The Taos
Discussion
Monday, September 05, 2005
ARC model and the tone scale:
thread of 4 beads
Paul,
I would like to make a couple of comments related to your references to W3C standards, ontological modeling "by people who are not computer science trained", and "where individual viewpoints are reflective of a specific ontology instantiated."
Your comments and intentions are at the heart of what Knowledge Foundations technology is all about. Our U.S. Science and Technology laboratory draw down study in the mid 90's demonstrated that the U.S. had been losing 10s of billions of dollars on research, requirements and specification documents because laboratory scientists and engineers and their down stream project manager recipients were not communicating in a language understandable to one another.
We found major gaps in usage of expensive documents for this reason. We call these varying viewpoints and language mindsets "mediating structures." These structures exist within any enterprise simply because people see the world, and communicate about it, differently as a result of enculturation, education and life experience.
Using Mark II, the semantic platform tool Dick gave you during our meeting in Santa Barbara, we modeled knowledgebases that included every mediating structure, in the languages understandable by scientists down to clerical people (if that was a requirement of the project). The specific purposes of these projects centered on job knowledge transfers and professional to para-professional transfers of expertise.
Because of time limitations, we were not able to demonstrate the modeling process to you, but you should know that a reasonably intelligent, conceptual person can model knowledge using our systems. Typically, we use reference books that are important to productive activities. We start with the concept "book" and everything about that book, then we model the book concept structure (contents, chapter, index, etc.), then we model the conceptual contents. Next, we model the relationships. Finally we create an outline resource and feed it into the knowledge builder one layer at a time.
Backbone concepts and relationships are used to build down to a most intricate lace work. The Mark II builder tool self-builds, self-organizes and when up-dated, self-transcends it content. Thereafter clerical personnel up-date the knowledgebases that were created.
With paid labor, the costs ranged from $5,000 to $7,000 per book. You could do this yourself using the tool we gave you and give the knowledgebase (saved to CD or DVD - or transmitted via the internet), to anyone you choose.
Finally, the notion of capturing upper ontologies is equal to playing God, and is in its kindest sense, the folly of man.
Do any of us know what new paradigms will be established in our life times? It takes 10 to 30 years for new invention and the language to talk about it to develop. Who really knows what is coming? Our system does not require invention. We capture the very knowledge from the very books and manuals that exist today. Our ontologies are core to project - nothing more.
We do not create standard knowledge.
Mark III, our new tool due out in 2006, will capture every detail, and every relationship of those details, to precisely capture the knowledge content of any domain - by any reasonably intelligent person.
The good news is that when machines have access to this knowledge, the machines will help humans use knowledge to reason through complex problems.
My best to all.
Dennis