Public: Information: Database
Well Defined Concepts Library   (+1)  [vote for, against]
A library, that takes a Wikipedia page URL, and returns a well-defined formula corresponding to the index of that formula.

As a pure mathematician, whatever field you turn to, you find a vernacular that people use -- be it physics, or economy -- the various concepts from temperature to assets price, have rather specific definitions, in context of specific instrumentation and accounting standards. (Measuring asset price, needs equilibrium of supply and demand of your asset in some specific market. Measuring temperature may need equilibrium of energy exchange with your mercury inside the thermometer).

Suppose you want to stay at abstract level, and not load your brain with all that vernacular (like "Market price," "Temperature," etc.), and just want to model input-output scenarios to apply decision theory to decide what to do and what's most valuable, and yet communicate with the society, in a language that they immediately understand.

For example, business valuation layer of society may rely on vernacular, with words like EBITDA, CAGR, NOPAT, NWCTR, FATR, FCFF, NIBD,.. etc. which are very specific terms, in context of specific accounting systems, and they **mean** very specific things, like acceleration to a physicist, that doesn't want to think about each molecule, because their brain has layers of neurons trained to take those metrics as input to make decisions.

Being that these characteristics are just derivative features of Input-Output processes, and you have input-output data, you can compute them, no problem. You just need a convenient reference to what are the concepts that a target population makes decisions with, and apply them on your data types.

A library, that takes a Wikipedia page URL, and returns a formula corresponding to the index of that formula, with well-defined domains and codomains, so you can conveniently use it in your CAS system, or your programming language.

NOTE: Could be not limited to Wikipedia, but with capability to support many other URLs with computational formulae described in a less unstructured, less rigorous way.
-- Mindey, Dec 12 2019

Metawiki (GitHub) https://github.com/...x/metawiki#metawiki
Namespaces for vocabularies. Potentially useful as a dependency. [Mindey, Dec 12 2019]

The sense of computer was not a device, but a human. Whatever, let me update it in the description, to avoid confusion.
-- Mindey, Dec 12 2019


// So - does your “mathematician” in this case understand the concepts of other disciplines or are they simply manipulating symbols?

Well, the idea is pragmatic, in a sense, that mathematician does understand some low level concepts, like data record and basic data types, which gives her the ability to compute arbitrary sums and differences, like cumulative sums, matrix products, differentials, etc., which is enough to compute the values for concepts that others care about, if she has the definition of that concept provided in a form of a formula or equation.

So, basically, she would compute temperature, just give the records of particle movements, and tell what temperature definition is. So, when you use that library, and do something like:

import concepts
concept = concepts.get('https://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature #Kinetic_theory_approach')

And you had a record of Brownian motion, and associated particles over time, in form of a database of atom paths over time, with sufficient granularity, you'd be able to compute it from the definition, without having to go through and interpret other literature.

So, with this library, we're talking. You giving me the link to very specific concept that your talk needs, and I give you the value for that concept, with respect to a data sample.
-- Mindey, Dec 13 2019


// I don’t think your concept is well defined here.

And, then you've got a better idea to fix that?
-- Mindey, Dec 14 2019


So, if I understand this correctly, if I was a human computer and someone asked me to solve a fluid dynamics problem with some given data, could ask your library system for the formulas and solve the problem using them. But I wouldn't have to know what the input or output data means, right? I could use the formulas just the same, and get the right answers, without even knowing what fluid dynamics is. So this seems conceptually equivalent to a collection of downloadable algorithms to run on an electronic computer.
-- notexactly, Dec 21 2019


// formula corresponding to the index of that formula //

Hang on; is that a typo, or does this idea depend on either (a) the prior construction of an infinite collection of formulae referring to each other without resolution or (b) some entirely vacuous formulae which resolve to their own addresses?

Have you consulted Hofstadter? If not, I would urge you to do so.
-- pertinax, Dec 21 2019



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