Post-ESSLLI Musings

First, Hans Kamp's lecture on DRTs and temporal relations was great, he basically merged an event-calculus (i.e. of the type I use!) into DRTs via constraint logic programming. No implementation though, but the theory seems fine. The idea of C-OWL
seems also much more feasible than OWL, and had a great lunch talk with the fellow who gave a talk on Making the Semantic Web More Semantic, where he supports grounding out in some psychophysical dimensions. Still, maybe I've been reading too much Maturna recently - but how do we know even those are reliably objectives ("for humans" I might add being very important), and even then - what use would those be for most of the things such as abstractions like business transactions and very real cultural items like the Eiffel Tower. He also claimed that communication does not need to have "reference" anywhere, but the pattern of communication "itself" can determine the meaning of communication. Maybe for some...but when in doubt and in a foreign country, the gesticulate and point trick always seems to work. Good ending to ESSLLI, and I'm off again for camping this weekend.