Suggestions for “must reads” that can help me to understand this complex country and continent are welcome!

Non-Fiction

Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela (1994, Abacus). Highly recommendable to anyone interested in the struggle and appalling situations and injustices under the Apartheid regime. It easily readable, and makes a man out of the myth. It is a personal account, and not so much an exposé of ideas (cf., e.g., Fidel’s “my life” or “la historia me absolverá”).

Terrific Majesty: the Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention by Carolyn Hamilton (1998, Harvard University Press). After the first chapter of academese, the remaining chapters provide a highly readable and fascinating picture of the life of King Shaka as well as the agendas of the multiple narrators of those times, somewhat alike a two-layered ‘soap opera’. 

The Racist’s Guide to the People in South Africa by Simon Kilpatrick (2010, Two Dogs). Illustrates well the new term I learned here, “equal opportunity offender”, although he does it in a satirical, witty, way. For the record, I can confirm Kilpatrick’s description of the Dutch [described in the same paragraph as the Germans]: yes, I do commit the cardinal sin of wearing socks in sandals, eat liquorice and lots of cheese, don’t leave a tip if the service or food is crappy, and as a child I went many times on summer holidays in France bringing most of our food from the Netherlands (indeed, that was cheaper). But, to some extent, I still wonder how accurate and/or exaggerated some of the descriptions of the other groups are. 

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for our Time by Jeffrey D. Sachs (2005, Penguin Books). Appeared to be written for people who politically lean to the right to convince them to move toward a centrist position, for Sachs’ ego as do-good-er within a capitalist framework, and serves as an appeal to the baby boomers to let go of the generational egoism so as to come off less bad (or a bit better) in history. 

Persons in Community: African Ethics in Global Culture, edited by Ronald Nicholson (2008, UKZN Press). Various essays of varying quality. Positive: Ubuntu from different perspectives and in different contexts. One can safely skip the annoying writings with Christian religious stuff, which has done more harm than good, notwithstanding the attempts at revisionary history writing.

African Renaissance (read in part), edited by Malegapuru William Makgoba (1999, Mafube Publishing). A collection of essays written in 1999 on problems and looking forward on what to do to realise a better future for South Africa and the continent. I think this will become a useful document for assessing if, and if yes how, the hopes and ideas have been realized over time. As an aside, it introduced me to the term “potted plants in green houses” that refers to certain academics in South Africa (note: they can be found in other countries as well, albeit due to different reasons).

Currently reading: Africa’s Peacemaker? Lessons from South African Conflict Mediation (currently reading), edited by Kurt Shillinger (2009, Fanele). The collection contains analyses of several conflicts in Africa, and lessons learnt of South African efforts in conflict mediation. From the parts I have read, this would have been useful to read for one of the courses of the MA in Peace & development I did a while ago.

Lined up to read: Chabal’s Africa: the Politics of Suffering and Smiling (2009, Zed Books).

Pamphlets

The following three pamphlets are from New Frank Talk, and give plenty of food for thought—not just to me, but if you do a search on it, you’ll see various sources, including news articles, discussing the topics.

Black Colonialists: the root of the trouble with Africa by Chinweizu. On post-colonial time, loathing Blacks in government who behave like their former colonialist masters.

Blacks can’t be racist by Andile Mngxitama. The thesis is that if you are not in a position of power, you cannot be racist, as one cannot act upon one’s prejudices about certain identified groups of people (if one has them); hence: ‘race’-based prejudice + power + acting upon it = racist. (Most) Blacks are not in a position of power, hence, cannot be racist, or so goes the argument in a nutshell. 

The white revolutionary as a missionary? Contemporary travels and researches in Caffraria by Heinrich Böhmke. On the ‘well-meaning left’ going to Africa to ‘help the poor and do good’ as a modern-day version of the colonialist-missionary with its negative influences.

Fiction

The Angina Monologues by Rosamund Kendal (2010, Jacana Media). One of those books you just have to finish reading quickly to see how events unfold with the characters. It describes the experiences of three South African interns in a remote hospital in South Africa and how they come to grips with that new situation and their heritage with the different situations and mores they each grew up with.

The Master’s Ruse by Patricia Schonstein (2008, African Sun Press). The author has been so friendly to me, but it was not easy finishing reading the book. Perhaps it is a good book, attested by the freedom of the reader to read in it what fits the reader (and that wasn’t pretty). 

