ORB Visualization
(soon)
2/17/2004 2:00 AM
John (Sowa),
Might you look at the work by Breanna Anderson that has developed into the commercial process
The reason may be evident immediately, but if not perhaps we can have a discussion about what assumptions regarding machine representation of human knowledge in everyday situations. My sense is that Breanna’s core concepts moves down a path quiet different from efforts like the OWL (Ontology Referential Base) standard.
It seems, to me at least, that there are new social values that will be achieved when enterprises begin to see how important it is to manage taxonomy and vocabulary. IF controlled vocabularies were developed and used with reconciliation of terminology mediation, then such “knowledge management” system might reduce the stated reason for the development of comprehensive machine ontologies. I can see the importance of ontology for ontology sake, but there seems to be some common sense missing in more ways than just one way.
A world opens up that seems, at least to me, completely unanticipated by the mainstream of ontology standards work and the research literatures in machine learning and related things. The core problem (again as it seems to me) is in developing a business or economic process around the adoption of this “new way”.
Why a business model has not been found that supports knowledge management using reconciliation of terminology is an interesting question for social scientists to consider. Even stating the conjecture that the marketplace is failing to overcome cultural issues is difficult to state, given the vast resistance that has been developed. On the other hand, once such a business case is made and the technology evolves to meet this challenge, one might expect a sudden shift in business practice and in American culture.
Our group has been working to address the educational aspects that reinforce the resistance, as well as to develop the new computer science that allows new products to be crafted that do work to support knowledge management using reconciliation of terminology. Related to terminology reconciliation is our instrumentation and measurement of co-occurrence structure.
http://www.ontologystream.com/beads/nationalDebate/sixteen.htm
In your message to me, which I posted as:
http://www.bcngroup.org/Macrocognition/four.htm
you express a dissatisfaction with OWL (Ontology Web Language).
But in your short note you do not suggest anything SIMPLE or EXPECTED that overcomes a state of dissatisfaction. I suggest in my comments why one might need to give up the notion of formal semantics - at least in any form that we can imagine even after some history with this notion.
Looking into your published work is daunting, even for me. But in the very first of the paper at:
http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/causal.htm
you say:
"No consensus about causality has emerged during the century from Peirce's remarks of 1898 to Kim's remarks of 1995."
But then you take the reader, anyone who has the background and the time, on a wonderful journey that suggests a view about how a future "formal semantics" might develop based on abstractions that to seem universal in nature. This work is deeply suggestive, and deeply exciting but simple culturally in accessable. I mean by this that the work that needs to be done to bring this type of work into operational systems is not anticipated by anything that the markets are doing. (Again, this is my limited observation.)
So we, ontologists, have this paradoxical situation with respect to making a living from developing ontology that is useful in everyday affairs. Many, if not all, of us who try this are failing. It is not easy to understand the failure. And by failure we also recognize that there are intellectually dishonest individuals who are making a living creating garbage. This is the problem we are contemplating with respect to DARPA and NIST funding for stuff that just has not and will not find useful application.
http://www.bcngroup.org/python3/fortysix.htm
On the other hand there is work that suggests that the computer be used as a communication device - not simply between one person to another person, but between processes. This does not seem to be a new concept, but one might recognize some cultural barriers that inhibit the development of enhancements to human communication where an independence from information intermediators
{the news media, the political process, advertising}
is missing. So the issue of knowledge representation is deeply entangled with cultural transformations. Of course, one would expect this.
So, for example, we might have an economic process and a second one. Can the actual structural events of these two processes be communicated (to each other) using machine algorithms? What I am suggesting is a type of control theory that was, at least I suspect that it was, popular in some “applied semiotics” theory in the Former Soviet Union. Feigenbaum did review this Soviet work in 1994 and was very negative about the work (Pospelov, Fin and others), calling it “mere heuristics”. (Personal communication from some of the participants of the 1994 conference hosted by ARL – Tom Reader).
My suggestion is that the measurement of structure can be encoded and communicated and thus made available for the interpretive act that gives meaning and context to some other process, whether ecological, biological or social. This suggestion was also being voiced by the many scientists that I and Peter Kugler (and others here in the States) talked with during the four conferences that followed the one in 1994.
But these are also thoughts I have had all of my life. A sharp focus from these thoughts come from my efforts (late last year) to create machine generated subject matter taxonomy from public document repositories (for the FCC). The subject matter taxonomies does not have to have semantics, except when viewed and experienced by a human in a context of search for subject matter.
http://www.bcngroup.org/area2/KSF/Notation/notation.htm
Might you make some comments about this issue? The dialog and these posting of dialog gives me the illusion that we are making some progress towards an National Project to Establish the “Knowledge of Knowledge Sharing in Social Systems”.
http://www.bcngroup.org/area2/KSF/nationalProject.htm
Your kindness is appreciated.