OASIS Mailing List ArchivesView the OASIS mailing list archive below
or browse/search using MarkMail.

 


Help: OASIS Mailing Lists Help | MarkMail Help

humanmarkup message

[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [Elist Home]


Subject: [humanmarkup] Notes on Process, Stratified Complexity,Knowledge Management, Topic Maps and Ontology


Title: Notes on Process, Stratified Complexity, Knowledge Man
Hi Everyone,

I wanted to post a few notes about Knowledge Management, Topic Maps and Ontology because in the course of exploring the element, channel, we ran right into the divide between content and processing in computing.

Arguably the separation of content from processing instructions, which is central to the way XML is envisioned to work into the future is necessary. This allegedly allows for such things as the Human Markup Language specs we are working on because  <facetious> we don't have to worry our pretty little content heads over the nuts and bolts of the mechanics underlying the use of our pretty little vocabularies.</facetious> In other words, we are not supposed to need to look under the hood and see how it works, as opposed to how it is supposed to work.

Fortunately, we have Len, who spends a lot of time doing just that on the xml-dev list, which I suggest you follow even though it is not by any means necessary. The point I am making is that we really DO have to look under the hood from time to time and make sure that what we think we are doing is what in fact is occurring. That's a little less important now that it will be a few years from now once Web Services, Topic Maps, UBL and HumanMarkup, etc, have some mileage under their metaphorical belts.

To me the concepts of Stratified Complexity, Situatedness, and the rest of children that have grown out of Complex Adaptive Systems are pretty self-evident and also pretty thoroughly applicable to our work, as far as they go. I'm not really interested in the debates within these schools of thought, I just happily take what seems appropriate to me, and leave the rest--which is all of our prerogatives.

While Kurt, David, Rob, Manos, Paul and Sylvia (whom I name because I have some slight familiarity with their views) might all have differences of opinions with me and each other in regard to details, I suspect we all  agree that the structural, organizational tenets or principles that the masses of data within most given Knowledge Management Topics or Topic Areas that can be mapped with Topic Maps (or will be able to be so mapped at some point soon now) yield are the key tools for making those fields useful. In my opinion it is in the ability of RDF to usefully extract the datasets from these fields that we will want and need to use in HumanMarkup. That is what I see as the the mechanics under the hood, so to speak that will make our work useful out there in the world at large.

For myself, because I am not a scientist, but an artist with some rather odd predilections for science and technology, I prefer to stay in the realm of the general, so you don't see me getting into the details of this very often. So I wanted to say that I think we would benefit from adopting, and adapting, as David has done, the DAML-OIL set of Ontologies for our use, to be added to and amended as our secondary schemata require.

For an evaluation of DAML-OIL:
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/WebOnt/reqdo.html

For a presentation about DAML-OIL:
www.cs.man.ac.uk/~horrocks/Slides/daml-pi-feb-01.pdf

You're all adept at searching on your own, so I won't re-refer to the horrocks paper we studied earlier on when I went and did that 300+ hours of work on our own <facetious>little /facetious> HM.frameworks:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/humanmarkup/documents/HM.frameworks.txt

A Last Note: I suggested to Philip Rossomando that RDF is more amenable to formulating an explicit grammar from the implicit grammar which our Primary Base Schema will inevitably contain. And I suggested to him that he contact Manos about working with Manos on that area with special attention to following the Topic Maps work that is also on-going... I suggest the same to all who want to make a contribution in that area. This is allied to but neither dependent on, nor envisioned as part of, a possible High-Level Ontological Framework Subcommittee, or however it gets named if there is sufficient interest to form it.  That, I would suggest, should concern itself with HOW to use both the XML and RDF Base Schemata for the applications, the identification of which, I would also suggest, should be a first priority of such a subcommittee.

Ciao,
Rex

P.S. I also tend to ignore dramatic gestures by volatile personalities. In the long term, the work is what counts, not who does it or how it gets done or who claims credit for it.

 
-- 


[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [Elist Home]


Powered by eList eXpress LLC