Help?

[venta]

Just had an email from a friend who teaches computer science at A-level, and is baffled by an exam question his students asked him about.

Can anyone offer definitions of the following:

syntactic representation of knowledge
semantic representation of knowledge
direct manipulation interface

Some quick googling offered little help on the first two, and suggested that the last one is a Can Of Worms (TM). I've found a couple of pages waffling vaguely about direct manipulation, once of which describes it as "complex, compound, important and often poorly defined construct". Which is nice.

Comments

Bunch of @rse !

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

That's the sad thing about formal computer science courses. To pass them, you're supposed to memorise all this utter shit that has nothing to do with computing.

Chances are the first two are really just about explaining the difference between 'syntax' and 'semantics'.

Re: Bunch of @rse !

[venta.livejournal.com]

I agree :)

Of course, the fact that some monkey has employed me as a programmer for over 3 years now, yet I can't define syntactic and semantic for you proves your point....

I spent a year in the Comlab drawing up pretty schemas in Z, proving programmes correct and writing in Prolog. Guess how much I've used of that since I got a job :)

[dmh.livejournal.com]

I would hazard that the syntactic representation of knowledge is about using precise formal vocabularies to represent stuff and the properties of such stuff (model-theoretic semantics) whilst the semantic representation of knowledge is the abstract system the syntactic representation of knowledge is describing. So maybe RDF model theory is a semantic representation of knowledge with stuff like RDF/XML and N-tripes describing it in formal syntax. (Maybe I'm totally wrong, but if you attach meaning to data it strikes me you have information, and if you (or a machine) can make inferences based on that information, doesn't it then become knowledge?) Luckily the definition of the third term is easy; it's an obvious reference to the funky computer Tom Cruise uses in Minority Report.

[cardinalsin.livejournal.com]

Sounds like stuff from the crossover area between AI and psychology. Roughly speaking, I'd say that in this area possessing semantic knowledge means you have a representation of something which corresponds to something in the real world (i.e. it is a symbol for that thing). Possessing syntactic knowledge means you have a representation which is structured in the same way as something in the world... which amounts to the same thing.

Semantic/syntactic representation *of* knowledge, on the other hand, sounds far more philosophical, and as someone with a philosophy degree I can safely say: What?! I would guess it comes down to analysing the semantics and syntax of knowledge, but that doesn't sound too different from the above.

To be fair to the exam in question, I *think* computer science is supposed to be about the abstract theory of computing rather than any particular computer and how it works.

Ooh..

[venta.livejournal.com]

...hello Josh. Didn't know you were around :)

Thanks to all for suggestions.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

I highly doubt that a GCSE question is expected to be that complex. Even if they say "knowledge", they are not asking for a doctoral thesis in the philosophy of mind ;-)

Surely, as bateleur suggested, what they're asking is that if you've got some kind of structure or object or textual representation of data or whatever, what's the difference between the syntax and the semantics of that structure/object/text/whatever?

They're asking about the syntax/semantics of the representation, aren't they? Hence the phrasing of the question...