The Tetherless World Weblog

By a series of interesting coincidences in life, I have recently found myself in contact with Andrew Hugill, who is, among many other things, the Director of the Institute of Creative Technologies at DeMontfort University in Leicester, UK. Andrew sent me a copy of a CD of his music called “Pataphysical Piano” which I have truly enjoyed, and recommend to those interested in new directions in music. That, however, is not the intent of this blog (although I’m sure he won’t mind a few extra sales).

Rather, I was curious about the term “pataphysics” and was pleased to see a Wikipedia entry on the subject show up in the first page of the 45,000 or so Google finds. The original definition was “”the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments” which didn’t shed much light. However, it was later stated to be the principles that rest on “the truth of contradictions and exceptions.” This latter, for those of you who know me, is way too good to believe — as I believe a crucial aspect of the Semantic Web is that we will have to learn to live with the truth of contradictions and exceptions, and that that is the main argument I’ve been having with the forces of neatness, many of whom have clustered in the OWL 2 WG.

The philosopher, playwright and general polymath Alfred Jarry, who coined the term pataphysics, stated that it was “as far from metaphysics as metaphysics extends from regular reality.” I am happy to report that Googling for the term “patadata” I only find 10 hits, none of which uses it to mean “data interpreted through the truth of contradictions and exceptions” which is “as far from metadata as metadata extends from a databased representation of reality.” So consider this term now to be coined with exactly that meaning, and I happily join the ranks of previous petaphysicists as I continue my study of the functions and properties of “patadata markup” — a long paper on which I will publish as soon as I work out a few more details.

Yours patalogically,
Jim Hendler

p.s. Interestingly, one of the interesting aspect of pataphysics throughout the past century has been a mix of seriousness and parody, often non-distinguishably entwined. I hope to continue that tradition with this blog post and my future writings on the subject.

Below is an email I sent to the group today.

———————-

Dear TW friends

You must have already known the huge earthquake occurred on May 12 in
Sichuan, China. It has caused enormous loss of lives: more than 50,000
confirmed death, around 30,000 missing, plus about 300,000 people
injured as of today. The whole nation, as well as Chinese all over the
world including me, are in deep sorrow for the tragedy.

For the memorial of the earthquake victims, on May 19 14:28pm (Beijing
Time), sharply one week after the earthquake, Chinese public held a
moment of silence. People stood silent for three minutes while air
defense, police and fire sirens, and the horns of vehicles, vessels
and trains sounded.

Google China released a traffic curve for the three minutes [1]. At
the deepest point, it dropped to 10% of the normal traffic. At the
time, millions of people stopped their work on computers, stood up and
lowered their heads to observe. The curve clearly conveys a message of
national unity of the Chinese people in a time of calamity. I’m pride
to be a part of the people.

Web plays an important role in the earthquake relief this time.
Messages and information are exchanged on the web much faster than
traditional ways in helping the rescue work. For example, when a girl
heard that army helicopters couldn’t find a landing site around her
home town, she immediately posted a good location on the internet, and
it was replicated thousands time across many sites in just a few
hours, until it reaches the army command. For another example, when
all communication avenues were cut off from the outside world, the
first message from the isolated area was from the website [2] of the
local government, which was revived by backup power and link; due to
reports from the website, it was decided to use airdrop instead of
land rescue for some area, otherwise it will be too late.

This can still be improved. With semantic web, such information can be
propagated, instead of by human forwarding, by software agents in just
seconds, to the handheld device of the pilot of helicopter. In
earthquake relief, every second saved in knowledge aggregation and
propagation means more hope for lives. I hope this dream of tetherless
world can become true as early as possible.

Thank you for reading this.

Jie

[1] http://googlechinablog.com/2008/05/blog-post_22.html
[2] http://www.abazhou.gov.cn