Saturday, November 19, 2005
Center of Excellence Proposal
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ONTAC stands for Ontology and Taxonomy Coordinating Working Group
It is a working group of
Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP)
One: Regarding our freedom and the concept of a Democracy
Two: On the modified Tim Berners-Lee’s Layer Cake Model of the Semantic Web architecture
Communication from Paul Prueitt
Ralph, I am appreciative that you made a communication into this discussion. (see [220] )
My position is that a National Project to establish the knowledge sciences would allow all who might lead us into something more functional and useful, to lead. My position is that the nation suffers because of the control of the standard’s process narrow business interests and because of the legacy where many of the academic issues are confused. John Sowa’s position is similar in many respects, as is yours, Ralph. We all make compromises that we would rather not. You once told me that you would have preferred to work with Topic Maps but that you had to work with RDF in order to get the work with the web services working group.
Certainly Top Quadrant would be one of the leaders. You and your group has been an excellent leader even in the less than optimal development environment that we have been dealing with for over a decade.
Why not work to change the conditions under which we work? Is this possible, and still bring forward those systems that are deployed or which are close to being deployed. Is there an agreement that things could be much better in terms of developing the best systems for e-government.
The knowledge sharing foundation concept would provide a proving ground for concepts, and would establish transparency on what does not work, and what has not been able to demonstrate results that are consistent with expectations. I originally proposed a Manhattan Type Project related to knowledge management and knowledge representation in 1993.
Four additional comments about your thoughtful communication:
John’s communication [217] contained the following:
<quote>
Your statement “An ontology can be merely
a set of well defined concepts, without logic. ”
This may be a true statement, but it is irrelevant
<end quote>
and then:
<quote>
On the other hand -- which is the hand holding the money that funds projects
like ONTAC -- formal ontology can be applied to the task of *legislating* how
various computer programs are specified to handle the much narrower, much more
specialized, and very much more precise categories that are implemented in
computer systems that are required to interoperate
<end quote>
The rest of John’s communication [217] demonstrates good synthesis over what is possible given the situation with funding and with the types of very poor peer review that has been demonstrated over the past decade. ( see case study)
By poor peer review, I specifically mean specific individuals who have disallowed diversity, taken a narrow viewpoint, assumed an king like role of authority (example: Hendler at Univ of MD), and (also specifically) slowed down the progress on Topic Map type systems. (Again for those who do not follow this history between the RDF/Tim Berners-Lee’s Layer cake model verses a Topic Map model; the difference has to do with the role of human’s in making interpretations.)
My response [218] is out of great personal frustration, awareness of many others who are in the same state as I am in.
In your note you make reference to a recent TBL’s talk
see http://www.w3.org/2005/Talks/1110-iswc-tbl/#(12)
Tim Berners-Lee's talk at ISWC2005,
And I find something that is barely comprehensible. There is almost no organization to what I find at this URL. What is there can be understood only if you are part of an in-crowd, in my opinion. And, there is no mention of Topic Maps or any other standard other than the one his group (the W3C) is pushing. There is no description of problems that are faced by the community that is working on the new technologies.
Ralph, you mentioned that the layer cake was modified. How? I do not see any changes to this misfortunate diagram (criticized by John Sowa on many occasions).
Ralph said:
One of the most forward-looking aspects of our current work is in pluggable architecture for reasoning engines. The goal is to be able to use different types of reasoning over a given knowledgebase combining, for example, probabilistic (Bayesian) reasoning with rule-based reasoning.
Communication this morning from a colleague: “Similar situation here. We are all in the same boat. There are many signs that the tyranny is beginning to end, despite lots of grandstanding.”
Given that this is an area that I feel that the W3C makes profound mistakes in, and the Topic Maps conventions do not, I would like to know why you feel that there is progress.
Many people know me, and my positions. In the meeting at GSA, and other places, we have seen the continual influence and dominate control by individuals who admit that their interests are in making money through consulting. We have seen the language at the GSA meetings become about “lines of business” as opposed to “processes”.
This “lines of business” language occurs in a larger context, as John pointed on in private correspondence. This context is the failures of our government to stop War Profiteering.
In Virginia, my state issued drivers license has my identification as a “customer” rather than as a “citizen”. For me this simple use of language tells it all.