Socio-Natural Thought Semantic Link Network: A Method of Semantic Networking in the Cyber Physical Society

Humans have been recognizing, establishing and making use of various relations consciously and unconsciously since the formation of human society. Waving and maintaining various relations accompany everyone's life. Humans' social behaviors create or emphasize relations. Various networks evolve with the development of society. Some relational networks gradually become independent of individuals' life during evolution so that they become a part of knowledge and culture sharable cross generations. The study of social relations trace back to the age of Laozi (576-BC), Confucius (551-479 BC), Thales (624 BC-546 BC) and Socrates (469 BC-399 BC). The formal definition of general relation traces to the invention of set theory in 1874. Humans have intelligence to observe and participate in social processes, to think, and to know the effect of establishing a relation. Humans can also actively select appropriate relations and persons according to requirement, situation and social rules. Machines are obviously limited in these abilities. Various graph-based models have been used to connect resources in the cyber space. Two issues are fundamental: (1) machines know little relation in human society and the nature, data structures in machines are for machines to process not for humans to read, so it is not realistic to expect machines to discover social and natural laws and resolve relevant issues without human instruction; and, (2) machines are hard to know the effect of establishing and making use of relations, and to explain computing result according to society and nature. The cause is that machines do not have any worldview. Connecting various networks and machines with nature, society, and even human minds can create a new world where individuals have semantic images that can enhance mutual understanding. The semantic images can be constructed by a Semantic Link Network SLN consisting of nodes with rich semantics, semantic links between nodes, and rules for reasoning, influencing and evolving the network. Waving semantic link networks in the cyber physical society and exploring the laws of semantic networking are challenge issues.