We seek to take some initial steps towards a theory of information that is adequate for understanding and designing systems that process information, i.e., information systems in a broad sense. Formal representations of information are needed in designing, using and maintaining such systems, especially when they are computer based. However, it is also necessary to take account of social context, including how information is produced and used, not merely how it is represented; that is, we need a social theory of information. Ideas from ethnomethodology and semiotics, as well as logic and the sociology of science, are used to explore the nature of information.

this paper is on procedures whereby new (e.g., juvenile) members of a population could learn to communicate with the other members by observing their communicative behavior. Two apparently distinct issues are relevant to the evaluation of such learning procedures. First, the procedure must enable the new members to accurately acquire the communication system of the population, even though their observations may be limited, noisy, or otherwise misleading. Second, the learning procedure used by its new members will affect the population's communication system over time. The use of a particular procedure might result in the population's communication increasing in coordination, ultimately yielding a nearly optimally coordinated system. If a learning procedure were to satisfy both criteria, it could explain how learned communication systems are maintained over time, as well as how they are established in the first place.

The main thrust of this paper will be to illucidate and promote discussion on the relationship between ontologies and natural language. The value, power, and, I will claim, necessity of basing ontology construction on an understanding of natural language is recognized generally neither within AI nor within formal ontology. This is primarily because of a rather impoverished view of language, of what language is, how it functions, and of what it is doing when it `functions' --- in short, the very role of language for modes of human Being is (again!) being underestimated. Language is misconstrued as an `on the surface of things' technique of building descriptions of the world. This obscures the reasons for using an understanding of language in ontology theory and practise. The paper will briefly set out these reasons, both theoretically and practically --- theoretically, by grounding ontology construction in the understanding of language offered by systemic-functional linguistics and rela...

We describe an approach to user interface design based on ideas from social science, narratology (the theory of stories), cognitive science, and a new area called algebraic semiotics. Social analysis helps to identify certain roles for users with their associated requirements, and suggests ways to make proofs more understandable, while algebraic semiotics, which combines semiotics with algebraic specification, provides rigorous theories for interface functionality and for a certain technical notion of quality. We apply these techniques to designing user interfaces for a distributed cooperative theorem proving system, whose main component is a website generation and proof assistance tool called Kumo. This interface integrates formal proving, proof browsing, animation, informal explanation, and online background tutorials, drawing on a richer than usual notion of proof. Experience with using the interface is reported, and some conclusions are drawn.

An approach to information visualization based on algebraic semiotics is introduced, and illustrated with examples. Semiotics is the general theory of signs, and algebraic semiotics is a new approach combining algebraic abstract data type theory with a grounding in social reality. The most important new ideas are to use semiotic spaces for systems of related signs, semiotic morphisms for representations of signs, and preservation orderings for the quality of representations.

This paper describes the Tatami project at UCSD, which is developing a system to support distributed cooperative software development over the web, and in particular, the validation of concurrent distributed software. The main components of our current prototype are a proof assistant, a generator for documentation websites, a database, an equational proof engine, and a communication protocol to support distributed cooperative work. We believe behavioral specification and verification are important for software development, and for this purpose we use first order hidden logic with equational atoms. The paper also briefly describes some novel user interface design methods that have been developed and applied in the project

To learn a language, the learners must first learn its words, the essential building blocks for utterances. The difficulty in learning words lies in the unavailability of explicit word boundaries in speech input. The learners have to infer lexical items with some innately endowed learning mechanism(s) for regularity detection- regularities in the speech normally indicate word patterns. With respect to Zipf's least-effort principle and Chomsky's thoughts on the minimality of grammar for human language, we hypothesise a cognitive mechanism underlying language learning that seeks for the least-effort representation for input data. Accordingly, lexical learning is to infer the minimal-cost representation for the input under the constraint of permissible representation for lexical items. The main theme of this thesis is to examine how far this learning mechanism can go in unsupervised lexical learning from real language data without any pre-defined (e.g., prosodic and phonotactic) cues, but entirely resting on statistical induction of structural patterns for the most economic representation for the data. We first review

Abstract. This paper introduces a Semiotic Appoach to Hypertext Theory. Having been applied to Informatics only in recent years, Semiotics promises a broader understanding of Hypertext as a structure of signs. The rapid visualization of the World Wide Web seems to justify this approach. Using the methodology of applied Semiotics and Graph Theory, the author analyses the challenges and restrictions of Hypertexts in general and the WWW in particular. 1

Abstract: This paper proposes a new approach to style, arising from our work on computational media using structural blending, which enriches the conceptual blending of cognitive linguistics with structure building operations in order to encompass syntax and narrative as well as metaphor. We have implemented both conceptual and structural blending, and conducted initial experiments with poetry, including interactive multimedia poetry, although the approach generalizes to other media. The central idea is to analyze style in terms of blending principles, based on our finding that different principles from those of common sense blending are often needed for some contemporary poetic metaphors. 1

Nearly all listeners consider the subjective aspects of music, such as its emotional tone, to have primary importance. But contemporary philosophers often downplay, ignore, or even deny such aspects of experience. Moreover, traditional philosophies of music try to decontextualize it. Using music as an example, this paper explores the structure of qualitative experience, demonstrating that it is multi-layer emergent, non-compositional, enacted, and situation dependent, among other non-Cartesian properties.