Black Diamond by Zakes Mda (2009, Penguin Books). Criticism of recent developments in South Africa is woven into the storyline. It also claims to insert all sorts of clichés, which is harder for me to assess. Disappointing is the portrayal of most of the female story characters who all happen to have all sorts of negative character traits and behaviours, with the male lead—having fought in the struggle, but not getting his share of the money and fame to become a ‘Black Diamond’—the good guy. It reads as if it were a Bouquet-book but then for a male readership.

Can he be the one? By Lauri Kubuitsile (2010, Sapphire press). Now this is a real Bouquet-book (called Sapphire here), but then with a cast of successful Black South Africans.

Earlier

Regarding possible suggestions, I have read several fiction and non-fiction books over the years, so possible glaring omissions from the aforementioned list may have been covered already—or: if you consider reading something about (South) Africa and none of the above piqued your interest, then maybe one or more of these ones do. Some of those books are, in alphabetical order by surname of author:

I write what I like by Steve Biko (1987, Heinemann). A must read. Writings from the ‘70s, on the Black Consciousness Movement. Introduced me to the term “Whitey” and (problems with) the “White liberal left”.

Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee (2004, Vintage).

Lettera ad un consumatore del nord by centro nuovo modello di svilluppo.

Concerning violence by Frantz Fanon (part of Wretched of the earth, which, when you search a bit, is available in whole as a free pdf download). Highly recommendable.

Hacia el reino del silencio by Miguel Díaz Nápoles (2008, Pablo de la Torriente, Editorial). On Cuban doctors in Ghana.

The challenge for Africa by Wangari Maathai (2010, Arrow Books). Highly recommendable. Interesting analyses of problems, ideas and successes for self-empowerment. If you have any difficulty choosing between this and Sachs’ book, take this one.

I am an African by Ngila Michael Muendane (2006, Soultalk CC). About decolonization of the mind. A must read.

How man can die better: the life of Robert Sobukwe by Benjamin Pogrund (version of 2006, Jonathan Ball Publishers). Highly recommendable to anyone interested in the struggle and appalling situations and injustices under the Apartheid regime; Sobukwe was with the PAC.

Inside rebellion: the politics of insurgent violence by Jeremy M. Weinstein (2007, Cambridge University Press). Highly recommendable, if you’re into this topic.

As mentioned, if you have any good suggestions, please leave them in the comments or email me off-line, lest I keep on picking books fairly randomly and hoping it is worthwhile the price and reading time.  But maybe I should venture more often into the real world, instead of ‘reading this one more book to be better prepared for it’.

ONSET, the foundational ONtology SElection Tool, does the hard work for you (download jar file). You answer one or more questions, and it will compute a suggestion based on the answers and your priorities, and it explains why the particular foundational ontology was selected. As usability is important, several “explain” buttons were added, in particular in the “ontology commitments” category. To increase a user’s confidence, ONSET not only simply selects a foundational ontology for you, but also explains why by relating it back to the answers the user chose, and it displays all (if any) request that was not met by the selected ontology. The rather basic main page of ONSET contains an example and links to the various versions of the three ontologies.

Zubeida Khan, a recently graduated (cum laude) BSc honours student I supervised, did most of the work to realise ONSET. She went painstakingly through some 50 publications to extract the features of the ontologies, by considering the ‘selling points’ from the side of the foundational ontology developers, assessing what motivates domain ontology developers of ongoing and completed ontology development projects to choose one over the other, and examined independent characteristics (such as the language in which it is available, modularity). A list was compiled consisting of foundational ontology parameters, and the values were filled in for each ontology (in the current version, they are BFO, DOLCE, and GFO). These values were subsequently verified by the respective foundational ontology developers. Zubeida then implemented it in ONSET (download jar file), following good software design practices and taking into account extensibility of the tool.

While ONSET makes it a lot easier for a domain ontology developer to select a foundational ontology, from the Ontology (philosophy) side of things, it, perhaps, raises more questions than it answers (which deserve attention, but not in this blog post).

Feedback is welcome!

Given that it is that time of the year again for a little public reflection, my 2011 was, on the whole, very positive, with the move to South Africa and having commenced as Senior Lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. In addition to the usual productive research and teaching and community services, I’ve been catching up on (South) African politics, history, and socioeconomics, started learning isiZulu, and trying to get to understand this complex society here in SA.

As for the blog, the amount of posts is lower compared to previous years (though with the topics just as varied), which is due to all those other activities and because I am writing lecture notes for this year’s ontologies and knowledge bases course, which otherwise would have made it piecemeal onto the blog (like these ones on ontology engineering). The deadline for those lecture notes is mid January, so stay tuned for upcoming updates.

