Zombiac and The Semantic Web
Nocturne in D Major, Part Two

The slides and the two SVG files are available for viewing at open-meta.com.

A podcast of the nocturne will also appear on the site. My poster paper and a podcast to accompany it are already available on the site.

Before we get back to continuing the discussion from part one let us spend a moment and consider what Zombiac is. Philosophical Zombie (see Wikipedia) is a hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except that it lacks conscious experience or qualia or sentience. Zombiac, then, is a metaphor of a "mechanical contrivance" like Edsac, Ordvac, Univac, Illiac (computers) and zombie-homunculus-in-a-box. It is a play on words and a metaphor.

A metaphor for what one may ask. The focus of the nocturne presentation is that "nobody is home" in the modern computer. Said another way it points out that computers are lacking in common-sense, even horse sense. Tim Berners-Lee instigated the Semantic Web by virtue of his discussion in a Scientific American article. To-date people's implementation of this semantic web has no common-sense yet and has not progressed yet to the level of zombie-homunculus-in-a-box as these are at least holistic in their planning and execution (behaviour). Tim Berners-Lee's Semantic Web is a system of alpha-zombies ('in a box') and does not have the behavioural capability that a situated, understanding agent or system has. The holistic ("organic") inter-activity is missing.

The two SVG demos show that often what we experience seems to be the world but is really the output result of some below-level-of-consciousness processing which taps consciousness on the shoulder and then holds up a cue-card (for it to clue in with). "Seeing" a bar-chart is an example and the first demo SVG code and podcast explaining it provide interesting discussion.

SVG demo two shows a round wall clock picture with a red-coloured sweep-second-hand and black hour and minute hands showing the current time, as it passses, second by second.

The ontology metadata in the first SVG picture convey spatial relationships between SVG elements like rectangle and text. This allows a content-based semantic search of SVG pictures, finding in this case a bar-chart, a second order thing which is actually nowhere in the picture. ("The bar-chart is in the eye of the beholder" not on the screen or page.)

The second SVG file has the time-ontology from JPL's SWEET (15 ontology set)
embedded in the SVG metadata element in the picture. Looking at the code we see how a reasoning program can detect ("see") that the three hands of the picture (of the operating clock) depict time and the passage of time. Also the ontology "allows the clock picture to know that not only do its hands show the passage of time but also knowledge of time related things, such as seasons, etc."