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

[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.