Saturday, November 19, 2005
Center of Excellence Proposal
à
ONTAC stands for Ontology and Taxonomy Coordinating Working Group
It is a working group of
Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP)
[217] ß communication from John Sowa
communication on
Whitehead’s process ontology by John Sowa
à [219]
First, I have the greatest admiration for Dr
John Sowa; however the issue that has arisen has to do with both honesty within
the Semantic Web community and the use of taxpayer money by IT consulting
firms.
A deeper issue arises regarding the
consequences of the current control of all IT standards process. I have claimed that vested interests express
power in such a fashion as to be absolutely known to all in the IT industry.
This power is sufficient to have fired or not hired anyone who would suggest
that the standards are wrong minded, scientifically ill-defined.
I have conducted a conversation with one of
the working groups over the past two weeks in order to expose what the issues
really are.
It is up to the Washington Post and other
news media to report on this conversation if they feel that my request that
they do so seems justified. The BCNGroup
bead games are a type of web log; and contain a dozen of more similar
conversations about the same issue.
The “false” representation of “all” IT
standards processes, with ISO being the exception and OASIS being a partial
exception, is that there is an open discussion and evaluation of a set of
issues that are truthfully presented.
The “irrelevance”, that John Sowa is talking
about, is a forced judgment motivated by powerful industries whose will is to
pervert academic activity and to define a set of facts on the ground that deny
principled discussion not consistent with the perceived interests of these
powerful forces (those forces created by specific people who have great
wealth).
The perceived interest is to control the
behavior of the communication mechanisms that will support a future business
AND political environment. There are
specific individuals and specific organization dedicated to achieving this
interest. The sums of money involved
are in the tens of billions per year.
The ONTAC core mission is derived from
the proper notion that electronic government will be the means through which
the people of the United States interact with the government. The hijacking is that these powerful forces
wish to control both the means of interacting with the government and the
economic system. The Democracy is
almost lost.
The notion that the behavior of all computer
programs has to be precise and exact is not in line with reality. In the connectionist paradigm, such as
artificial neural networks, the program is designed by the programmer to
receive input in the form of unanticipated data patterns. From this input, program behavior occurs by
the program that is not designed by the programmer.
The semantic extraction technology, that is
my field of expertise, has the same property.
The key point, ignored by the working groups, is that human in the loop
interaction will cause the programs to behave in a fashion that is not
anticipated by the programmer. This is
what “loose coupling” means. Commerce
can be over engineered in a way that cannot be fixed afterwards. We are at or beyond a critical point in
human history, one that is effectively controlled by a process expressed
through these IT standardization groups.
There are alternatives.
“The key benefits of this
approach are (1) a separation of concerns between interaction (protocols) and
local decisions making (policy); (2) reusability of protocols across processes;
(3) evolution and refinement of processes by protocol composition; and (4)
flexible process enactment that respects local policies while adopting
continually.” [1]
The concepts expressed by this quote are
inconsistent with the notion that the standards committees are to be the
authority on how all computer programs work.
The notion that “hard coupled” computational
systems should control the interactions of commerce, our politic expression, and
our communication is being claimed. The
claim is blatant, and the claim is enforced by exclusions of those who would
state alternative viewpoints.
One alternative is to claim that ontology is
to be regarded as a set of concept representations without logic [2].
From this viewpoint, the ontology is a set of
abstractions to be used to produce ontological models – most of which are not
equipped to “reason or think”. Even in
engineered systems, the model does not “think” and produce judgments. Hilbert space models of engineered systems
can be used to compute actual, determined, future states. Ontological models of living systems can be
used to understand and communicate between humans information that is available.
The decision to change an appointment is left
to the responsibility of the human, and not left in the control of a mechanism
that is designed and built by standards committees.
Thus ontology can be used as a dictionary to
serve the purpose of human communication.
Web services are thought, or represented by members of the standards
committees, to by responsive to human intent.
If the viewpoint expressed in the quote above (foot note 1) is taken
into account, then human computer programs can measure intent. We already have natural language to express
intent. Natural language is a centuries
old technology. Semantic extraction
techniques allow humans to make an mapping to design abstractions and business
protocols. This notion is available in
the literatures, but is suppressed by the working group. A group developed a Roadmap for Semantic
Technology Adoption. I organized this
group in response to a contract supported by US Customs [3].
The use of the term “ontology” for machine
translation dictionaries occurred in the late 1940s at Georgetown. The imposition of the notion of computing
with ontological terms has been imposed on this deeper tradition, in spite of
principled argument that computing in this way always leads to failure at
unexpected and critical times. The
scholarship on this point is extensive.
In the IT literature, the web services are
almost always represented to go beyond mere data interoperability, which we
already have except in cases due to non-interoperability by intentional
design. Data interoperability has been
possible for decades, and is not achieved due to designed non-interoperability
by the same community that would have us believe that hard wired computer
programs (running without human intervention) can provide the interoperability
that is not available by design.
In “Web Services and Service-Oriented
Architectures”, by Douglas Barry, he
starts out with a scenario where by a traveling salesman’s complete schedule is
computed by “web services” and then recomputed as things change in the
world. Tim Berners-Lee’s famous article
in Scientific America has web services making medical prescriptions. Computer mediated processes would support
these types of activities, but not hard wired computational programs without
iterated human interaction and community-based decision making.
It is a simple situation. Create new computer technology that is human
centric and supports (standardized but open sets of concepts) mediated human
communication, or create a control mechanism.
The effects of trying to engineer human
communication and economic activity is to create a world that makes money for
those who are part of the system (are members of the religion), but which
continues the alienation of all those who do not pay into a membership.
The alternative is to support the BCNGroup’s
call for a National Project. Such a Project would change the course of
our development of information and communication systems. It would restore honesty to our behavior.
[1] Desai, N; Mallya, A U; Chopra, A K; Singh M P (to be published in Special Issue on Interaction and State-based Modeling, IEEE. “Interaction Protocols as Design Abstractions for Business Processes.
[2] Prueitt, Paul S. (1996a). Is Computation Something New?, published in the Proceedings of NIST Conference on Intelligent Systems: A Semiotic Perspective. Session: Memory, Complexity and Control in Biological and Artificial Systems. October 20-23. Also at http://www.bcngroup.org/area3/pprueitt/kmbook/Chapter2.htm