Thursday, December 08, 2005
as a
action
To John Sowa and others
Senator Frist delivered a long speech to an almost empty room yesterday.
http://frist.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Issues.Detail&Issue_id=59
The Senator’s speech was on the real possibility that the pandemic flu could cost the US economy 650B over a three-month period of time. He stated that around one million Americans would likely die if the H5N1 flu strain hits human populations this year.
Those in the bcc in Tenn., please forward this note or (URL [1] ) to the Senator's office.
He is calling for a Manhattan Project to address the American populations susceptibility to flu and other biological threats. Clearly he is not simply talking about the advance of medicine, which is doing a wonderful job. He is talking about how government is organized at the town/city, state and national levels.
Specifically he is talking about information science, and the deep inadequacies of the current IT infrastructure to meet a whole range of occurring or potential crisis.
John (Sowa),
In response to you note: copied below
I refer you the to concept of "simultaneous policy" as one means in which (dysfunction to function) transformation of our society will occur, in my opinion. Of course we are not now ALL dysfunctional, and the future will not be purely functional. But...
The BCNGroup's call to the Protege team at Stanford University is to quickly provide a stable minimal RDF and OIL editor, so that medical communities can start to use something that they do not now have. The absence of editing tools for RDF, OWL and Topic Maps is the choke point (in our opinion) to the development of knowledge based human interaction of the type we envision in the Anticipatory Web.
Each of these editing tools should be based on Service Oriented Architecture, with no mention of a programming language, of example.
The human knowledge is already available. The problem is in not sharing the right information with the right person in the proper fashion.
Senator Frist once told me, at a briefing I attended, "what could he do, he was only a Senator", in regards to the cyber threats entrenchment. That was two years ago and many good things have developed. Some things have not happened, like a control on spam.
In our ontology community the problems are on the verge of being understood. It is really true that certain academics hold us back, as I have repeatedly said, but the community is close to a simultaneous policy statement of our own.
The barrier is the W3C standards process itself, and you (John Sowa) have more than once agreed with me on this specific fact.
The OASIS standard, including the work actually being done by Rex and his group in southern New Mexico, is a completely different matter. These standards do allow the kind of flexibility in interpretation that the W3C standards pretend are un-important.
The Manhattan Project to create the knowledge sciences is the correct project for the Senator to support.
For more on this discussion, we have an index type page as well as a new thread on medical informatics ontology... and new projects being planed or being started.
To the Protege/OWL eforum...
please communicate with Dr Jayanth Paraki, dparaki@yahoo.co.in , in India on a project to create two parallel ontologies, one in RDF and one in Topic Maps.
We will be using the new Ontopia (just released) Topic Map editor, Protege (which version I have no idea as of yet... see [280] as well as a very fine RDF repository (and back-end) developed by a small company called Intellidimension.
Contributions to this effort should be coordinated with Dr Paraki.
Dr Paul S Prueitt
Founder BCNGroup.org, OntologyStream.com, Taos Institute.