Ludwig’s Fruit Shop: An Engineering Model of Semantics

Plan  Day 1Sign Contract
Plan  Day 2Work together with computers sharing information
Reality Year 2Still not working “|information incompatibilities”
Grant another six months extension and/or sack project manager?

The problem: information is not data. Unlike data, information does not come in handy packets that can easily be passed from one computer to another. In fact, it does not even have a physical form. This was pointed out in 1948 by Claude Shannon – the man who defined the concept of information. Everything you think you know about information is wrong. This book is here to help.

“Ludwig’s Fruit Shop” follows a single idea, that data, information and knowledge are intimately related, but in a less than obvious way. The first half of the book starts by teasing out these relationships, and follows up by putting the idea into practice. The central concept – the knitwork – requires a shift from seeing knowledge and intelligence as two separate things to one in which they are two aspects of the same concept. It also starts to shift the perspective from starting with “we have these applications – how do we exchange data?” to “we share knowledge when we join together – how can we get our computers to make that faster?”

In the second half builds on knitworks to develop a model of “level change” – how the same knowledge can be relabelled to express a higher level concept. This is then used to build an engineering model of semantics – a re-engineering of three incompatible models of semantics into a single model where they each contribute one aspect of meaning, Where knowledge about a set of individual terms is relabelled into a system of differential terms, and relabelled again into the mechanism of the system that interprets the terms: what was “data model”, “ontology” and “code”. These are not verbal dextereties, but intended to form computable systems that reliably link one computer model to another. Models intended to be realised in logic, rather than probabilisitic networks.

To spice up what risks being a dull, technical essay, I claim that AI is rubbish, the semantic web a mess, and even logic is not all it’s cracked up to be – not to mention a proof that it is technically impossible to fill in a tax form. And to remind you that this is currently at a very low technology readiness level, odd memories from my career pop up, including being the first person to take a microprocesser into the Houses of Parliament.

This book brings together a career’s worth of experience in systems engineering and computing, a career at the bleeding edge of technology – prototypes, immature technologies and speculative projects – where having an eye on the next job is the best route to a long and interesting career.

In the current draft (November 2025), I have got to the end of developing a TRL 1/2 model – more an advertising puff for the idea than an academic discourse.