What's in a Link

(this is supporting document for the Cambridge Semantic Web meetup event on 3/9/2010 )

Date

3/9/2010

Location

Cambridge, MA

Presentation

Vimeo

What's in a Link, Revisited - William A. Woods

William will discuss ideas about representing meaning in computer representations based on his classical paper "What's in a Link: Foundations for Semantic Networks" - 1975 [1] and his review "Meaning and Links " in 2007 [2] in a historical context.

William A. Woods is a Distinguished Software Engineer at ITA Software, Cambridge, MA and a member of the Cambridge Semantic Web Meetup Group. http://parsecraft.com

Foundations for Semantic Networks

William A. Woods
Bolt, Beranek and Newman
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Copyright © 1975 by Academic Press, Inc.

II. What is Semantics?

A. The philosopher and the linguist

B. Procedural semantics

C. Semantic specification of natural language

D. Misconceptions about semantics

E. Semantics of Programming Languages

III. Semantics and Semantic Networks

A. Requirements for a semantic representation

B. The canonical form myth

C. Semantics of semantic network notations

D. Intensions and extensions

E. The need for intensional representation

F. Attribute and "values"

G. Links and predication

H. Relations of more than two arguments

I. Case representations in semantic networks

J. Assertional and structural links

IV. Problems in Knowledge Representation

A. Relative clauses

B. Representation of complex sentences

C. Definite and indefinite entities

D. Consequences of intensional nodes

E. Functions and predicates

F. Representing quantified expressions

V. Conclusion

References