Hi I am a metadata philosopher. The purpose of this site is to muse on the nature of data, and render here knowledge of its most basic forms and nature. It is my belief that the data itself is the tip of the iceberg. That the mass of information is hidden between the data in the usually unclassified and frequently non-rigorous contextual relationships among and between the data. I believe that the central challenge to truly understanding data is to decode the context - the meaning behind the data.
The human brain evolved explicitly for this purpose. I believe that in its and our unique abilities are in fact truths on the nature of data and that an understanding into the base process of how our reasoning brains process information into language instinctively will reveal the truth of meaning. My challenge here to myself is to tease out the meaning and structure, lurking just above our own level of thinking (insofar as it is the maker of our thinking itself) and turn it into a language that we can use easily to ascribe meaning to data and extract meaning from data.
Briefly, I believe that the truly unique thing about humans - the ability that no other creature possesses - is recursion. In effect, at some point we managed to eke out the ability to nest concepts within concepts. Symbolic recursion: sets within sets. That one small step, even very restricted in dynamic scope, would have allowed the explosion of abilities from other primates to humans that explains language (and just about all the other cultural advances else thereby).
That said, I believe that a normalized and simple way to store and process symbols (that is to process concepts) would be very helpful in making this similar leap available to machines. A normalized way to describe anything with a normalized concept scaffold to afford a common language. I believed that this is missing, and that it’s creation will be the final missing piece toward dynamically automating everything, from analysis to design to creation. That is to say, I hope to let the data figure itself out.
