Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Wikis and the Lexicon

The Lexicon is the semantic unit database for a given system. Its keys are the unit names (more or less words), and its records are the sloppy, messy definitions of those concepts.

A Wiki is also a way of mapping from terms onto definition-like text. So is writing a Wiki sort of cognate with defining a domain for semantic programming?

Kind of. I'll bet a Wiki structure would be a fantastic way of annotating a Lexicon; this is the approach I'm going to attempt at the quant-semantics Wiki. A Lexicon entry is going to be much, much more fine-grained than a sensible Wiki structure would comfortably support, but if we think of a Wiki page as a microdomain where concepts are grouped together for ease of presentation, this might be quite useful.

Then we would just scrape the Wiki to compile the program. How cool is that? For this to work, the Wiki is going to have to support code (which Wikispaces does), and the compiler will have to know how to tell smoo code from syntactic structures.

I think this might work! Then the semantic programming Wiki could end up being the general library for inclusion.

What a pretty concept!

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