Semantic representations for collaborative, distributed scientific information systems

Abstract

It is vital for Los Alamos to respond to the challenge presented by the ongoing revolution in Information Science and Technology. Distributed Information Systems (DIS) are having a profound affect not only in science, but in society in general. In view of their increasing role in the management of scientific information, in national security and intelligence, and certainly as objects of scientific inquiry themselves, these DIS need to be designed and studied from a scientific perspective. The technological developments over the last ten years, the Internet and the World-Wide Web (www) in particular, have been breakthroughs, allowing for the construction of non-linear, hypertextually based, DIS. And yet most of these DIS are still constructed by hand, and have the properties and architectures of the prior paradigm based on books and libraries, with strictly hierarchical categorization designed with many hours of human effort. Our broader vision is based on an organismal model where DIS are adaptable and evolutionary, scalable, highly connected, high dimensional, resilient, and admitting to many complementary views and orderings. The key development necessary to support this view is the representation of semantic information in DIS. We propose a set of software developments and experiments which will both construct novel DIS with explicit semantic representations, and measure the semantic properties of existing DIS. For DIS design, we propose an architecture called Semantic Webs, where a binary multigraph representation relates a number of nodes according to a variety of semantic categories, each partially ordered. The ontological relations among the semantic categories allows a dynamic among them, and thus for the DIS to be self-modifying and adaptive, suggesting new links as a form of inference. These structures will be implemented as Java add-ons in existing browsers. Semantic categories will be represented as hypertext links, with type indicated by anchor color.