[topicmaps-comment] Letters on Mark X Series Editing Tools &Experience -- An Invitation and comment

[paul <beadmaster@ontologystream.com>]

Comments from the Topic map community?

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: paul [mailto:beadmaster@ontologystream.com]
Sent: Saturday, June 08, 2002 9:37 AM
To: categoricalAbstraction@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Letters on Mark X Series Editing Tools & Experience -- An Invitation and comment

(Open communication, please circulate)

 

Dick Ballard

Knowledge Foundations Inc.

 

Dick,

 

The intent of your new letters, to the categoricalAbstraction forum, is perfect, in that the barriers that the community has in expressing intellectual property is quite profound.  Your willingness to actually talk about how the Mark 2 works is important to the community, and unlike - for example - the Cyc ontologies where there is no ability for those who could make an objective evaluation to make this evaluation.  And of course, the topic maps ontologies seems to never really occur in a way that is visible either.  Cognitive graphs (Sowa's work) are the same way, in that after working through the technical literature he has written one is left with a great need to see something work in real settings.

 

The philosophical grounds for understanding why machine ontologies, up to now, do not lead to real working systems is made from an examination of the illusionary nature of formal systems. 

 

The principles that are being designed into the Mark 3 address the required openness in the formalism and to human interaction in a way that is consistent with what the Russian logicians wanted from QAT and semiotic system for control of (whatever):

 

http://www.bcngroup.org/area3/pprueitt/kmbook/Chapter9.htm

 

 

and to the work of Peter Kugler and others.

 

 

As we talk about the Mark 2 and the Mark 3, there will be insights both by yourself and by others.  These insights are the substance of patents if handled in a proper fashion.  As I do  think that the SAIC/OntologyStream proposal to NIMA will be funded, we might wish to put in place a process to allow a restricted community an ability to quickly disclose as patents those insights that none of us have had as yet.  I call this an IP Glass Bead Game. 

 

There are currently four such IP Glass Bead Games being played. I happen to be the Magister Ludi in each of these, except one where Don Mitchell is playing this role.   I suspect that there will be many hundreds of these games being played as we start to encode knowledge technology innovations into a special CoreTalk operating system and memory manager (which can only now be discussed under non-disclosure agreements).   Again this notion, of community building through the capture of IP ownership, is the NIST proposal, but we may find venture capital even if NIST can not quite come to break down this barrier as disclosed in our Three Year Plan:

 

http://www.ontologystream.com/threeYearPlan/plan.htm

 

 

Someone somewhere has got to express the science of knowledge systems in a clear fashion without all of the subterfuge that we find in the XML and ontologies communities.  For example, the only real disclosure of what individual innovators are doing is made into a patent process that has a 3 and sometimes 4 year period where the disclosure is not public - while the PTO makes an evaluation.  This is useless in the context of establishing a new discipline.  How can one innovate on secret "disclosures"?

 

The PTO is broken in many ways.   Over time, the PTO's behavior may develop to actually be un-Constitutional as well as being simply confused about the nature of information and knowledge technology.

 

 

The hard issues in knowledge representation is made only harder in a climate where some workers have only partial glimpses of a complete knowledge system.  It is often the case that these individuals present themselves as having seen the holy grail - because it is required by the management and investment airheads that anyone asking for investment make these types of ridiculous presentations.  This investment behavior badly screws up everything that needs to be done to develop a discipline and a community.  The DoD cottage industry managers finish the "innovation road kill" phenomenon by disallowing any real innovation into the government... as we all see with the fact that at the FBI that the notion of full text retrieval is a dream that might take 2 more years to implement.  Fuzzy search is specifically discounted, and the notion of concept search is treated as an embarrassment.   One has to ask, as some Senators are asking, why the DoD cottage industries are acting as gate keeper to keep normal and mature COTS based capabilities away form the service of our nation.  The Senators should ask the scientists, like me,  who have been consistently blocked from deploying full text and conceptual search technologies for the past decade. 

 

(Perhaps the cottage industries believe that the American People have not yet paid enough for their high priced gate keeping.  I personally think that we have legal and social crimes being committed by those whose integrity we are asked not to challenge, and I think that this will continue until Congressional hearings reveal the complete and total truth about what these IT companies are doing to "earn" a profit by institutionalizing these ugly problems. I specifically have much to tell in regards to my own experience and a set of other case studies of similar experience by other scientists.  

 

http://www.bcngroup.org/area3/manhattan/sindex.htm

 

A solution to the cyber terrorism problem is available, not only in my work but in the work of a number of under funded and abused start-ups. 

 

http://www.ontologystream.com/SLIP/index1.htm

 

This solution is similar to the solution to the cyber porn problem, in that the system preserves the problem because it is a good problem "for the system" - in spite of what the problem does to human culture.)

