what / about

OneSpace2008, the First International Workshop on Blending Physical and Digital Spaces on the Internet

OneSpace2008, the First International Workshop on Blending Physical and Digital Spaces on the Internet, aims to present a high-quality forum of discussion about the identification and study of the complex relationship of the Internet with space, place, geography and distance, whether physical or virtual. Technologies as well as novel ideas, experiments, and insights originating from multi-disciplinary viewpoints, including humanities, social sciences and mathematics are welcome. Please visit the workshop’s website.

from Prof. Werner Kuhn’s talk

Prof. Werner Kuhn’s closing talk for the Edinburgh e-Science Institute’s theme on Geospatial Semantics is now online. It gives a good idea of actual challenges in GIScience, and in Knowledge Representation in general.

Most often I cannot read the CAPTCHAs… so I wonder.

Above, my clumsy attempt to imitate Jessica Hagy’s inspirational diagrams. I cannot easily think like that - always seem to get lost in the detail - but wish I could. The piece of wisdom behind this configuration was given to me by a photographer met in Paris, long time ago. Try it! works most of the time.

Simple - i.e. non composed - concepts are able to communicate deep insights about life. Sometimes. But what strikes me is how even something as simple is difficult to represent with existing knowledge representation formalisms. How could we define love, or health, or work? I mean define it to do something useful, such as knowing when you are working or not while at the workplace, or decide if it is important to be fit to feel healthy. We would use other words, but it is not what happens when we explore the meaning of such a diagram; most certainly the word gathers memories of factual contexts, including events and processes, making the intersection meaningful beyond the simple conjunction of terms.

But if textual and diagrammatic hermeneutics are not your cup of tea, you can still have a look at this JH and Powerpoint-culture inspired digital art video by Clemens Kogler, called Le Grand Content (whatever that means): “…why, how, and what. These are the top words in teenage poetry albums…”, etc.