I wish you all a happy, productive, and prosperous New Year! 

This is a book that contradicts itself a hundred times; but that is not a criticism of it, because its author thinks contradictions are a sign of intellectual ferment and vitality. This is a book that systematically distorts and selects historical evidence; but that is not a criticism, because its author thinks that all interpretations are biased, and she regards it as her duty to pick and choose her facts to favor her own brand of politics. This is a book full of vaporous, French-intellectual prose that makes Teilhard de Chardin sound like Ernest Hemingway by comparison; but that is not a criticism, because the author likes that sort of prose and has taken lessons in how to write it, and she thinks that plain, homely speech is part of a conspiracy to oppress the poor. This is a book that clatters around in a dark closet of irrelevancies for 450 pages before it bumps accidentally into its index and stops; but that is not a criticism, either, because its author finds it gratifying and refreshing to bang unrelated facts together as a rebuke to stuffy minds. This book infuriated me; but that is not a defect in it, because it is supposed to infuriate people like me, and the author would have been happier still if I had blown out an artery. In short, this book is flawless, because all its deficiencies are deliberate products of art. Given its assumptions, there is nothing here to criticize. The only course open to a reviewer who dislikes this book as much as I do is to question its author’s fundamental assumptions—which are big-ticket items involving the nature and relationships of language, knowledge, and science.

It has been blogged a few days ago by Evgeny Morozov and reblogged quite a few times (e.g., here, where read it first). They noted the 9-page review was behind an academic paywall, which has been miraculously lifted by now. The remainder of the review backs up the above-quoted statements, and has a ‘nice’ finishing touch at the end:

In its denial of external reality as something given, its obsession with motifs of dominance and power, and its rejection of logical dualisms (war is peace, freedom is slavery, and what is untrue is above all not simply false, and vice versa), the postmodernist sensibility displayed in this book is strangely reminiscent of the official philosophy of Orwell’s posttotalitarian state.

The textbook for the course is Hopcroft, Motwani and Ullman’s Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation from Stanford University [1]. Their slides and well as Diego Calvanese’s notes from the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano were useful in the preparation, but this is still fairly dry matter. To make it livelier, I had looked around for illustrative simulators, games and the like.

The nicest one I found when preparing the course are the AutoSim automaton simulator (which generated a lukewarm response, at best) and the CFG Grammar Editor made by Carl Burch at Hendrix College, but I may have missed even better ones. It is sort of entertaining for the answers to the exercises of chapters 2 and 5 of the Ullman text book, and in due time I’ll post them here. Recently, JFLAP came to my attention, developed at Duke University, which has lots of more features compared to AutoSim, like an implemented state minimization algorithm and conversions between DFAs NFAs and REs. It also has an accompanying textbook, but, alas, that book only covers languages and automata, not the undecidability and complexity that is also part of the course. There are many simulators of Turing machines around, from Java implementations to physical simulators (see, e.g., this list), with the Lego of Doom, developed by four students at Århus University, as most entertaining, but not exactly classroom material, and there are nice illustrative videos of the Turing Machine in the classic style by Mike Davey. If you have any suggestions, please leave them in the comments.

The intention was to brighten up the second part of the course also with some games and puzzles as examples, in addition to the standard examples of the Travelling Salesman Problem, Knapsack, Clique, SAT etc. The clique generated some interest, as it could be effectively related to Facebook (the students form a clique themselves: they have a facebook page for the course). But, overall, there wasn’t enough time to go into sufficient detail. The plan was to revisit Sudokus, which was a 2nd-year programming exercise but also happens to be NP-complete [2], like so many other games (among others: Solitaire, FreeCell, Same Game/Clickomania, etc.—mentioning this generated interest); check out, e.g., Wikipedia’s list of game complexity of 34 games, the separate list of NP-complete games and puzzles and PSPACE-complete ones and David Eppstein’s list with complexity of puzzles, solitaire and two-player games. The games generated interest. Then there are non-game fun problems, like the new Pancake Flipping Problem (sorting a stack of pancakes with one spatula) that is NP-hard [3], and certain ways of balloon twisting with equal length balloons is NP-complete [4]—both brought under my attention thanks to the Improbable Research blog. There are many more NP-complete problems that may (should?) interest the students, like more serious ones about efficiently allocating blood in a blood bank, timetabling etc. Likewise for EXPTIME problems, such as reasoning over UML Class Diagrams [5], which it did, to some extent. The Complexity Zoo, however, seemed to scare them off.

