ESSLLI 2005 and Ph.D. Thoughts.

For the next two weeks I'm going to be at ESSLLI, the European Summer School for Logic, Language, and Information, which is Heriot-Watt. It's a good hour trip there and back everyday, and it lasts from 9 in the morning to at least 6:30, so I'm not sure how much I'm going to be able to do in my spare time. The classes look interesting, I should be taking classes on summarisation, information retrieval, metaphor processing, as well as reasoning on the Semantic Web and NLP for Multimedia applications, as well as attending a workshop on the logical foundations of grammar. There should also be great talks on statistics and NLP as well as "Why the Semantic Web isn't Semantic".

However, while I took a brief trip in the highlands to unwind post-G8, I started to really hash over ideas about being the Ph.D. thesis together. Basically, I have an all-star team of advisors, and now have to pull together my three favorite topics in philosophy, Web architecture, and NLP together. I'm thinking that I could write up how the web effects our ideas on information, representation, and digitality (thus putting the subject matter of the Web on firm philosophical ground with regards to AI), and then proceed to use that terminology to formalize a theory of the Web (Semantic Web/XML Schema as types, Web Services as functions) and then finally make the whole thing concrete by using a combination of Henry Thompson's lambdaXML (It appears that Wadler's Links just won't happen in time, and it's a much more ambitious project than the rather simple one I need!) and the GridNLP stuff I used to work on with Ewan Klein to make a program that analyzes web caches and searches, creating narratives out of them using techniques pioneered by Johanna Moore. That's no small amount of stuff - but I already have bits and pieces of it done, and most of it just needs to be tied together.