Friday, September 24, 2004
Background discussions on a proposed
Anticipatory Technology Challenge Problem
(the cc list includes
people whom the core team feels should have a formal role in the Anticipatory Technology Challenge
Problem (proposed) - as advisors, workshop presenters, university
hosts, suppliers of software or as subcontractors. The bcc list includes 40 names
that could join the cc list. Please
indicate if you wish to be removed from either list.)
John
(Sowa):
I used several quotes from your slides in writing the course notes for
the upcoming second week of my course -- particularly those of Alfred North Whitehead,
Modes of Thought. I was talking about the difficulty of constructing any
definitive metaphysical (ontology) abstraction hierarchy given the arbitrary
nature of what is retained in abstraction versus assumptions about what can be
thrown away as of lesser importance. The quote:
"The topic of every science is an abstraction from the full
concrete happenings of nature. But every abstraction neglects the influx of the
factors omitted into the factors retained."
Fits well into comparing theory to natural observation.
Thanks again
Dick
Richard Ballard,
Founder, Knowledge Foundations Inc
The short message from you to John, above, is so insightful, I have copied it here for others to make comment on if they wish.
Given that the ACQUANT program evaluated your work once (2002), and did not fund, do you have an understanding of why, in their minds, they did not fund. I know that many of us feel that the program managers do just not understand the paradigm in which we work. But what was their justification for not funding?
I know how I see your software fitting into the
anticipatory technologies, and how your theoretical work fits into a future
knowledge science. Thus I know how I
would encode Mark 3 data into Orbs – but you and I have not talked about
this. (call me). In any case, you and I are both committed to
including each other in a future knowledge science curriculum, as envisioned in
the planning process leading to a National Project.
My sense is that we should constructively include a 100K - 300K piece to the Anticipatory Technology Workshop Challenge Problem. Please be kind enough to write a supporting document, with an integrated focused with my work, and lasting 12 months. Remember that the workshop needs to support five or six independent approaches to anticipatory technology and bring them together into a common
1) data encoding, or system of data encoding
2) deployment environment, ie the Knowledge Sharing Foundation
3)
curriculum
Pilesystems Inc and SchemaLogic Inc are invited to make a
simple bid to the core team for inclusion in the workshop. This must be done at under $50,000 each for
something that shows logics of schema (controlled vocabularies) and the
foundations to the work underlying Pilesystems’ data encoding and relationship
to the academic history (in the US) of what Peter Krieg and I have referred to
as "polylogics".
Returning to Richard's contributions.... Mark 3 has a user interface design that is
based on question answer, and is HIP in this sense.
What might bind together the work on Mark 2 and Mark 3, my
core team's work and John Sowa's work is a common and objective encoding -
where we standardize on the Berkeley Hash table system (for reasons that are
important - I argue) but also adopt a notational system that does not care if
the implementation is on Hash tables or key-less hash (given the concern over
the Primentia Patent). I know that
Readware, schemalogic, polylogics and Sowa VivoMind analogy engine all have
different encoding.
Please,.. I hope that some of this is ok and that we can
agree on what I have just offered.
Collaboration means collaboration, if I have something wrong then I hope
to understand what that something is.
Likewise 100K - 300K might allow John to bring his work
into a common notational and data encoding "standard" for the 12-month
workshop.
The core team, Tom Adi, Paul Prueitt, Amnon Myers and Ken Ewell, need to lead here and hope that everyone will understand that we try very hard to understand the full set of issues related to the Workshop concept.