Jiang, semantics

Today my student Tao Jiang (working on galaxy evolution with the SDSS and SDSS-III data) passed his oral candidacy exam, and I gave my talk (remotely) at AstroInformatics2010. The latter was a bit too aggressive (Djorgovski asked me to be controversial!) and of course I had to tone it down in the question period: Indeed, the semantic world is considering issues with trust. But the only things people could point to on the issue that meta-data are probabilistic is the idea of fuzzy data and fuzzy logic, and I seem to remember that these are not—in their current forms—defined in such a way that they could communicate (and be used for marginalization over) precise likelihood or posterior probability distributions. In the question period, one audience member even suggested (as I have been writing in my blog and elsewhere) that we think of catalogs as parameters of a model of the image pixels! So that was good.