<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes" ?>
<!-- Copyright 2008 David Dodds All Rights Reserved code copyright
owner -->
<svg xmlns = 'http://www.w3.org/2000/svg'>
<desc xmlns:myfoo="http://example.org/myfoo">
<myfoo:title>This is a financial report</myfoo:title>
<myfoo:descr>The global description uses markup from the
<myfoo:emph>myfoo</myfoo:emph> namespace.</myfoo:descr>
<myfoo:scene><myfoo:what>widget growth</myfoo:what>
<myfoo:contains>thirteen graph-bar</myfoo:contains>
<myfoo:when>1995 through 2007</myfoo:when> </myfoo:scene>
</desc>
<text id="originlabel" x="1" y="12"
style="font-family:Verdana; font-size:12.333; fill:lightblue">
* origin x=0, y=0
</text>
<text id="uplabel" x="340" y="20"
style="font-family:Verdana; font-size:12.333; fill:black">
UP
</text>
<text id="downlabel" x="340" y="230"
style="font-family:Verdana; font-size:12.333; fill:black">
DOWN
</text>
<rect id="xbaseline" x="37" y="190" width="280" height="1"
style="stroke:black; stroke-width:1" />
<text id="text3" x="317" y="194"
style="font-family:Verdana; font-size:12.333; fill:indigo">
18
</text>
<rect id="endlineright" x="333" y="96" width="1" height="104"
style="stroke:black; stroke-width:1" />
<rect id="endlineleft" x="37" y="96" width="1" height="104"
style="stroke:black; stroke-width:1" />
<rect id="bar1" x="40" y="160" width="20" height="40"
style="stroke:green; fill:green; stroke-width:0" />
<rect id="bar2" x="60" y="140" width="20" height="60"
style="stroke:yellow; fill:yellow; stroke-width:0" />
<rect id="bar3" x="80" y="111" width="20" height="89"
style="stroke:blue; fill:orange; stroke-width:0" />
<rect id="bar4" x="100" y="130" width="20" height="70"
style="stroke:yellow; fill:yellow; stroke-width:0" />
<rect id="bar5" x="120" y="173" width="20" height="27"
style="stroke:green; fill:lightgreen; stroke-width:0" />
<rect id="bar6" x="140" y="191" width="20" height="09"
style="stroke:green; fill:green; stroke-width:0" />
<rect id="bar7" x="160" y="140" width="20" height="60"
style="stroke:yellow; fill:yellow; stroke-width:0" />
<rect id="bar8" x="180" y="167" width="20" height="33"
style="stroke:green; fill:green; stroke-width:0" />
<rect id="bar9" x="200" y="175" width="20" height="25"
style="stroke:green; fill:green; stroke-width:0" />
<rect id="bar10" x="220" y="129" width="20" height="71"
style="stroke:yellow; fill:yellow; stroke-width:0" />
<rect id="bar11" x="240" y="150" width="20" height="50"
style="stroke:green; fill:green; stroke-width:0" />
<rect id="bar12" x="260" y="139" width="20" height="61"
style="stroke:yellow; fill:yellow; stroke-width:0" />
<rect id="bar13" x="280" y="125" width="20" height="75"
style="stroke:yellow; fill:yellow; stroke-width:0" />
<text id="text1" x="37" y="210"
style="font-family:Verdana; font-size:12.333; fill:black">
95969798990001020304050607
</text>
<text id="text2" x="37" y="230"
style="font-family:Verdana; font-size:12.333; fill:blue">
Mean High Ratings August 2007
</text>
</svg>

Caption: SVG "code" used to generate my bar-chart picture.


Copyright 2008 David Dodds

Look at my illustration of my bar-chart (it's in the files section).
What you see is a coloured bar-chart. Where are the colours? The
yellow, orange etc are seen on the bars are they not? Isn't that why
we call them yellow, orange, etc bars!?

