ORB Visualization
(soon)
Discussion:
Reply to Robert Baran
2/13/2004 5:51 PM
My sense is the John Sowa (Cognitive graphs), Art Murray (Knowledge engineering - GWU) and I could develop an overview of the current core issues related to data ontology.
http://www.bcngroup.org/Macrocognition/four.htm
The Global Information Grid (GIG)
concepts are fundamentally reduced in complication IF the science is right and
is allowed to influence fully funding decisions (as opposed to what is
occurring today).
Helen Gigley at Networking and IT R&D (NITRO) is not the only one expressing a concern about the outcome for hundreds of millions of dollars in software development.
In fact, this overview, and the development of a curriculum is the objective of the National Project ($60 M) proposal:
http://www.bcngroup.org/area2/KSF/nationalProject.htm
The real need is to develop a community based peer review that is not being influenced by the poor funding decisions made by DARPA and NIST and to a lesser extent by NSF over the past four decades.
That the funding decisions have been poor seems to be disputed only by a very few, and these are the people who made the decisions or received the funds. There are some information gathering that is occurring in preparation for some type of political or legal challenge to several of the large corporations that are proposing and building systems that are not useable by the end user.
There are, in my judgment, between 200 and 300 first class contributors to machine representation of human knowledge into ontology. Machine representation of human behavioral patterns
and some other closely related science were included while developing my list of 200-30) individuals.
But the fragmentation of this community's work is severe. The reasons are explored in a short position paper :
http://www.bcngroup.org/area2/KSF/HIP.htm
Recently my colleagues and I have been developing the historical parallel between the history of technologies based on direct electrical current (DC) and alternating electrical current (AC). This historical parallel has provided my group with a useful communication device, one that is understood even by common folk living in rural America. (More on this later.)
The core issue is exemplified by the discussions at the recent Friends of the Intelligence Community meeting on cognitive engineering / cognitive task analysis:
http://www.bcngroup.org/python3/fortysix.htm
where one finds a community of scientists who have an almost uniform understanding that the wrong people are funding the wrong people. (What are "friends" for?).
Breanna Anderson (founder of Schemalogic Inc) and Sandy Klausner (CoreSystem's) would make principled expositions of available ontology and controlled vocabulary (taxonomy) within knowledge management systems having a computational foot print. But they have to be invited, and their expenses paid.
The knowledge sciences can be presented in a simple way. There are the human science, the ecological sciences and the machine science (computer science).
Klausner's work on a new computer science is presented in a Macromedia presentation that can be down loaded from:
http://cyberseek.com/Coretalk/CoreSystemIntro.PC.zip
I am willing to talk to all of these technologies as well as the work on Topic Maps by Coolheads and Ontology systems and use by Ralph Hodgson (whose over all work is some of the best).
-----Original
Message-----
From: Baran, Robert H. [mailto:BARANR@ONR.NAVY.MIL]
Sent: Friday, February 13, 2004 1:03 PM
To: Paul Prueitt
Subject: ontology
Paul,
I thought of you this morning at a weekly meeting of a group that advises ONR on network-centric issues. The subject area was content-based tagging and information flow. It was recalled that the GIG has a mandate to the effect that all data on the net will be tagged at the source. So the questions arose, should the Navy CIO be pushing for a uniform "ontology", and are there science issues implicit in such ontology or just "business" issues? No one really seemed to have much sense of how ontology is worked in the commercial world so it was hard to guess how the state of the art might play in GIG theology.
The first hour of the meeting was attended by Helen Gigley who is involved with Networking and IT R&D (NITRD). She commented to the effect that DARPA has invested (and is still investing) lots in ontology but without much return so far as the questions seem to far outweigh the answers.
Would you have a sort of standard lecture along the lines of "data ontology for dummies"?
Robert H. Baran
Office
of Naval Research, Code 01NA
800 N.
Quincy Street, BCT 1-1208
Arlington,
VA 22217-5660