 

And ultimately we see that the IT investments themselves served the ego of the investors initially and then is spoiled because the IT product is not correct.  So we see that there is no ROI with the current investment behaviors.  The system tolerates this because of the (often undeserved) concentration of wealth that occurs under our form of capitalism.  So the wealthy can afford to make deep and profound mistakes in what is funded. The loser here is the world's social structure.

 

Out of a Darwinian process of random selection, comes a few survivors.

 

The advantage that the Mark X series has is the historical presence.  There is a history here.  Another advantage is the information theory that you developed and vetted with important theorists, and for which much more can be said than has been said - or perhaps even imagined even by you or I.

 

Dick, and the others in this forum.  I wish to address this issue of a IP and proposed scholarship and patent Mark 3 - based knowledge base.

 

Fist, because it is important to the community; this economic power of a common repository of patent and scholarship disclosures. 

 

Like the moves (or books) where evil is defeated only by turning the evil power into itself; capitalism's reductionist reinforcement has to be used to protect the new knowledge science and technology.  This is the brilliance of the BCNGroup Charter, in that a mechanism is envisioned to take property ownership as gifts form creative people who do not care to own anything, and confers this into a community ownership in the form of Patent and Trademark Office approved patents.  The community ownership is then dispersed, completed, (this is to say purged) from the BCNGroup by a scientific committee making gifts to individual scientist or innovators.  The purging of the money must occur once a year, by Charter.  This is done through prizes and university scholarships.

 

I have a relationship to M-CAM that allows me to run patents that are submitted for review and potential inclusion through an automatic intellectual property space mapping technology.  This service general cost around $15,000 from M-CAM, but the BCNGroup has the ability to format patents in a way that allows M-CAM to batch process 5 - 9 patents in a cluster for around this price.  As I know the internal architecture, this work is streamlined.

 

What is then possible is that an innovator or group of innovators, such as a group of people working under your direction on the Mark 3, would be observed by a Magister Ludi

 

http://www.ontologystream.com/area1/primarybeads/bead1.htm

 

http://www.ontologystream.com/area1.htm

 

or group of "advisors".  The patent disclosure is homoeomorphism to the PhD thesis in that:

 

1) broad competency must be demonstrated

2) an original contribution to human knowledge must be made

2) a literature review must specify the relationship of this original contribution to the elements of the literature review.

 

Failure to know of someone's work that is similar to one's own is to lose the opportunity for a patent of a PhD.  Many many individuals have forgotten this simple rule. 

 

So the BCNGroup wants to assist in the proper disclosure of IP, first in the form of patents and then later on in the form of virtual PhD processes.

 

http://www.ontologystream.com/distanceLearning/learningSystem.htm

 

The Mark 3 is the proper knowledge system to encode the community knowledge of knowledge science and technology.

 

One is constantly dealing with protecting one's IP in a situation where the immune system of the status quo does not want to allow knowledge science and technology a place to root.  However, the BCNGroup strategy is to use hundreds of commonly owned patents on processes that are valuable when rendered as software, to root knowledge technology in a fertile valley, rather than on some rock ledge. 

 

The time is right for this process to start. 

 

www.bcngroup.org

 

 

Please consider joining the BCNGroup membership.

 

-----Original Message-----
[psp] 

From: Richard Ballard [mailto:rlballard@earthlink.net]
Sent: Saturday, June 08, 2002 6:43 AM
To: kmci-Virtual-Chapter; categoricalAbstraction
Subject: [categoricalAbstraction] Letters on Mark X Series Editing Tools & Experience -- An Invitation

Friends:

Last February, I talked of beginning a new series of letters on the Mark X
EditForm, Builder, and the User Editors. That was before the Knowledge
Technology Conference in March. After that conference, I appreciated better
the gaps in the technological community's knowledge of knowledge. So I
embarked on a series of 7 letters, that surveyed what I thought were the
most important "missing pieces". Wojtek and Jack promise not to let me off
the hook in answering additional questions with respect to those letters, so
consider that discussion as still open.

This intended new series is completely at the other end of the spectrum. It
aims only to write the content of a knowledge model into a simple ASCII text
file. With that start, it will follow each editorial step needed to prepare
these files for a semi-automatic process of parsing and mark-up aimed at
integrating this model with thousands to hundreds of thousands of other
models. This process of editing is at the center of any large scale
knowledge capture project.

Over the past 16 years this process has evolved through two distinct
generations (Mark 1 & 2). My aim is to describe and deconstruct the Mark 2
process and all the key issues of editorial thinking, examining closely each
distinct tasks and its purpose. Then "brainstorm" each goal and process in
search of better, more productive methods. Ultimately I will try to fashion
a tool design that makes such best practices the obvious thing to do when
used by that rather ordinary sort of worker (no disrespect intended), drawn
to editorial professions. In the space of several months I plan to refashion
the editorial process, its work products, and then sketch the tool designs
in preparation for programming and prototype development.