Even inclusion of some more context, old and new, may brighten it up, like the material about Alan Turing, Chomsky’s original paper [6] (tried this, didn’t generate interest), where the naming of NP-hard comes from [7] by Donald Knuth, an additional note on P and NP by Moshe Vardi [8], and blog posts about “Big problems with big iron”—or: the main gains are to be made in improving the algorithms, not the hardware—by Richard Lipton, or the SEP entry on the Church-Turing Thesis [9] for the philosophically-minded (tried this, without response).

For those of you studying or teaching a theory of computation course: this year’s midterm, quiz, and exam (with solutions!), can be downloaded from my website here, which might be of use.

References

[1] Hopcroft, J.E., Motwani, R. and Ullman, J.D. (2001/2007). Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation, 2nd/3rd ed., Pearson Education.

[2] Takayuki Yato and Takahiro Seta. 2003. Complexity and Completeness of Finding Another Solution and Its Application to Puzzles. IEICE Trans. Fundamentals, E86-A (5):1052-1060.

[3] Laurent Bulteau, Guillaume Fertin and Irena Rusu. Pancake Flipping is Hard.  arXiv:1111.0434v1. (Submitted on 2 November 2011).

[4] Erik D. Demaine and Martin L. Demaine and Vi Hart. Computational balloon twisting: the theory of balloon polyhedra. In: Proceedings of the 20th Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry (CCCG 2008), Montréal, Québec, Canada, August 2008.

[5] Daniela Berardi, Diego Calvanese, and Giuseppe De Giacomo. Reasoning on UML class diagrams. Artificial Intelligence, 168(1-2):70-118, 2005.

[6] Chomsky, N. Three models for the description of language. IRE Transactions on Information Theory, 1956, (2): 113–124.

[7] Donald E. Knuth. A Terminological Proposal. SIGACT News, January 1974, pp13-18.

[8] Moshe Y. Vardi. On P, NP, and Computational Complexity. Communications of the ACM. Vol. 53 No. 11, Page 5, November 2010.

[9] Copeland, B. Jack. The Church-Turing Thesis. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/church-turing/>.

All this started off with my BSc(Hons) in IT & Computing thesis back in 2003 and my first paper about the trials and tribulations of conceptual data modelling for bio-databases [2] (which is definitely not well-written, but has some valid points and has been cited a bit). In the meantime, much progress has been made on the topic, and I’ve learned, researched, and published a few things about it, too. So, what is the chapter about?

The main aspect is the ‘conceptual data modelling’ with EER, ORM, and UML Class Diagrams, i.e., concerning implementation-independent representations of the data to be managed for a specific application (hence, not ontologies for application-independence).

The adjective ‘formal’ is to point out that the conceptual modeling is not just about drawing boxes, roundtangles, and lines with some adornments, but there is a formal, logic-based, foundation. This is achieved with the formally defined CMcom conceptual data modeling language, which has the greatest common denominator between ORM, EER, and UML Class Diagrams. CMcom has, on the one hand, a mapping the Description Logic language DLRifd and, on the other hand, mappings to the icons in the diagrammatic languages. The nice aspect of this it that, at least in theory and to some extent in practice as well, one can subject it to automated reasoning to check consistency of the classes, of the whole conceptual data model, and derive implicit constraints (an example) or use it in ontology-based data access (an example and some slides on ‘COMODA’ [COnceptual MOdel-based Data Access], tailored to ORM and the horizontal gene transfer database as example).

Then there is the ‘ontology-driven’ component: Ontology and ontologies can aid in conceptual data modeling by providing solution to recurring modeling problems, an ontology can be used to generate several conceptual data models, and one can integrate (a section of) an ontology into a conceptual data model that is subsequently converted into data in database tables.

Last, but not least, it focuses on ‘biological data analysis’. A non-(biologist or bioinformatician) might be inclined to say that should not matter, but it does. Biological information is not as trivial as the typical database design toy examples like “Student is enrolled in Course”, but one has to dig deeper and figure out how to represent, e.g., catalysis, pathway information, the ecological niche. Moreover, it requires an answer to ‘which language features are ‘essential’ for the conceptual data modeling language?’ and if it isn’t included yet, how do we get it in? Some of such important features are n-aries (n>2) and the temporal dimension. The paper includes a proposal for more precisely representing catalysis, informed by ontology (mainly thanks to making the distinction between the role and its bearer), and shows how certain temporal information can be captured, which is illustrated by enhancing the model for SARS viral infection, among other examples.

