4/21/2004 9:21
AM
Key questions on Common Upper Ontology
I
am unsure how to place my thoughts into the bead game structure until I
understand if this conversation will go anywhere productive. Dan Levine, Paul Werbos, please let us know
if you have time to contribute. Jim
Hendler, I hope you will take the time here, simply because there is a need to
move some issues related to John Sowa's comments. These issues have to be moved by those who can lead the way for
those many who follow.
In the previous bead, John Sowa suggests that perhaps "ontology" as defined in various ways MIGHT not be the basic infrastructure for what we call the Semantic Web. John also suggests that
"Furthermore, neurophysiologists are the first to agree that
nobody in the world really knows how people think and that anybody who claims
to know is either a liar or a charlatan."
My sense is that his effort is to deconstruct where we are in our foundational theories so that something new can be tried. I am guessing, and trying to see how his important work can be carried into the proposed K-12 knowledge science curriculum. { + }
(John, please allow me to use the third person here, and then let me know how you feel about this characterization of your motivation.)
The problem is not that neuroscience does not have a deeper and fuller understanding of human thought than twenty years ago, but that the neuroscience has not been transferred into a framework that helps society deal with the social and political discourse. Individuals like Karl Pribram, Gerald Edelman, Walter Freeman, (to name a few); have deep understandings that are simply not transparently conveyed either in the popular science literatures (available in the book stores), or the university curriculums.
We barely allow the more advanced work to influence our theories of education, or curriculum development in political science or public policy.
Let me say this precisely and from my life’s experience, I am now 53. I just have not seen any process that transfers the knowledge of scholars to children at the rate and quality that is needed if we as a Nation are to have economic, political and military control over the peoples of the world. Well, perhaps the notion that we should exercise this control is also a consequence of this limited capacity of our educational system to convey both the next generation of science, and moral philosophy.
In the Internet, the need for structural (data) interoperability does require some type of commonly accepted knowledge of computer structure. This is where the greatest amount of actual work is being done by groups like those that Jim Hendler leads .
But perhaps the standards processes are simply dysfunctional due to market competitions for owning and being the one that specified the "standard". I have over and over made this point at Brand Newman and Susan Turnbull’s month’s meeting. The effort required to be a participant in a standards process is so extreme as to allow the standards process to be hijacked by those who often have nothing in mind other than lines of business.
The alternative is something that John Mallery is suggesting.
I agree with John Mallery, a researcher at MIT AI lab, that the best minds need to work to develop a break through which is fundamental enough and powerful enough to end what is essentially a very wasteful process related to the development and adoption of Information Technology standards.
Having a standard is not a problem; it is getting one that has become an end in itself.
I get a lot of criticism for criticizing the “system”, and yet it is not enough to offer alternatives if the system is persistently hijacked by people who cannot comprehend the issues because they have other agendas and do not have the education to even discuss issues such as why current forms of cognitive engineering can be predicted to create massive premature closures on any development of intelligence on terrorism or other National Security issues.
John Sowa's comments about ontology and neuroscience indicate that the National Project to define and develop a science of knowledge systems is really critically needed.