One-line and One-paragraph Ph.D. Thesis Proposal

I'll be honest: it's been hard to craft a Ph.D. thesis proposal that fits the following constraints:

1. Manages to combine such diverse areas as Web architecture, narratives, and philosophy of the mind, but I think I may have just done it. Note that these three requirements are covered by my three Ph.D. thesis supervisors, Henry Thompson, Johanna Moore, and Andy Clark.


2. Has a coherent strand of thought....the Web embodies parts of the human mind that our biological brain is not too good at, and so to use the Web we need to back-up to tools that focus on what we're good at. Just like the visual desktop is a better metaphor for data for most people than the black hole of the command prompt, a narrative (blog) is a better way to organise data than a big list.


3. Has three gee-whiz factors "This guy is doing the philosophy of the Web", "That sure looks a lot like Scheme for Web Services in XML", and "A blog that writes itself...cool!"


4. I already have substantial parts of it done...so it's just a matter of finishing the work I already started! And each of my advisors also has relevant interests and work in the area.

• Title:

  The Semantics and Significance of the Web: From Information to Narrative



• One Sentence:

  This thesis analyzes the philosophical and computational architecture of the Web, to analyse and generate personal narrative texts on the Web.



• One Paragraph:

  
  This thesis analyzes the philosophical and computational architecture of the Web, and uses the resultant framework to analyze and generate ontology-rich narrative texts on the Web. The Web is treated as an extension of the human mind, one that is successful because it allows this extension to take place using universally accessible digital representations. The Web benefits from the sharing of information with a universal network, yet the most useful information being that which is easily accessible and personalized. This "network intelligence" shown to be diametrically opposed to both the classical and embodied traditions in artificial intelligence, as both assume a single cognitive agent, while network intelligence takes into account how intelligence is developed through the flow of information through a Web of connections without sacrificing the embodied and personalized nature of all information. The Web is characterised as a universal information space, and a philosophically rigorous model of information, embodiment, encoding, and representation on the Web is developed. The next stage of Web development as presented by the Semantic Web and Web Services is then conceived as the transformation from the Web from a universal information space to a universal computation space, since the Semantic Web can be considered a particular kind of typing and Web Services as functions that operate over those types. To return from abstraction to grounding, the problem of organising information on the Web is difficult, and one of the earliest solutions developed by humans for organising their personal information is the narrative. We use the Web framework developed earlier to construct a program that detects and analyses narrative texts on the Web through the detection of both narrative structure and the use of ontologies. This program consists of a complex Web Service-based NLP pipeline for analysis and generation of narratives, based on an empirical study done with children's stories. This program allows the automatic detection of narrative texts in free text, and can therefore be used to automatically generate a Web-based personal narratives from text gathered by users in the Web.