As Uschold has modeled it, the further one moves away from shared human consensus, the less information one has about the context to use in making meaning. Whereas most work on information systems ontologies is focused on transforming text descriptions into logical formalisms for machines, in this paper I want to focus on the implicit qualities of ontologies as shared human consensus. To achieve semantic interoperability, we must devise ways to include and represent the implicit semantics that allows us to communicate with other people. Implicit semantics relies upon shared ontology, contextualized in experience, in order for information to be meaningful. For true semantic interoperability to occur among diverse information systems, within or across domains, information must be contextualized rather than objectified as part of a computational artifact. But attempting to provide a precise description for every possible context and transforming them into logical formalisms is an impossible task, if not a fool’s errand. Even if it were possible, our formal ontologies would be a crystallization of an emergent experience, and brittle, such that attempting to alter them based on a new understanding, or new knowledge, or attempting to merge ontologies, would almost always results in breaking them.
One might argue that incorporating multiple ontologies containing diverse cultural perspectives can circumvent the objectification problem, but having multiple formal ontologies doesn’t eliminate the problem of semantic interoperability, it compounds it—there is no mechanism for blending these multiple ontologies or accommodating contradictory information contained within them. If one were to construct an automated reasoning process using inferences, any inferences that are constructed will have to privilege one ontology over another, especially in the case of contradictory information, in which case why bother to have multiple ontologies in the first place?
To ground this notion of contextualization, I draw upon Heidegger’s (
1927) notion of
being-in-the-world in which each of us is immersed in and never separate from experiential context. This context is the ever-present background that shapes our semantic and ontological commitments to the world around us—helps us make meaning of what we perceive to exist. Moreover, we are always
being-in-becoming, experiencing the world as emergent—dynamic, contextualized and with a personal historical perspective. In this way, Heidegger eschews the classical ontology of category disambiguation in favor of ontology as an emergent phenomenon. It is this notion of
being-in-becoming that also allows us to introduce the notion of culture to the study of ontology in information science and the creation of SDI.
The notion of culture as described by cultural anthropologists (D’Andrade
1995; Strauss and Quinn
1997) closely parallels the notions of
being-in-the-world and
being-in-becoming. Culture emerges through the interplay of intrapersonal cognitive structures and extrapersonal structures in the world. Culture is a phenomenon integral to our experience and one that shapes our ontological commitments to the world around us. What we presume to exist and the meaning that we make of the world is dependent upon our cultural schemas and experiences. What information is deemed important, how that information is modeled and represented (e.g., through language or images or art), and how it is presented and displayed is dependent upon the cultural context in which the information system exists and the cultural schemas shared by those developing and using the system. Culture
2 helps to focus our attention on and make meaning of relevant extrapersonal structures and their qualities and dimensions that comprise the context and background of the world. We are always immersed in a cultural experience.
Schemas: the intrapersonal dimensions of culture
In cognitive science, connectionist theory posits the human conceptual system as a network composed of a large number of units joined together in a pattern of connections (Rumelhart and McClelland
1986). Cognitive anthropologists and educational psychologists refer to these patterns of connections as schemas (Anderson et al.
1984; D’Andrade
1995; P. M. Davis
1991; Strauss and Quinn
1997). Strauss and Quinn (
1997, p. 6) define schemas as “networks of strongly connected cognitive elements that represent the generic concepts stored in memory”. D’Andrade (1995, p. 140) expands on this concept and describes schemas as “flexible configurations, mirroring the regularities of experience, providing automatic completion of missing components, automatically generalizing from the past, but also continually in modification, continually adapting to reflect the current state of affairs”. Describing them as ‘flexible, mirrored configurations’ implies that schemas are entities within cognition that are comprised of several elements that have both structural and representational qualities. Schemas are not the individual elements, but rather strongly connected clusters of elements of experience within cognition. Elements of experience are clustered in cognition, which increases efficiency, because they are clustered in our lived experiences. Simply mentioning the name of something is often enough to activate schemas associated with it. Schemas help to fill in the ambiguous or missing information because the associated neurons and cognitive elements are more likely to be activated by the initial stimuli.
Schemas—these strongly connected networks of cognitive elements—are powerful processors of experience, help with pattern completion, and promote cognitive efficiency. They serve to both inform and constrain our understanding of experience. People recall schematically embedded information more quickly and more accurately (DiMaggio
1997). In fact, schemas hold such sway in our cognition that people may falsely recall schematically embedded events that did not occur. They are more likely to recognize information embedded in existing schemas because of their repeated activation. This repeated activation evokes expectations within cognition, and the easy recognition of contradictory or challenging information that do not conform to those expectations formed as part of the existing schemas. Information that is orthogonal to existing schematic structures, that doesn’t acquire salience through the repeated activation of schemas and the creation of associated expectations, is much less likely to be noticed or recalled. Because of their functionality in pattern completion, schemas function, in some sense, as flexible filters of experience, enabling us to attend to its salient features while filtering out the non-salient.
