Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Teasing apart the structure of a "context"

Starting with a vague "lump" of desire for conversational context to be defined, I have come so far as to define a ContextFrame (a template) and a ContextRecord (A snapshot of a partially filled template). Now I am getting clearer, slowly day by day, on some of the details. So we have

ContextFrame:
   ID (with a self vocab)
   ENV (another ID)
   MODS (each with a tree of vocabs)
   PARTS(each with its own ID)
   RELS (narrative structures used to fill MODs)

ContextRecord:
   (a printout of ID and MOD values)

Generally I will assume a tree of ContextFrames, doubly linked via ENV and PARTS and with a single parent. Later we can talk about dynamic re-assignment of ENV.
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Where it is starting to get subtle is in the observation that a linked collection of ContextFrames can include both a tree of ID vocabularies and a collection of trees: one per MOD, per each frame.

To be honest, although I am pretending that there is nothing real or anatomical about the format that I am defining, in the back of my mind I hope there is something correct about these definitions that transcends my current programming needs. I am being merciless with myself, trying to be as clear as possible. So two types of trees emerge within definitions and I wonder about neural anatomy. Since the contexts are almost nothing but 'wiring' it is easy to imagine it.

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