Friday, January 20, 2006
[361] ß parallel discussion in “national debate” bead thread
This is part of a discussion
that will be moved to a Wiki page soon.
The Second School of Semantic Science, on
founding
On writing an EU program
Azamat,
Let me state some perceptions that you and I share.
First, you and I share the Need to found a science about human knowledge. There are others that I know, and that you know, who also share this need. The need is strong and has in fact been a source of personal challenges, due to the difficulty of the issues and due to the various forms of resistance to the concept that "science" has to extend beyond the strong reductionism that has been so full of utility during the last century.
The difficulties of the issues is also why the obvious weaknesses of strong reductionism has not been an argument we can use to bring the funding mechanisms to support natural definitions of complexity. However, there is no question that society itself needs an evolution of science, specifically from an institutional science that sometimes (but not always) is governed by a strong from of scientific reductionism.
Scientific reductionism, as Paul Werbos and others are able to point out clearly, has lead to benefits that are real, and there is no clear point at which a reductionism methodology becomes "not scientific". The work by BioPAX clearly shows that a great deal can be accomplished in the area of data integration, and the support of scientific communalizations, using OWL Full (in a slightly non-standard fashion). Alan speaks to this in a previous communication to the bead games.
However, works like the life work of Robert Rosen point to some aspects of phenomenon that fail to be modeled by breaking the material bits of life down to smaller bits. Judith Rosen has spoken elegantly to this recently. She is part of the team.
The funding path that I have been discussing with her and others has to do with a EU program that you brought to my attention. I am asking you to re-focus on that program and to take the lead role in advocating a specific approach to modeling complexity. This approach would merge your work with mine and with a scientific foundation firmly revealed in the work of Robert Rosen.
I know that you do not know Rosen's work well, and perhaps have not read any about his work other that what Judith has communicated. So there is some conceptual work that would need to be done before the Feb 10th deadline for the proposal.
The key to my role is in establishing compliance to the OASIS work on ontology modeling language, and web services. The web services need to serve three communities
1) B-2-B (supporting transparency and flexibility)
2) G-2-B (supporting compliance and interoperability)
3) bioinformatics (supporting scientific communication about gene and cellular expression)
The work at DERI is not the only work that is contributing to OASIS WSML, WSMO, WSMX technical committees. Within the community of several dozen individuals, there are some that are strongly W3C and acts to push the language in the direction of RDF and so called "descriptive logics". So we have branding language that is owned by W3C that implies that OWL is fully descriptive (of all things) as well as being "expressive" of all things. As Andrea Proli's comments indicate, there is the sense that the branding language used by W3C proponents is acceptable, even in spite of the concerns expressed by natural scientists.
The proposal to the EU, if it is made, has to use this fact; e.g. that the semantic web community, including most “knowledge engineers” and the thousand or so PhDs in AI, is almost “purposely” making false claims about what W3C standards can do. We have to do this in a way the glorifies what the W3C standards have done and can be used to do – WHEN THE DOMAIN OF DISCOURSE IS SIMPLE.
Thus we need to use the Rosen definition of complexity as The Foundational definition, showing how the OASIS standards can be used to create transparency, flexibility, compliance to regulatory policy and support for complex discussions about complex natural systems. [314]
Paul Prueitt PhD (mathematics and quantum cognitive neuroscience)
The Taos Research Institute
Taos New Mexico