Shared schemas as cultural schemas
The sharing of schemas does not require people to have the same experiences at the exact same time and place, rather that they experience the same general patterns. As agents in the world, we organize our experiences in ways that ensure ease of communication, coordination of activities, and collaborative interaction. Because we organize our experiences in particular ways, people in the same social environment will indeed experience many of the same typical patterns. In experiencing the same general patterns, people will come to share the same common understandings and exhibit similar emotional and motivational responses and behaviors. However, because we are also individuals, there can be differences in the feelings and motivations evoked by the schemas we hold. “The learner’s emotions and consequent motivations can affect how strongly the features of those events become associated in memory” (Strauss and Quinn
1997, p. 133). Individuals will engage the external world structures and experience the same general patterns. Similar stimuli and experiences will activate similar schemas. It is in that sense we consider them to be shared schemas. It‘s their quality of sharedness that makes them a dimension of the cultural.
Schemas also have other qualities that make them a dimension of the cultural. Some schemas are durable. Repeated exposure to patterns of behavior strengthens the networks of connections among the cognitive elements. Some schemas show historical durability. They are passed along from one generation to the next. Some schemas show applicability across contexts. We draw upon them to help us make sense of new and unfamiliar experiences. Some schemas exhibit motivational force. Such motivation is imparted through learning, explicitly and implicitly, strengthening the emotional connections among the cognitive elements. Schemas are not rigid and inflexible. They are adaptable, sometimes resulting in the strengthening of existing schemas, sometimes in their weakening in the face of new experience.
We share the intrapersonal dimensions of culture when we interact with others. In sharing these intrapersonal dimensions, schemas are activated. Activation evokes meanings, interpretations, thoughts, and feelings. We make meaning of our experience. The cultural meaning of a thing, which is distinct from the personal cognitive meaning, is the typical interpretation evoked through life experience, with the acknowledgement that a different interpretation could be evoked in people with different characteristic life experiences. In some cases our experience is intracultural, where we share a similar cultural frame. In other cases our experience is intercultural, where we are attempting to share different cultural frames. The meanings evoked by one person in relation to a particular extrapersonal structure may not be the same as those evoked in another. In fact, the meanings evoked may not be the same within the same person at different times, for they may experience schema-altering encounters in the interim. The ways in which we share these intrapersonal dimensions of culture makes each person a junction point for an infinite number of partially overlapping cultures.
Contextualization and emergent experience are not synonymous with chaos, however. Common and stable meaning persists
because cultural schemas provide that stability and facilitate common/shared understanding. We don’t enter every new situation or moment as a blank slate, experiencing the world for the first time (Talmy
2001). Cultural schemas are the ontological structures that provide stability and facilitate semantics with respect to our experiences. They are what enable stability and persistence of meaning, because they allow us to adapt prior experiential understanding to new contexts through the recognition of what Heidegger refers to as
ready-to-hand elements of experience.
Reconceptualizing ontologies as cultural schemas is better explained using a Heideggerian ontological perspective rather than an Aristotelian one. For Heidegger (
1927), the basic state of
Dasein—man’s being (literally, “there being”)—is understanding, making sense, making meaning of the world in which he is embedded. Immersion in the world is an inescapable fact of human existence. The world and the meaning we make of the world are inextricably linked through our experience within the world. Our experience of the world is also always cultural—what we recognize as salient is dependent upon the conceptual
fore-structures (i.e., intrapersonal schemas) we employ in making sense of our contextualized experience (i.e., the encountering of extrapersonal structures).
Another inescapable fact of our existence is temporality. We are always
falling into the next moment with an accompanying directionality of our conceptual
fore-structures. In other words, we have expectations as we move temporally through the world. In coping with our everyday existence we encounter two basic modes of intentionality according to Heidegger: (1) an objective intentionality corresponding to the
present-at-hand, and (2) a deictic intentionality responding to the
ready-to-hand (Agre
1988). The expectations generated by our
fore-structures have a duality about them. They are able to accommodate the holism of our experience to some degree by what Heidegger describes as
ready-to-hand, as well as the
present-at-hand elements, features, entities and phenomena that become the focus of our attention at any given moment.
