we are picking the option with the lower entropy potential. Whether I assert it to be so or not, the “meme” concept is an information structure doomed for extinction.

[1] Richard Dawkins, 1976. The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, New York City, ISBN 0-19-286092-5.

[2] This phrase was perhaps first made famous by Mark Twain or Bernard Baruch, but in any case is clearly understood now by all.

[3] According to Wikipedia, Benitez-Bribiesca calls memetics “a dangerous idea that poses a threat to the serious study of consciousness and cultural evolution”. He points to the lack of a coding structure analogous to the DNA of genes, and to instability of any mutation mechanisms for “memes” sufficient for standard evolution processes. See Luis Benitez Bribiesca, 2001. “Memetics: A Dangerous Idea”, Interciencia: Revista de Ciencia y Technologia de América (Venezuela: Asociación Interciencia) 26 (1): 29–31, January 2001. See http://redalyc.uaemex.mx/redalyc/pdf/339/33905206.pdf.

[4] Joseph Fracchia and R.C. Lewontin, 2005. “The Price of Metaphor”, History and Theory (Wesleyan University) 44 (44): 14–29, February 2005.

[5] See further M. K. Bergman, 2012. “Give Me a Sign: What Do Things Mean on the Semantic Web?,” posting on AI3:::Adaptive Information blog, January 24, 2012. See https://www.mkbergman.com/994/give-me-a-sign-what-do-things-mean-on-the-semantic-web/.

[6] Terrence Deacon, 1999. “The Trouble with Memes (and what to do about it)”. The Semiotic Review of Books 10(3). See http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/semiotics/srb/10-3edit.html.

[7] Kin selection refers to changes in gene frequency across generations that are driven at least in part by interactions between related individuals. Some mathematical models show how evolution may favor the reproductive success of an organism’s relatives, even at a cost to an individual organism. Under this mode, selection can occur at the level of populations and not the individual or the gene. Kin selection is often posed as the mechanism for the evolution of altruism or social insects. Among others, kin selection and inclusive fitness was popularized by W. D. Hamilton and Robert Trivers.

[8] You may want to see my statement of purpose under the Blogasbörd topic, first written seven years ago when I started this blog.

[9] Claude E. Shannon, 1948. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, Bell System Technical Journal, 27: 379–423, 623-656, July, October, 1948. See http://cs.yale.edu/homes/yry/readings/general/shannon1948.pdf.

[10] As Shannon acknowledges in his paper, the “bit” term was actually suggested by J. W. Tukey. Shannon can be more accurately said to have popularized the term via his paper.

[11] See further http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_entropy#Relationship_to_thermodynamic_entropy.

[12] See Thomas D. Schneider, 2012. “Information Is Not Entropy, Information Is Not Uncertainty!,” Web page retrieved April 4, 2012; see http://www.lecb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/information.is.not.uncertainty.html.

[13] The “negative entropy” (also called negentropy or syntropy) of a living system is the entropy that it exports to keep its own entropy low, and according to proponents lies at the intersection of entropy and life. The concept and phrase “negative entropy” were introduced by Erwin Schrödinger in his 1944 popular-science book What is Life?. See Erwin Schrödinger, 1944. What is Life – the Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, Cambridge University Press, 1944. A copy may be downloaded at http://old.biovip.com/UpLoadFiles/Aaron/Files/2005051204.pdf.

[14] R. Buckminster Fuller, 1981. Critical Path, St. Martin’s Press, New York City, 471 pp. See especially p. 103 ff.

[15] The seminal paper first presenting this argument is Vivek Sharma and Arto Annila, 2007. “Natural Process – Natural Selection”, Biophysical Chemistry 127: 123-128. See http://www.helsinki.fi/~aannila/arto/natprocess.pdf. This basic theme has been much expanded upon by Annila and his various co-authors. See, for example, [16] and [19], among many others.

[16] Arto Annila and Erkki Annila, 2008. “Why Did Life Emerge?,” International Journal of Astrobiology 7(3 and 4): 293-300. See http://www.helsinki.fi/~aannila/arto/whylife.pdf.

[17] According to Wikipedia, the principle (or “law”) of maximum entropy production is an aspect of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, a branch of thermodynamics that deals with systems that are not in thermodynamic equilibrium. Most systems found in nature are not in thermodynamic equilibrium and are subject to fluxes of matter and energy to and from other systems and to chemical reactions. One fundamental difference between equilibrium thermodynamics and non-equilibrium thermodynamics lies in the behavior of inhomogeneous systems, which require for their study knowledge of rates of reaction which are not considered in equilibrium thermodynamics of homogeneous systems. Another fundamental difference is the difficulty in defining entropy in macroscopic terms for systems not in thermodynamic equilibrium.

The principle of maximum entropy production states that the in comparing two or more alternate paths for crossing an energy gradient that the one that creates the maximum entropy change will be favored. The maximum entropy (sometimes abbreviated MaxEnt or MaxEp) concept is related to this notion. It is also known as the maximum entropy production principle, or MEPP.

[18] The actual number of Mayan books burned by the Spanish conquistadors is unknown, but is somewhere between tens and thousands; see here. Only three or four codexes are known to survive today. Also, Wikipedia contains a listing of notable book burnings throughout history.

[19] Mahesh Karnani, Kimmo Pääkkönen and Arto Annila, 2009. “The Physical Character of Information,” Proceedings of the Royal Society A, April 27, 2009. See http://www.helsinki.fi/~aannila/arto/natinfo.pdf.

[20] I discuss and chart the exponential growth of human wealth based on Angus Maddison data in M. K. Bergman, 2006. “The Biggest Disruption in History: Massively Accelerated Growth Since the Industrial Revolution,” post in AI3:::Adaptive Information blog, July 27, 2006. See https://www.mkbergman.com/250/the-biggest-disruption-in-history-massively-accelerated-growth-since-the-industrial-revolution/.

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Information is Structure

Still More Structure Makes “Information” Information

Structure is Information

Modularization Also Leads to Big Graph Visualization

Modularization of the UMBEL Vocabulary

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Some Quick Investigations Point to Promise, Disappointments

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Linked Data is Sometimes a Useful Technique, but is an Inadequate Focus

Disappointments and Successes

What Lessons Can We Derive?

Shifting the Focus

For More on the Talk

Adaptive Information is a Hammer, but Genes are Not a Nail

A Brief Disquisition on Memes

Information is a First Principle

Seque #1: Information is (Not!) Entropy

Seque #2: Entropy is (Not!) Disorder

Information is Structure

Some Tentative Implications