The paper is not online yet, but I did put together some slides for the presentation at MAIS’11 reported on earlier, which might serve as a sneak preview of the 25-page book chapter, or you can contact me for the CRC.

References

[1] Keet, C.M. Ontology-driven formal conceptual data modeling for biological data analysis. In: Biological Knowledge Discovery Handbook: Preprocessing, Mining and Postprocessing of Biological Data. Mourad Elloumi and Albert Y. Zomaya (Eds.). Wiley (in print).

[2] Keet, C.M. Biological data and conceptual modelling methods. Journal of Conceptual Modeling, Issue 29, October 2003. http://www.inconcept.com/jcm.

First, there were the usual questions, like name, age, marital status, country and province of birth, since when I live in South Africa, and so forth. And then the census person kind of anticipated my response on what my first language is. “English”. “No”. “You sound as if it is”. “Oh. It really isn’t”. So, ‘other’ was ticked, and English as second language. I protested slightly, as the first words and coherent sentence I uttered in another language than my first were in French, and then German, and then English, and then Spanish, and then Italian, and then Zulu. The form did not cater for that. My mind started wandering off to database design and accuracy of the data. Ah, well.

Then there was the race question. Not that I have figured it out how it works here, and after this event, even less so. For instance, some students who look definitely Mediterranean to me, are proudly Indian, and some people who have a pale skin complexion assert vehemently they are Coloured. So I thought I’d better not bother start trying to box anyone (including myself). But the question had to be answered. The census person read aloud the question: “Are you Black, Indian, or Coloured?”. “Uh, huh?”, turning my head to see the question on the sheet, which had five possible answers. Again, “Are you Black, Indian, or Coloured?”. “Uhm, I’m from Europe. European?”. “Ok, ‘other’”, which was ticked off, and that’s fine by me. Somehow, ‘White’, whilst being in the list, was, to her, not an option worth mentioning and considering to tick off, as apparently I am clearly not White. South Africans with as much of a melanin deficiency as me start their phrases every now and then with “we Europeans…[fill in anything that doesn’t hold for all Europeans]”; are they the Real Whites^TM? And, by converse, I am a Real European^TM, who is then, by definition, not White? Confusing.

The remaining questions were fairly standard, or sensible to ask in a country like South Africa (e.g., in the Netherlands, they would not ask whether I have piped water and am connected to the electricity grid; here, many still have to make do without). I am still wondering about the whole list of equipment though. That the census wants to know whether I have radio, TV, and Internet access at home makes sense in the light of information dissemination, but what’s so useful about knowing who has a DVD player? In the light of COP17 next month, it would have been nice if they had included ‘bicycle’ in the list, instead of only ‘motorcar’. There was no question about how one travels to work and how long it takes, although the answers could have been useful in the planning of the country’s infrastructure.

I got two barcode-stickers at the end: one for the door and one for my passport. The first one acts alike the ‘no Jehovahs, Evangelists, door-to-door salesmen etc.’ stickers one can observe on several front doors in some European countries, the second one for cross-checking that I will not be counted twice or not at all. It’ll be interesting to see what the statisticians are going to do with all the data.

AFRICON’11

I think back at this conference with mixed emotions: the logistics were quite lousy and very expensive, but I’ve made several new connections and it was good to be informed about who’s working on what in Africa. Overall, and going by the sessions I attended, it gave me the impression of a workshop-level event rather than ‘the’ major conference on the continent it is claimed to be. Looking through my notes now, some of the noteworthy items are Dietmar Dietrich’s keynote on the questions if IT is to/can be a major contributor to solve the energy challenge. (Green IT seems to be the new up and coming hot topic in research and engineering.). The Robotics and AI sessions and dialog session I attended had several showcases of robots, Tracey Booysen from UCT presented how to build the, thus far cheapest, swarm robot (60 USD) [4], and Alexander Ferrein described the experiment of high school students preparing and participating in Robocup Junior [5]. Other topics were as diverse as smart carpets, water quality monitoring with live sensors made from algae, the role (if any) for robotics in sustainable development, and ubiquitous healthcare with mobile phones.

Slightly off-topic: the walk at the top of the Victoria Falls was doable even for me and the microlight flight over the falls was great.

