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Saturday, December 18, 2004

The BCNGroup Beadgames

National Project à

Challenge Problem  à

Center of Excellence Proposal à 

 White Paper on Incident Information Orb Architecture (IIOA) à

Types of Ontology for Crisis Management à

   Adi Structural Ontology Part I  à

Cubicon language description à

Orb Notational Paper  à

 

 

On market forces

Paul

 

Have you looked at what we're doing at Lockheed:

 

www.aerotext.com

 

Our technology is far and away better than anything offered by Google - you can get some information on how we did at the TREC contest this year at NIST: http://trec.nist.gov/ .

 

 

Bill,

 

You have good experience with text understanding technology and so I assume that you will make an objective evaluation of the Lockheed aerotext technology.  One of OntologyStream's current contracts is with Lockheed.  On this contract, we have staffed the Senior Ontology Developer.  We are looking for one perhaps two others with Semantic Web experience.

 

It would be nice to know that a proper set of tools exists and can be evaluated in the context of this project.

 

Clearly every large contracting corporation will have a branded solution to the perceived challenges, SRA, SAIC, LMCO etc. 

 

What has been our experience is that ALL of these solutions are shaped by a single set of market forces including

 

1) lack of understanding by program managers and business managers of the nature of abstraction, computers and human experience of knowledge.

 

2) the presence of a false, scientifically incorrect, AI polemic that misinforms our culture about the nature of abstraction, computers and human experience of knowledge

 

3) a combined consequences of individual self interest in the academic community and self interest in the behavior of business managers and program managers 

 

(see:)  [175]

 

The self-interest of academics is sad, but ubiquitous - particularity in the area of AI and Semantic Web.  Historical forces have "selected" for specific types of personalities in the SW and AI leadership.  A few counter-examples exist, but not many. 

 

The BCNGroup, of which you have been aware since your PhD work at Georgetown (1992), has come to advocate a National Project to systematically address these market forces, starting with the development of a K-12 curriculum in the knowledge sciences.

 

We have also identified approaches to Human-centric Information Production (HIP) that may be superior in objective terms than those that have resulted in compromised technology design as expressed in systems like those developed by groups that participate in the TREC competitions.

 

****

 

However, our group cannot keep up with all of the application development at places like Lockheed.  Perhaps this aerotext technology has objective value and is relatively unencumbered by cost and control by Lockheed based on business interests?