29. August 2006
Why Ballpoint Pens and Pencils are Similar?
Just in case you are wondering about the title of this blog: it is taken from an urban legend claiming that the NASA spends million dollars on developing a space pen where the ink does not run out due to the missing gravity - while the Russians just use a pencil to solve the same problem (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil; ‘pencils in space’-section.) The German business magazine Handelsblatt takes up the story for an ad clip in television stating ‘its substance that matters’. The funny thing about the clip is that Handelsblatt claims that substance decides, but was not aware of the fact that the space pen story was a fake.
Nevertheless I took the WordNet definition of ballpoint pen and pencil to compare their similarity using the MDSM approach [37] and it turns out that they were not very similar at all. This was the inspiration for my MDSM+TR [39] paper, where I tried to integrate Sowa’s Thematic Roles into MSDM to stress the importance of function for similarity assessments. Ballpoint pens and pencils are made out of different parts and materials, but both share the role of being writing implements.
Nevertheless I took the WordNet definition of ballpoint pen and pencil to compare their similarity using the MDSM approach [37] and it turns out that they were not very similar at all. This was the inspiration for my MDSM+TR [39] paper, where I tried to integrate Sowa’s Thematic Roles into MSDM to stress the importance of function for similarity assessments. Ballpoint pens and pencils are made out of different parts and materials, but both share the role of being writing implements.
Download the ad clip (German language only) at: http://www.bbdo.de/de/home/news/20030/spot_space_pen.html
[37] Rodríguez, A. M. and M.J. Egenhofer, Comparing Geospatial Entity Classes: An Asymmetric and Context-Dependent Similarity Measure. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 2004. 18(3): p. 229-256.
[39] Janowicz, K. (2005) Extending Semantic Similarity Measurement by Thematic Roles, in First International Conference on GeoSpatial Semantics, GeoS 2005, Mexico City, Mexico.2005, Springer Verlag: Berlin. p. 137-152. [PDF] (external link)