MAIS’11

MAIS followed three previous yearly winter/spring schools (MOWS’08, MOSS’09, MOWS’10), though this time it was held in Durban instead of Pretoria and the scope was broader than ontologies.

Alessandro Artale, from my former employer the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, gave his Formal Methods course to participants from UKZN, UNISA, CSIR-Meraka, and UP in the mornings, augmenting the theoretical aspects with practical’s with NuSMV in the labs, and he closed with recent results on formal temporal conceptual data modelling with light-weight temporal DLs.

The afternoons were filled with tutorials and research presentations. Nelishia Pillay from UKZN gave a well-prepared tutorial on hyper heuristics and Sergio Tessaris, also from FUB, gave a tutorial on SAT and efficient Boolean reasoning (online abstracts). The research presentations by students and researchers covered topics such as formal conceptual data modeling, non-monotonic reasoning, event processing of video, ICT for the sugar cane supply chain, belief revision, foundational ontologies, optimization, and digital forensics. We were short on time with all sessions and continued the discussions during the breaks. Hopefully the ongoing research activities and new ideas the participants were exposed to and exchanged with each other will lead to fruitful collaboration.

Local and International participants of MAIS’11 (photo by Phumelele Mavaneni)

UPDATE (17-10): Phumelele Mavaneni, intern journalist from the UKZN Online e-newspaper, wrote an article about MAIS’11 (vol 5, issue 39), and on the right is a group photo with some of the participants.

SAICSIT’11

It was my first SAICSIT attendance, and it gave me a positive impression, both regarding papers presented and the people who attended. The event was quite selective with a 33% acceptance rate for full papers and 20% for short papers. The ambiance of the venue was good to meet the few people I’d met before and become acquainted with fellow CS & IT researchers and the system in South Africa.

The sessions were ‘mixed’, in that a talk about, say, static typing with value space-based subtyping [6] was followed by media download in South African taxis [7], and software-defined radio [8], classifier fusion strategies [9], and an ICT for rural development evaluation framework [10] were all put in the same session. The shift was a bit odd at times, but it also contributed to a broader-than-usual exposure of CS and IT research. Caroline Pade-Khene was actually quite skeptical about ICT4D—or: it is at best a “working hypothesis” [10]—which partially shone through some of the ICT4D paper presentations; it is not easy to figure out what to measure, how, and even the kinds of things being measured are changing over time. And gathering empirical data is time-consuming and faces unexpected obstacles, as Gary Marsden described in his entertaining presentation about the media downloads [7]. My own papers [2, 3] were on the theory-side of CS & IT, were well-received, and ‘brought out in the open’ a couple of attendees with an interest in ontologies.

Now it’s back to the regular activities of, mainly, teaching theory of computation and researching so as to have some results for the upcoming submission deadline season (and also to submit that journal paper).

References

(note: the non-linked papers are not online [yet])

[1] Keet CM. Bottom-up ontology development reusing semi-structured life sciences diagrams. AFRICON’11 — Special Session on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence in Africa, Livingstone, Zambia 13-15 September, 2011. IEEE Xplore.

[2] Keet, C.M. Rough Subsumption Reasoning with rOWL. SAICSIT Annual Research Conference 2011 (SAICSIT’11), Cape Town, South Africa, October 3-5, 2011. ACM Conference Proceedings, pp 133-140.

[3] Keet, C.M. Enhancing Identification Mechanisms in UML Class Diagrams with Meaningful Keys. SAICSIT Annual Research Conference 2011 (SAICSIT’11), Cape Town, October 3-5, 2011. ACM Conference Proceedings, pp 283-286.

[4] Booysen, T., Rieger, M., Ferrein, A. Towards inexpensive robots for science & technology teaching and education in Africa. AFRICON’11 — Special Session on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence in Africa, Livingstone, Zambia 13-15 September, 2011. IEEE Xplore.

[5] Ferrein, A., Marais, S., Potgieter, A., Steinbauer, G. Robocup Junior: a vehicle for S&T education in Africa? AFRICON’11 — Special Session on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence in Africa, Livingstone, Zambia 13-15 September, 2011. IEEE Xplore.

[6] Paar, A., Gruner, A. Static typing with value space-based subtyping. SAICSIT Annual Research Conference 2011 (SAICSIT’11), Cape Town, South Africa, October 3-5, 2011. ACM Conference Proceedings, pp 177-186.