But there is no colour (or sound) "out there" beyond your mind, which
seems to be "behind" your eyes and "between" your ears. Many people
are comfortable with saying the (apparent) location of one's mind is
"in" (or at least simultaneously occupying the same volume) as one's
brain.

The yellow is a pigment of your imagination. When you "see" yellow
you are experiencing what some people call qualia. Well and so what?

The yellow "looks as though" it is "on" or at least "at" the surface
of the bars in the chart that "have" a yellow colour. Yet you do
*experience* the yellow(ness) in your awareness (ostensibly that is
located in your mind in your brain in your skull). Yet you "see" the
yellowness [as being] "on" ("at") the surface of the bar / rectangle.
If one asks you "Where is the yellow"? You would answer "On the bar."
"On the front of the bar." Yet you would not say that your awareness
is on / at the front of the bar. It is in your mind (which is in your
head). How can it be that you experience the experience, you 'have'
the awareness in your head (mind) but the yellow is "seen as being
located at / on the front of the bar. You don't experience the yellow
as being located in your head, you experience it as located on the bar
(which is on /at your "computer screen"). We experience the experience
[which is experiencing yellow colour] but the source / origin /
location of that experienced yellowness is at / on your computer
screen. For some people this is a conundrum, a problem.

At the start of this episode I have shown a subset of the SVG "code"
used to generate my bar-chart picture. When we look at the rendered
result of this SVG file we see the illustration shown in the file
section of this group. (Except that the orange bar in the SVG code is
red in the files section picture. (Its an older version of the same
bar-chart.))

If we wanted to be able to ask the computer some questions about the
bar-chart picture we could use an XML parsing system that searched
for particular patterns in the SVG code (it is XML). Let's say we want
to know if there is anything yellow-coloured in the bar-chart. We can
look at the rendered output and see, yes there are some yellow
coloured patches in the illustration. By scanning the SVG code we
locate the "yellow" string" in several places and return the entire
SVG element for each such detection. That is simple XSLT pattern
matching. We could even count the number of such SVG elements returned
for the query "yellow". If we happened to be using some graphic
system that used RGB triples instead we would have to use a lookup
table that shows the RGB triple equivalent to "yellow" . Still not
rocket science.

We can look in the SVG code for "bars" or for rectangles, text ,
various colours and so on. We can do that because such things are
explicit (in the code) in the SVG text. Using this pattern matching
approach on explicitly present kinds of text is quite straightforward.

Asking a question (of the SVG program) like "Is the text below the
bars or not?" "Is the yellow bar the shortest one?" "Is the orange
bar the best one?" Oops. Pattern matching (of text) can't be used as
the technique to find answers to such questions (when you ask the
questions to a computer).

To answer these new type of questions we know that the answer is never
there (in the picture itself) explicitly, in the form of matchable
(SVG)text. What we need to do is make some inferences to arrive at the
answer rather than looking up / scan for explicitly stated (in the
picture) answers. [This means that we have to have a means of knowing
/ representing what information is *explicitly* contained in an SVG
'program' / 'code' (instance).] Our first question, "Is the text below
the bars or not?", we have to be able to determine what a) 'the
text', b) 'the bars', c) 'below' are. Let us say that we find (SVG
item id=) 'text1' to be 'the text' and (SVG item) 'bar1' through
'bar12' to be 'the bars'. There is nothing in the picture (SVG code
text) called 'below' that we can match on. If we treat 'below' as a
predicate we can check out our set of known predicates and see if it
is there. We can look in our set of ontologies and we find 'below' in
the space.owl ontology.

We discussed the space.owl ontology in previous postings. We see that
'below' also has a procedural definition. A simplified version is
shown next. The Y-axis of this SVG picture is upper left corner so the
smallest Y-axis value is at the top of the page, perhaps exactly
opposite of how many people conceive of 'elevation'.


public boolean Below( int y1, int y2 )
{
if (y1 < y2 )
{
return true;
}
else
{
return false;
}
}

The code simply compares the Y-axis origin of two SVG objects [object
(at) x1,y1, and object (at) x2,y2] and sees if one is closer to the
Y-axis zero than the other. The function returns true if object 2 is
below object 1 . A functional test is of course, more sophisticated,
this code above was used simply as an illustration of a procedural way
to implement a declarative predicate such as 'below'.

