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Peter Fox

Xinformatics – ITEC 6961/CSCI 6960/ERTH-6963-01

Week 5, March 16, 2010

Foundations; semiotics, library, cognitive and social

science and class exercise - information modeling

Contents• Review of last class, reading, assignment 2

• Foundations; semiotics, library, cognitive and social science and class exercise - information modeling but trying to still stay clear of architectures

• Discussion of reading

• Assignment 3

• Next class

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Micro life cycle of data

Semiotics• Also called semiotic studies or semiology, is

the study of sign processes (semiosis), or signification and communication, signs and symbols

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A sign (Peirce and Eco 1979)1. “A sign stands for something to the idea which it

produces or modifies....

2. That for which it stands is called its object, that which it conveys, its meaning; and the idea which it gives rise, its interpretant

3. ....[the sign creates in the mind] an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign.” (Peirce)

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1. “That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign.

2. This sign stands for something, its object.

3. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea which I have sometimes called the ground of that representation.” (Eco)

Examples

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Icons

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(Meaning based on similarity of appearance)

Index• A sign related to an object

• Signifier <-> Signified

• Meaning based on cause and effect relationships

• E.g. in a particular configuration, the letters "E", "D" and "R" will form the sequence "R", "E", "D".

• RED denotes a certain color, but neither the letters individually nor their formal combination into a word have anything to do with redness.

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Index examples• Smoke, thermometer, clock, spirit-level, foot

or fingerprint, knock on door

• Signify what?

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• Fire, temperature, time, alignment, identity, announcement

• Or?

Symbol (meaning based on convention)

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Semiotic model

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Syntax• Relation of signs to

each other in formal structures

• … the term syntax is also used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the …

• But not the meaning or the use! 12

Semantics

• Relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their denotata

• Study of meaning of … (anything?)

• Mainly need to worry about failures

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Pragmatics• Relation of signs to their

impacts on those who use them

• the ways in which context contributes to meaning, conveying and use

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Library science• Curates the artifacts of knowledge

• Has developed over centuries

• Separate principles from how they have been implements

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Collections, Directories, …• Organizes and manages them for consumers

– Cataloging and classification

• Dictionaries, thesauri, encyclopaedias, maps, charts, ...

• Reference services (authority)

• Bibliographical organization and mapping

• Important for logical and physical models and how to manage and provide content

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Bibliometrics• The information in ISI Web of Science and Scopus

can be used to see how authors, groups or universities and countries cooperate and how they publish in different subject areas.

• A requirement for most of these studies is that the database address fields are complete and searchable.

• For the sake of clarity one can seldom show all relations; a reduction must often be carried out with regard to the number of authors, number of relations, and strength of the relations, for the maps to be readable. 17

Bibliometrics• The map shows

countries that researchers at Linköping University have co-published with 1996-2006.

• The limit has been set to 5 co-published articles. 18

Indexing and abstracts• To organize, find and summarize things

• To facilitate search via information retrieval mechanisms (F. van Harlemen – ‘we only need information retrieval because we perform information burial’, 2010)

• To facilitate precision in search via sufficient metainformation

• Dewey decimal, Library of Congress

• Search: Z39.50 (ISO23950), Circulation Interchange Protocol (CIP), MAchine Readable Catalog (MARC)

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Preservation• ‘Maintaining or restoring access to artifacts,

documents and records through the study, diagnosis, treatment and prevention of decay and damage’ (wikipedia)

• Digital age– Curation and preservation– Translating the full life cycle (yes, the micro life

cycle for data and information)

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Libraries also have taught us• Access

– Limited or open

• Rights and responsibilities– Attribution and citation– Proprietary and security

• Ethical and legal issues– Free publication of how to violate laws, build

bombs

• Publishing– What is required to be published– Record and dissemination mechanisms

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Cognitive Science• Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of

the mind and intelligence • It operates at the intersection of psychology,

philosophy, computer science, linguistics, anthropology, and neuroscience.

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Mental Representation• Thinking = representational structures +

procedures that operate on those structures.

• Data structures mental representations+ algorithms +procedures= running programs =thinking

• Methodological consequence: study the mind by developing computer simulations of thinking.

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What is an explanation of behavior?

– Programs that simulate cognitive processes explain intelligent behavior by performing the tasks whose performance they explain.

– Neurophysiological explanation is compatible with computational explanation, but operates at a different level.

– At the neural level, cognitive processes are parallel, but at the symbolic level, the brain behaves like a serial system.

– The human mind is an adaptive system, learning to improve its performance in accomplishing its goals. 24

Nature of Expertise• Manifests as cognition

– refers to an information processing view of an individual's psychological functions

– Process of thought as ‘knowing’

• Indicates a level of knowing and action that is above the non-expert

• Characterizing the expert versus the non-expert (or specialist vs. non-) is very important in information systems

• E.g. can a non-expert system be just as easily used and exploited by an expert?

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Epistemology• Theory of knowledge – and to do this

effectively you need to be concerned with:– Truth, belief, and justification– Means of production of knowledge– Skepticism about different knowledge claims

• Recall the data-information-knowledge micro-life cycle?