[7] Smith, G., Marsden, G. Providing media download services in African taxis. SAICSIT Annual Research Conference 2011 (SAICSIT’11), Cape Town, South Africa, October 3-5, 2011. ACM Conference Proceedings, pp 215-223.

[8] Winberg, S., Langman, A., Scott, S. The RHINO Platform – Charging towards innovation and skills development in software defined radio. SAICSIT Annual Research Conference 2011 (SAICSIT’11), Cape Town, South Africa, October 3-5, 2011. ACM Conference Proceedings, pp 334-337.

[9] Lutu, P.E.N. Empirical comparison of four classifier fusion strategies for positive-versus-negative ensembles. SAICSIT Annual Research Conference 2011 (SAICSIT’11), Cape Town, South Africa, October 3-5, 2011. ACM Conference Proceedings, pp 302-305.

[10] Pade-Khene, C., Sewry, D. Proposed Stages of a Rural ICT Comprehensive Evaluation Framework in ICT for Rural Development Projects. SAICSIT Annual Research Conference 2011 (SAICSIT’11), Cape Town, South Africa, October 3-5, 2011. ACM Conference Proceedings, pp 326-329.

But which identification mechanism(s) could, or should, be specified more precisely for UML, and how does it rhyme with progress about identity in Ontology? How to incorporate it in UML to foster consistent usage? For instance, should the procedure to find and represent identity, or at least good keys, be a step in the modelling methodology, also be enforced in the CASE tool, or be part of the metamodel and/or in the conceptual modelling language itself?

The distinct implicit assumptions and explicit formalisations of extant identification schemes are elucidated in [2] for ER, EER, ORM, and ORM2. As it appears, not even ER/EER and ORM/ORM2 agree fully on keys and reference schemes, neither from a formal perspective (though the difference is minimal), nor from a methodological or CASE tool perspective. Both, however, do aim at strong or weak identification of entities with so-called natural keys (/semantic identifiers) in particular.

At the other end of the spectrum, Ontology does have something on offer, but the philosophers are only interested in identity of entities. Moreover, it is not just that they don’t agree on the details, but there is a tendency to admit it is nigh on inapplicable (see [3] for a good introduction). Watered-down versions of the notion of identity in philosophy that have been proposed in AI, are to used either only the necessary or only the sufficient conditions, which are at least somewhat applicable, be it as a basis for OntoClean [4], or in Description Logic languages (including OWL 2) with their primitive and defined classes. The details of the definitions, explanations, and pros and cons are presented in a ‘digested’ format in the first part of [2].

This analysis was subsequently used to increase the ontological foundations of UML in the second part of [2] to introduce two language enhancements for UML, being formally defined simple and compound identifiers and the notion of defined class, which also have a corresponding extension of UML’s metamodel. The proposed extensions focus on practical usability in conceptual data modelling, informed by ontology, and are approximations to the qualitative, relative, and synchronic identity, and to the notion of equivalent class (defined concept) in OWL (DL).

For those of you who do not care about the ‘unnecessary philosophizing’ (as one reviewer had put it) and justifications, there is a short (4-page) version [5] with the formal definitions and the UML extensions, which has been accepted at the SAICSIT’11 conference in Cape Town, South Africa. The longer version that provides explanation as to why the proposed extensions are the way they are is available as a SoCS technical report [2].

References

[1] Object Management Group. Ontology definition metamodel v1.0. Technical Report formal/2009-05-01, Object Management Group, 2009.

[2] Keet, C.M. Enhancing identification mechanisms in UML class diagrams with meaningful keys (extended version). Technical Report SoCS11-1, School of Computer Science, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. August 8, 2011.

[3] H. Noonan. Identity. In E. N. Zalta, editor, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Fall 2008 edition, 2008.

[4] N. Guarino and C. Welty. Identity, unity, and individuality: towards a formal toolkit for ontological analysis. In W. Horn, editor, Proc. of ECAI’00. IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2000.

[5] Keet, C.M. Enhancing Identification Mechanisms in UML Class Diagrams with Meaningful Keys. SAICSIT Annual Research Conference 2011 (SAICSIT’11), Cape Town, October 3-5, 2011. ACM Conference Proceedings (in print).

(Picture from WhiteAfrican's blogpost on "What should Google do in Africa?" (2))

On average, there is one web domain for every 94 people in the world, but for Africa, this is 1 in 10.000. Somewhere buried on p24 and p26 of the TAR article, two reasons are given: no credit card to buy space online and a ‘.[country]’ costs more than a ‘.com’ domain. There’s no lack of creativity (e.g., the Ushahidi platform co-founded by the new head of Google’s Africa policy Ory Okolloh, and much more).

