Ancient Jugs Hold the Secret to Practical Mathematics in Biblical Times is a good illustration of the source of semantics.
From the post:
Archaeologists in the eastern Mediterranean region have been unearthing spherical jugs, used by the ancients for storing and trading oil, wine, and other valuable commodities. Because we’re used to the metric system, which defines units of volume based on the cube, modern archaeologists believed that the merchants of antiquity could only approximately assess the capacity of these round jugs, says Prof. Itzhak Benenson of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Geography.
Now an interdisciplinary collaboration between Prof. Benensonand Prof. Israel Finkelstein of TAU’s Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures has revealed that, far from relying on approximations, merchants would have had precise measurements of their wares — and therefore known exactly what to charge their clients.
The researchers discovered that the ancients devised convenient mathematical systems in order to determine the volume of each jug. They theorize that the original owners and users of the jugs measured their contents through a system that linked units of length to units of volume, possibly by using a string to measure the circumference of the spherical container to determine the precise quantity of liquid within.
The system, which the researchers believe was developed by the ancient Egyptians and used in the Eastern Mediterranean from about 1,500 to 700 BCE, was recently reported in the journal PLoS ONE. Its discovery was part of the Reconstruction of Ancient Israel project supported by the European Union.
The artifacts in question are between 2,700 and 3,500 years old.
When did they take on the semantic of being a standardized unit of measurement based on circumference?
A. When they were in common use, approximately 1,500 to 700 BCE?
B. When this discovery was made as per this article?
Understanding that the artifacts have not changed, was this semantic “lost” during the time period between A and B?
Or have we re-attributed to these artifacts the semantic of being a standardized unit of measurement based on circumference?
If you have some explanation other than our being the source of the measurement semantic, I am interested to hear about it.
That may seem like a trivial point but consider its implications carefully.
If we are the source of semantics, then we are the source of semantics for ontologies, classification systems, IR, etc.
Making those semantics subject to the same uncertainty, vagueness, competing semantics as any other.
Making them subject to being defined/disclosed to be as precise as necessary.
Not defining semantics for the ages. Defining semantics against particular requirements. Not the same thing.
The journal reference:
Elena Zapassky, Yuval Gadot, Israel Finkelstein, Itzhak Benenson. An Ancient Relation between Units of Length and Volume Based on a Sphere. PLoS ONE, 2012; 7 (3): e33895 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0033895