The Metaphorical Web picture is a fractal which I have edge detected
and extruded so as to enhance a three-dimensional visual texture. Some
people call this the Butterfly fractal. It is symbolic of computer
representational and processing metaphor.

(Some) Humans can "see" a butterfly when they look at this fractal
(The Metaphorical Web yahoo group picture). This is making / using a
metaphor. There is no actual butterfly, nor would it be mistaken for
an (picture of) actual butterfly. It evokes (for some viewers anyway)
butterfly-like rememberances, like their wings, perhaps flapping,
perhaps not. The point is that this is exactly what metaphor is, a
kind of analogy or similarity, but it is not random in its mapping,
nor is it a complete 100% point-to-point mapping such as would be an
instance of a photograph of some actual butterfly.* The details and
structure of this partial mapping is what computer metaphor is about.
Some readers will see relevancies into the domains of modeling and of
simulation, others in domain of robot 'planning systems'. Conceptual
Metaphors are used daily by people to think about their world, to make
and use functional abstractions, so much so that one often forgets
that it is metaphors we are thinking with and not things themselves.
Planning is aided hugely by being able to make and use metaphors and
science and technology employ them a lot. We have all heard of the
(scientific) metaphors such as "event horizon", "black hole", "gravity
well". As well as evoking useful images (particularly in people) these
terms can be used computationally in a meaningful way. That is what
this newsletter is about, the domain of generation and use of
functional "conceptual metaphors" as a technology and as a means of
advanced computer representation.

As of this post the domains of coverage by The Metaphorical Web have
changed from what they were previously. As the previous owner of this
group, Kurt Cagle, posted on Nov 2005, his material postings were
continued at a blog at http://www.understandingxml.com from that date
forward. Kurt will be making contributions to this version of The
Metaphorical Web as well.

*If one looks at a photo of an Albatross skimming through the air and
makes an analogical comparison of that with a photo of a U2 aircraft
gliding through the skies one can see that the latter is a
technological metaphor generated from the former. Canadian and other
passenger jet aircraft sport winglets at the end of their wings, these
are direct technological metaphor of the individual (specialized)
feathers at the tips of the wings of larger birds of prey. The Wright
brothers said that they got the idea of 'wing warping' from watching
birds in flight, clearly another direct technological metaphor, aka
'transfer'.

Future postings will bring into the discussion Aspect Oriented
Programming AOP, with some talk about AspectJ, and also about Java
Reflection and how both of these first order metaprogramming
technologies contribute to metaphorical and autonomous nee second
order systems.