Opening the Semantic Space in the Service of Collective Intelligence

Abstract

As the human recorded memory is progressively digitized and posted on line, the need for a common semantic coordinate system independant from natural languages and ontologies is growing. A future universal semantic addressing system, able to index all digital documents, should meet three basic requirements. First, each distinct concept should have a unique address. Second, the semantic coordinate system should be open to any concept and relations between concepts
(ontologies), whatever the cultural environments where these concepts are created and transformed, without neither privileges nor exclusions. Third, it should support a group of mathematically defined (automatable) operations on semantic addresses, namely : rotations, symmetries and translations in the « semantic space » ; semantic compression and decompression ; set-theory operations like union, intersection and symmetric differences ; ranking on semantic criteria ; semantic pattern recognition ; semantic distances measurement ; logical inferences, etc.
Developped by an international research network led by the Canada Research Chair in Collective Intelligence at the University of Ottawa, the Information Economy MetaLanguage (IEML), allows the construction of a semantic coordinate system meeting these three constraints. Website, including the IEML dictionary, since may 2006 : www.ieml.org. In Brasil, BIREME (www.bireme.br) is member of the IEML initiative.