We must not mistake, however, the
present-at-hand or the
ready-to-hand for objectivity. For Heidegger, entities reveal themselves as already imbued with a purpose or ‘assignment’, as having an assigned role to play (Cerbone
2008). ‘Assignment’ makes them more than mere ‘things’, and thus context-sensitive and non-objectifiable, per se. (The same can be said for geography and geographic entities, which will illustrate through examples of indigenous geospatial ontologies in the next section.) Our embeddedness and embodiment preclude a state of objectivity, per se.
Ready-to-handedness is the “perception of the inherently interested kind built into any kind of context-sensitive, intelligent behaviour” (Christensen
2007).
Ready-to-handedness is a form of phenomenal holism that describes the salient background features and elements of an engaged, embodied and embedded subject by virtue of what he recognizes as existing within that context and the possibilities that can emerge from those features and elements in that context. Experiencing this phenomenal holism does not mean we are unable to identify unique entities or things in our environment. We can and do—Heidegger describes these things as
presence-at-hand. We must be careful, however, not to mistake a
presence-at-hand as objective and separable from its
readiness-to-hand qualities. It is the interaction of the
present-at-hand and the
ready-to-hand that provides for the meaningfulness, or the semantics, of our experience.
What is present-at-hand is the extrapersonal structure that, through abstraction, is momentarily salient and becomes the focus of our attention through the activation of an intrapersonal schema. That momentary focus constrains our experience in terms of its directionality because we are attending to the salient elements of the entity or phenomenon we experience. It limits the possibilities of what is ready-to-hand. But we continue falling, and we attend to what is ready-to-hand, and transform those elements into salient focus, making them present-to-hand. In other words, each constraining focus opens up a limited set of possibilities, which in turn constrains then opens another set of possibilities in an unending process of emergent experience—a hermeneutic circle. Our fore-structures shape our falling such that the world we experience can be described as a cultural landscape. Our cultural landscapes have coherence because they have structure that derives from our cultural schemas, which encompass what becomes present-at-hand within the wider landscape of the ready-to-hand.
Applying Heideggerian ontology to artificial intelligence, Freeman (
1991) uses the metaphor of an
attractor landscape, which is useful to our discussion here. It is not the particular elements that activate our schemas, but rather their salience—“the significance of the stimulus,” (Freeman
1995). Freeman wants us to imagine a conceptual landscape as if it were a physical landscape with craters. These craters represent concepts, with salient, permeable boundaries that form the rim of the crater. The crater is what Freeman refers to as an
attractor. And the basin (lowest point) of the crater is a
basin attractor, which is the conceptual place that it takes minimal energy for our attention to flow. The path of our attention from rim to basin is what we refer to as the activation of an intrapersonal schema.
Now imagine that these craters exist in relation to one another, forming a complex network of basins in the landscape, i.e., an attractor landscape. When we view the attractor landscape, we see a vast network of basins, clusters of basins, basins within basins, and basins overlapping basins. Moreover, this landscape of basins lies upon a malleable surface that allows for changes in the landscape based on newly lived experience. Because the entire complex network landscape of craters is interlinked, localized changes arising from experience will have an effect on the structure and strength of the entire network. The attractor landscape metaphor reflects the notion that concepts (i.e., craters) don’t exist in isolation but rather as part of the network of schemas we develop through our lived and embodied experiences.
Dreyfus (
2007) notes that Freeman’s research indicates that there are “no linear causal connections between world and brain nor a fixed library of representations, but where…significance that is directly displayed in the world…is continually enriched.” In constructing an SDI, we tend to focus on informational structures as a ‘fixed library of representations’, much as we try to structure ontologies using strict logical formalisms. What I have argued here is that constructing an SDI is tied to ontology elicitation, which is grounded in the shared cultural schemas of a group of people, must be considered as through the lens of ‘structural coupling’ (Winograd & Flores
1987), and which we can better understand from a Heideggerian perspective using the concepts of
ready-to-hand and
present-at-hand.
Another metaphor that might be useful here is the relationship between wave and particle in quantum physics. Let us think of our cultural landscape as a wave, as a phenomenon that can only be grasped as temporal and in continual flux. When we try to focus upon the wave, it collapses into a particle. The quanta exhibit the qualities of both waves and particles. Our ontologies, our cultural schemas, are similar. They exist within a continually emerging experience, as if they were patterns of waves. The segmentation of ontologies into semantic segments is similar to a series of particles that results from the focus of our attention on what is present-at-hand based on the limited possibilities of what is ready-to-hand. Every interaction we have with the wave alters it, just like every contextualized experience we have alters our intrapersonal schemas. The difficulty we have is that our semantics are lexically expressed—a syntactically sequenced series of particles. If we want to achieve semantic interoperability for an SDI that serves not only the dominant culture but also the multiplicity of cultures, we must devise ways of including the ‘waves’ of the cultural landscapes.