In percentages of Google hits around the world, the USA tops with 31%, then India with 8%, China with 4.2%, UK 3%, Italy 2.3%, Germany and Brazil 2.9%, Russia 2.8%, France and Spain 2%, and at the lower end of the chart South Africa with 0.7%, Algeria and Nigeria with 0.6% and Sweden with 0.5%. The other African countries are not mentioned and have a lighter colour in the diagram than the lowest given value of 0.5%. These data should have been normalized by population size, but give a rough idea nevertheless.

40% of the Google searches in Africa are through mobile internet—including mine outside the office (unlike in Italy [well, Bolzano], here in South Africa they actually do sell functioning USB/Internet keys and SIM cards to foreigners). They estimated that there were about 14 million users in Africa in 2010 (the Facebook numbers on p26 total to about 28 million), which they expect to grow to 800 million by 2015. Now that’s what you can call a growth market.

There’s no Google data centre in Africa yet, but there are caches at several ISPs, which brings to mind the filter bubble. One can ponder about whether a cache and a bubble are better than practicing one’s patience. What you might not have considered, however, is that there are apparently (i.e.: so I was told, but did not check it) Internet access packages that charge lower rates for browsing national Web content and higher rates for international content where the data has to travel through the new fibre optic cable. So the caching isn’t necessarily a bad idea.

On content generation, Google has been holding “mapping parties” to add content to Google MapMaker, which also pleased its participants, because, as quoted in the article, they didn’t like seeing a blank spot as if there’s nothing, even though clearly there are roads, villages, communities, businesses in reality. There are funded projects to digitize Nelson Mandela’s documentary archives, crowd sourcing to generate content, Google Technology User Groups, helping businesses to create websites, and many other activities. In short, according to Google’s Senegal representative Tidjane Deme: “What Google is doing in Africa is very sexy”.

One of the ‘snapshots’ in the article mentions that Google now supports 31 African languages. I had a look at http://www.google.co.za, which has localized interfaces to 5 of the 9 official African languages in South Africa (isiZulu, Sesotho, isiXhosa, Setswana, Northern Sotho). As I have only rudimentary knowledge of isiZulu only, I had a look at that one to see how the localization has been done. Aside from the direct translations, such as izithombe for images and usesho for search, there are new concoctions. Apparently there is little IT and computing vocabulary in isiZulu, so new words have to be made up, or meanings of existing ones stretched liberally. For instance, logout has become phuma ngemvume (out/exit from authorization/permission) and when clicking on izigcawu (literally: open air meeting places) you navigate to the Google groups page, which are sort of understandable. This is different for izilungiselelo (noun class 8 or 10?) that brings you to Settings in the interface. There is no such word in the dictionary, although the stem -lungiselelo (noun class 6) translates as preparations/arrangements; my dictionary translates ‘setting’ (noun) into ukubeka (verb, in back-translation it means put/place, install; bilingual dictionaries are inconsistent, I know). It’s not just that Google is “hardwir[ing] [Africa] with tools”, they are ‘soft-wiring’ by unilaterally inventing a vocabulary, it seems, which reeks of cultural imperialism.

Admitted, I have not (yet) seen much IT for African languages, other than spell checkers for all 11 official languages in South Africa that work for OpenOffice and Mozilla, a nice online isiZulu-English dictionary and conjugation, and Laurette Pretorius’ research in computational linguistics—the former was heavily funded by outside funds and the second one a hobby project by German isiZulu enthusiast Carsten Gaebler. Nevertheless, it would have been nice if there were some coordinated, participatory, effort.

Writes the article’s author, Gemma Ware: “as Google’s influence grows, Africa’s techies are aware of the urgency to stake their own territorial claim”. This awareness has yet to be transformed into more action by more people. Overall, my impression is that ICT (and the shortage of ICT professionals) already has generated the buzz of excitement where people see plenty of possibilities, which makes it a stimulating environment down here.

References

[1] Gemma Ware. Is Google good for Africa?. The Africa Report, No 32, July 2011, pp20-26.

[2] Erik Hersman (WhiteAfrican). What Should Google do in Africa? June 28, 2011.

p.s.: The article does not really answer the question whether Google is good for Africa, and I didn’t either in the blog post; that’s a topic for a later date when I know more about what’s going on here.