Material Semantics
From Material Semantics
This project aims to assemble in a consistent and accessible format instances of contemporary human experience involving common physical objects and materials. This repository differs from many similar projects by emphasizing individual sensory experiences of concepts and schemas rather than semantic networks of concepts, relations, and propositions. It is hoped that this data can aid in the design of more intelligent and natural human-computer interfaces, as well as significantly augment the collection of raw data available (through similar projects) for the study of human reasoning and cognition.
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[edit] Background and motivation
In recent years, some authors working to start explaining human cognition have proposed the existence of a conceptual cognitive framework that can be seen as a link between the underlying connectionist infrastructure of human minds, and the abstract symbolic manipulations of which human minds are capable. These hypotheses focus on how metaphorical schemas are generated from and applied to physical, geometric, and embodied experiences. The representations of human knowledge and understanding presented in these hypotheses is complementary but distinct from well-established representations such as semantic networks and databases of propositions about atomic concepts. Furthermore, these hypotheses suggest a more disciplined approach to common computations involving concepts, such as similarity, by explicitly directing statistical computations over semantic graphs using conceptual dimensions.
The Material Semantics repository helps fill this gap by assembling a database of common knowledge with a structure that aims to reflect the conceptual cognitive frameworks proposed in recent work. There exist a variety of similar efforts in assembling repositories of common human knowledge.
- OpenCyc (opencyc.org)
- OpenMind (www.openmind.org, openmind.media.mit.edu)
- WordNet (wordnet.princeton.edu)
[edit] Repository definition and structure
We provide a description of the structure and format of the proposed repository.
[edit] Mining existing databases and ontologies for data
The following articles assemble information about the contents of existing databases and ontologies which may contain pertinent data. They also describe their structure and how they can be accessed.
The following intermediate database assembles information from the above databases in a normalized representation.