• Understanding what part this plays in your modeling and architecture can be critical

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Classical view of knowledge

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Intuition• This returns us to semiotics and to some

extent heuristics and abduction - understanding without apparent effort

• Heuristics - experience-based techniques that help in problem solving, learning and discovery

• Abduction we’ve covered …

• So how do you eek out (technical term) intuition? Use the cognitive process – drawing or mapping!

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Metamodeling and Mindmaps

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More mind maps

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Social Science• Networks of information providers

• Reputation matters a lot

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Sociology of groups, teams

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Understanding each other

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Cultural norms• Modes of what and how rewards are given

• Between those who produce and those who consume data and information

• How you collect, understand, model and design models and architectures is as much social as technical skill

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Discipline norms• Rewards

– Computer science – conference proceedings before

– Physical science – journal publication after– Engineer - patents– Humanities – journal and conference

• The line between producers and consumers is blurred – refer to our information fig.

• Collecting, understanding, modeling and designing architectures is social more than a technical skill (sorry!)

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Information Models• Conceptual models, sometimes called domain

models, are typically used to explore domain concepts

• High-level conceptual models are often created as part of initial requirements envisioning efforts as they are used to explore the high-level static business or science or medicine structures and concepts.

• Conceptual models are often created as the precursor to logical models or as alternatives to them

• Followed by logical and physical models 37

Object models• A data model is a logic organization of the

real world objects (entities), constraints on them, and the relationships among objects. – A database (DB) language is a concrete syntax

for an object (data) model. – A DB system implements that model.

• http://www.databaseanswers.org/data%5Fmodels/ (library of free data models)

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Object design• Object-oriented modeling is a formal way of

representing something in the real world. It draws from traditional set theory and classification theory. Some basics to keep in mind in object-oriented modeling are that:– Instances are things.– Properties are attributes.– Relationships are pairs of attributes.– Classes are types of things.– Subclasses are subtypes of things.

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Information Models• Logical information models (LIMs). • LIMs are used to explore the domain concepts, and

their relationships, of your problem domain. • This could be done for the scope of a single project

or for your entire enterprise. • LIMs depict the logical entity types, typically

referred to simply as entity types, the data attributes describing those entities, and the relationships between the entities.

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Information Models• Physical information models (PIMs). • PIMs are used to design the internal schema of a

database, depicting the information tables, the columns of those tables, and the relationships between the tables.

• PIMs often prove to be useful on a range of applications

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Object models• A core object-oriented model consists of the

following basic object-oriented concepts:– object and object identifier: Any real world entity

is uniformly modeled as an object (associated with a unique id: used to pinpoint an object to retrieve).

– attributes and methods: every object has a state (the set of values for the attributes of the object) and a behavior (the set of methods - program code - which operate on the state of the object). The state and behavior encapsulated in an object are accessed or invoked from outside the object only through explicit message passing.

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Object model• class: a means of grouping all the objects which

share the same set of attributes and methods. An object must belong to only one class as an instance of that class (instance-of relationship). A class is similar to an abstract data type. A class may also be primitive (no attributes), e.g., integer, string, Boolean.

• Class hierarchy and inheritance: derive a new class (subclass) from an existing class (superclass). The subclass inherits all the attributes and methods of the existing class and may have additional attributes and methods. single inheritance (class hierarchy) vs. multiple inheritance (class lattice).

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Steps in modeling• Identify entity types

• Identify attributes

• Apply naming conventions

• Identify relationships

• Apply model patterns

• Assign relationships

• Normalize to reduce redundancy (this is called refactoring in software engineering)

• Denormalize to improve performance47

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Tools (just a few)• Models

– http://www.datamodel.org/– MSDN:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb399249.aspx

• Schema– The Schematron differs in basic concept from other

schema languages in that it not based on grammars but on finding tree patterns in the parsed document. This approach allows many kinds of structures to be represented which are inconvenient and difficult in grammar-based schema languages. If you know XPath or the XSLT expression language, you can start to use The Schematron immediately.

– http://www.schematron.com/53

More schema tools• http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema

• http://www.stylusstudio.com/xml_schema.html

• http://download.cnet.com/SQL-Schema-Tool/3000-10254_4-10752603.html

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Tools• For modeling (esp. UML):

– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unified_Modeling_Language_tools

• Concept mapping– http://cmap.ihmc.us/

• Mindmapping– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

List_of_mind_mapping_software

• White board

• Piece of paper … you get the idea?55

Discussion• About semiotics

• Library science?

• Cognitive science?

• Social science?

• Modeling?

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Reading for this week• Is retrospective but … relates to your

assignment

• And a preview for architecture (there will be retrospective reading after next week as well)

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Assignment 3• Analysis of cognitive, collection and

social/cultural aspects of information in signs, discussed and decomposed along the lines we have talked about today and presented in class

• Due in two weeks – write up and presentation

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What is next• Week 6 – Information architectures theory

and practice (Internet, Web, Grid, Cloud) and class exercise for project definitions

• Week 7 – class presentations (15 mins total; 10 mins to present, 3-5 mins of questions)

• Project Assignment – week 6, end of term

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