What is striking I think is that when we watch Knowledge workers, they
appear to be doing things we have all done before. But when we put a
microscope to their thinking and intent as they work, we see levels of
detail and rigorous concerns that are many levels deeper than most people
have ever thought to think before. To be useful to real world editors this
work must have the checklists, the tests, the clear decision criteria that
goes directly to some reproducible way of making every abstract idea utterly
and unmistakably concrete. As with children, every instruction that is found
to stop short , leads immediately to the constantly repeated question, "Yes,
but WHY?" Finding yourself explaining "why", is always a voyage filled with
self-discovery and constructive re-creation.

THE TOOLS IN QUESTION:

EditForm -- is an ASCII text file that is read and parsed by the BUILDER
tool. In production, everything going into the Knowledge Layer goes in
through an EditForm. In Mark 2, if changes are to be made to the Knowledge
Layer, the editor constructed an EditForm to identify the concepts to be
altered and then asks the BUILDER to markup and "expand" these targeted
concepts. The Builder performs this mark up and returns the editor's
EditForm to show every possible connection to other content items. The
editor makes a copy of this "as is" EditForm, then constructs their own "as
should be" EditForm version. If their changes are "authorized", the "as is"
form is marked as a deletion and the "as should be" as the "new" body of
connections constructed in its place.

There are a great many new issues in the transformation of Mark 2 EditForms
to Mark 3. The most important of these is the basic Mark 3 grammar and all
of the ontological assumptions and conventions it entails. This grammar is
the signature defining every representational form that Mark 3 can
incorporate within a knowledge base. For everyone interested in the
formulation of a system of knowledge representation beyond Mark 2, Topic
Maps, and all the rest -- this discussion should fix the final form of Mark
3.0. You will want to be in on that debate and its consideration of all
possible issues.

This is clearly the place to bring up your own lessons learned from other
tools and ontological concerns.

BUILDER -- is the production tool that builds and maintains a single
knowledge layer over time. Versions of this layer can be "published" from
time to time as a proprietary knowledge asset. In this sense we speak of the
BUILDER as a printing press or production station. Mark 2's builder was site
(or seat) licensed as a commercial, small business enterprise tool from
1991-1999 at $50K per 2-seat license "as is" or for upwards to $100K for
licenses that required substantial new capabilities to be added and
delivered. Each license provided 1 year of updates, hot-line support, while
setting no production limit or royalties on the products it produced. In
most cases Mark 2 licenses were sold to project sponsors, who ultimately
would hold copyright and title to the knowledge asset under development. By
owning the tool license and the product, they could alternately internalize
the production process or outsource it to yet another service provider.

Most often the initial development services provider was a team of two or
more companies. One company, the prime, was a system integrator or
consulting firm with a long and close relationship to the project sponsor.
The other was a unit from Knowledge Research, my "project-oriented
production shop", an especially organized group of experienced and highly
skilled professionals capable of monumental feats of production, of cloning
assistants, and of training aides to quickly grow their total labor force to
match projects of any size.

The Mark 3 BUILDER is an evolutionary production system that will appear in
versions suited to a number of markets -- teaching, professional, small
business asset production, and large enterprise development and support.
This discussion will focus first on the small business knowledge asset
production shop, whose expected annual business should exceed $1
million/year. This level of business can support one or more full time
production teams.

The key design goal of this BUILDER version is a productive, collaborative,
and profitable process of knowledge capture and work flow. Its design as a
process management, work scheduling, ontology development, and collaborative
feedback tool maximizes our opportunities to embed all our best practice
work experience into the tool itself.

USER EDITOR -- is a highly interactive editor intended for individual
students, professionals, and knowledge workers who are creating and editing
their own original knowledge assets in an ordinary office desktop or laptop
work environment. This environment is less collaborative and less focused on
high production throughput and large scale asset integration. This tool will
receive greater attention for Mark 3.1.

JOINING THE DISCUSSION

We can broadcast our discussions on the open forums, but I expect there to
be a variety of sample documents and intermediate work products exchanged. I
am hoping that those seriously involved in this discussion will keep us
aware of their interest and constant attention, especially by contributing
regularly. As we go I will build and maintain a distribution list of
frequent contributors and be sending my letter attachments directly to them.
Those sharing attached artifacts may want to build similar lists to
facilitate their own direct distributions to this "inner group".

Please respond directly, if you aim to be a regular participant and preview
for me some of the issues and discussions most important to you. I will try
to put together some checklist or rough schedule and benchmark about where I
think we are -- as we go along. Let me know when you would like to jump in
with some major initiative or teaching and discussion topics and I can make
way and give your ideas full focus.

Give me a "heads up" on your interests this week and I will put up a first
outline and introductory starting letter by next weekend.

Dick