Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Outline of Work to be done on
Learning Theory and the Core Liberal Arts Curriculum
Part Six
On
the relationships between information science and ontology
There is a history to the use of the word “ontology” to
refer to a machine encoding of a representation of human knowledge. Certainly the first work on computer based
machine translation (late 1940s at
The scholarship on this history can not be made simple or treated in a few paragraphs. My interest is in reminding the reader, my reader, that this work is very difficult largely for two reasons. The first is that the science is not completed on what is human knowledge and why there is a difference between data or information and “knowledge” as experienced by humans.
The second is a backward looking information technology discipline (entrenched in many universities). As one of the faculty here said to me in a discussion today, “The computer information science curriculum seems to ignore the human in the loop requirement”. This condition is a critical one and one that has to be directly addressed.
The curriculum that I am proposing has to be proposed to the entire faculty and discussions about the role of computer science, information theory and mathematics opened as a legitimate discussion. The approach that I am revealing has had some testing, and there is firm grounding in behavioral science for the assumptions I make about Acquired Learning Disability.