Jack Park
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2000 16:35:23 -0800
Mr. Rod Welch
The Welch Company
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111 2496
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Miscellaneous comments on
POIMS:
plan, perform, report
...is similar to the Lisp programming language's
interpreter: read, eval, print
and to the inner interpreter of my programs (The Scholar's Companion):
find something to do, do it, study what you did.
Communication
plays a central role in the POIMS discussion. Several years
ago, it occured to me that if we practiced reductionist thinking, we might
realize that communication is likely one of just a few really primitive
concepts in the universe. My original thinking was that communication
started at the protein interaction level (molecular biology), and migrated
all the way up to whole cultures. I now think communication starts at the
quantum level.
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One of the other primitives I have deduced is that of the arms race, FWIW.
TheBrain...
http://www.thebrain.com
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...provides a graphical way to provide Topic
Maps...
http://www.infoloom.com
...of intellectual property.
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LifeStreams...
http://lifestreams.com
...provides a graphical way to record and maintain a
time series of event records. The two need to be combined; a project I
started a while back to do so is called Amanuensis. It's original
incarnation was Java, but it was always intended to become code inside the
core of the Linux operating system. I suspect there are profound
similarities between Amanuensis and POIMS.
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POIMS, however, articulates one
aspect of the time series issue that I had not given any consideration to in
that thinking:
planning.
Planning is a big artificial intelligence problem
and much work has gone into The Scholar's Companion code such that TSC
could plan study methods when new/interesting informational events occured.
You have brought it out as a first class citizen in the knowledge space. I
think that is important.
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You are steering an interesting line along the border of causal and
relational thinking. Newtonian mechanics has taught us to think causally,
and only now we are beginning to think relationally. You appear to be
plowing a path that brings the two together. Qualitative Process Theory,
the overriding paradigm I implemented in TSC tries to do this as well. The
mathematics of relational thinking may turn out to be Category Theory, one
of the topological algebras.
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What will make this melded universe work, as we both agree, is a
satisfactory response to the ontological issues inherent in this work. In
fact, it would seem to me that there is the need to address the knowledge
representation issue at the same time. For, without a uniform, though
heterogenous by nature, representation scheme, one will find it very
difficult to satisfy the demands users will put on the system as they
attempt to open or create knowledge spaces against a larger knowledge
library (Doug's DKR).
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It turns out that Oracle 8i, the database, makes an attempt to satisfy part
of this problem. As the literature explains it, 8i stores documents in a
uniform way, no matter the source. It returns documents in a format driven
by the needs of the requesting client. Thus, a Word document can be
accessed by a browser in html, for instance.
I suspect that this kind of thinking will necessarily have to go into the
final DKR, no matter how it is conceived. In fact, it would seem that some
cell phone of the future will also record the call so that it can become
part of the DKR. I imagine we will need some new laws about recording
conversations for that to happen.
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My work with Adam is centered around those issues related to knowledge
management, and is focussed at this time on those specific issues related to
a framework, especially the representational issues. These start with a
serialization scheme (likely XML in some form), a representation scheme
(several candidates there, including DocBook, some dialect of RDF, and maybe
even OML/CKML).
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There are two issues at work here, especially as relates to
your POIMS notions: one is the representation of narrative, and the other is
representation of the linkages (relations).
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Humans tend to grasp the relevance of things drawn in some graphics view. In
fact, it turns out that asking kids to draw concept maps (akin to mind maps) is
a great way to probe the depths of their understanding.
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Humans can compose thoughts both graphically and in narrative form. I tend
to prefer both: part in narrative -- the background stuff -- and part
graphically, taxonomic stuff and process envisionments. Because of that, I
can write simple process rules that watch a scenario as it evolves and fire
rules to continue the evolution. Thus, I get an envisionment of all the
various directions some initial scenario can take. It turns out that if I
were able to map a temporal sequence of my own thoughts and experiences to
such a graph, I would be able to analyze it in terms of the kinds of rules
necessary to fire to bring about the sequence. From that, I can begin to
discover mistakes in my thinking, and plan for the future by writing new
rules to get it right the next time by firing those rules during a planning
phase.
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With TSC, I wrote a simple constrained natural language interface that allows a
user to type simple sentences that get translated into the internal knowledge
representation scheme. From there, the user can construct simple queries that
play back "what the system learned." I can then use sentences to construct
initial conditions and fire rules that build a new envisionment. I hired a
high school freshman one year to use it. She wrote a story about the phyto and
zoo plankton universe. Her envisionment shows who feeds on whom, and so forth,
and a taxonomy was graphically displayed. All from simple sentences. That is
precisely where I am personally going with The Scholar's Companion. My hunch
is that POIMS is going the same direction, and my desire would be to see the
OHS/DKR go that direction as well.
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Sincerely,
Jack
Jack Park
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Post Script
this could be restructured into a dialog between us on unrev list.
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