By running such a procedural knowledge item the computer is not aware
of anything being above anything else. It does not experience the
output of the 'below' program / function. It can make a note of the
output but that is not the same thing as when a human mind experiences
something, like "the below-ness" of something.

In the same way we can look at "shortest" in "Is the yellow bar the
shortest one?" There is no "shortest" text in the SVG code, which
draws the bar-graph, to match equal to and so we must use inference to
answer the question. What is required is knowledge about geometry.
This can be found in the space.owl ontology (NASA JPL SWEET). Using
knowledge about geometry we can determine that height (of the bars in
this case) can be obtained a) using the value for SVG rectangle
element 'height=' or b) Ymax - height. The SVG rectangle's height
attribute tells how high the bar is but without regard for context
(which in this case is that the bar is oriented in a bar-chart, so as
to be 'visually comparable ' with other bars in the same chart.) b)
uses the context of being a member of a bar-chart and thus 'height' is
the Y-axis value at the top of the bar. Whereas a) is the scalar
distance from the top of the bar to the bottom of the bar or vice
versa. In the b) context, "shortest" means the bar with the largest
Y-value for the top of the bar. Since, in this case, the bottoms of
all the bars have exactly the same Y-axis value either a) or b) will
locate the shortest bar. With the bar top and bottom Y-co-ordinate
value known the bar (rectangle) can be determined and its colour
parameter examined (to be yellow or not).

'Is the orange bar the best one?' This is a metaphor! It is the
kind of metaphor Lakoff has written about. It is a spatial metaphor.

Notice in the code for my bar-chart there are two text strings 'UP'
and 'DOWN' and that these two text items were placed near the top of
the SVG frame and bottom, respectively. This was a visual (well its
SVG isnt it!) way of depicting Lakoff's metaphor "GOOD IS UP", using
de Bono (Atlas of Management Thinking) graphical meaning. "UP" is
towards Y=0 and "DOWN" is towards Y=300. (300 is the Y axis value for
the bottom of the picture area containing "the bar-chart itself.) We
know that "GOOD" has the values 'good', 'better', 'best' and we can
assign a range of Y-axis values to each of these 3 terms. We could
also use a mapping function to map the Y-axis (values) into the 3
terms. (See Lotfi Zadeh and Fuzzy Set theory and also the book
"Computing With Words".)

Given this, "the best bar" (computationally, 'the most UP' bar) is
the one with a bar top having the smallest Y-axis value. Is that bar
orange?

(Yes). [It is the bar having a top which is closest to the Y-axis
location of the text item "UP". Metaphorically, {the amount of }
'goodness' is directly proportional to {the amount of } UPness (of the
bar top).
(That, painful as it is, is the way the metaphor "GOOD IS UP" is
'explained' (programmed) to the computer.)]

Let us now return to "Where is the yellow." Is the yellow in the
phosphor on the screen? And not in your head / mind? You do not
experience the yellow as being in / on / at your eye, you know fairly
well where that is located in space and that location is not the same
location in space as the yellow is. While you "have" the experience of
yellow or yellowness, you do not have the experience of seeing.
Experiencing yellow is the result of seeing. Seeing is a process. You
do not experience the process / processing itself, you experience the
result of the process. That result is yellowness. The process(ing) is
the motor or engine which powers the manufacturing, of the output
product. The manufactured product is (the qualia) yellowness. As yet
computers seem not to have or perform this particular process and so
their awareness is of a different nature than ours. That nature is
about signal-stationarity, detection and logical processing. Some
terms for that: subconscious, second order metaprogramming,
proto-awareness. (PS The original bar-chart had a red coloured bar
that was highest. In the SVG code for the latest version of my
bar-chart that bar is coloured orange, the dates are different, and
the (IDs for) bars are called bars instead of lines.)