Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Center of Excellence Proposal
à
The Taos Institute
(on the possibilities)
[bead thread on curriculum reform]
Communication from BCNGroup Founding Committee
The Taos Institute will be a place where e-commerce systems (www.virtualTaos.net ) are developed based on the use of something like Python, RDF (Intellidimension's simple RDF repository), and Topic Maps (Ontopoly). The e-commerce system is to be dedicated to the support of the creative arts (of Taos and the Big Bend) and the advance of new educational standards. To do this, it has to make a lot of money using advanced computer science properly.
The problem with the computer science standards is that they change - and this property of always changing leads to someone like myself suggesting that OWL/RDF is not only a waste of time (in certain specific respects) but is also inhibitory of proper tools evolving as needed by our society. Spam for example, and cyber threats, is actually enhanced by the new developments coming from computer science. It is as if no one cares that email is now a marginally useful tool. (Many individual people do not use it because of spam.)
Topic Maps is a perfect example, many projects that should have been done with Topic Maps (and for which the managers wanted to use Topic Maps) were done (poorly) using some version of OWL that no longer is supported. So many of these projects were, in fact, literately a waste of time.
In reading Jeff's last note, I felt the longing I often have for 2.5 FoxPro (the version that was before FoxPro became embedded in "visual nonsense". Visual FoxPro is a mess because it changes on a regular basis and because it has to be understood completely to do anything with. The understanding that one gets is about it, not about what one wanted to do. This is a hijacking of the intent of the developer, and is part of a larger hijacking of our political and economic system by fundamentalist processes. We should be clear here that this is a claim we make based on direct observation and long standing discussions.
FoxPro 2.5 was a complete relational database, with all basic procedural calls required to build interfaces, and the SQL was nicely embedded in something very close to the simplest version of the BASIC programming language.
I also felt a longing for the early Mac operating system and programming languages.
John (Sowa) feels this also, I assume.
The system that I am designing for virtualTaos needs tools that will not change, and yet are sufficient to a number of functions...
1) natural language parsing that produces an Ontology referential base (Orb) with a Topic Map encoded ontology of linguistic invariance, concepts being expressed in weblogs (using Readware), Python interface to the Orb and the Topic Map (for computing with ontological constructions).
2) a simple e-commerce system having web services expressed in simple XML and accessed via Perl scripts and Python. (see
http://www.bcngroup.org/python3/home.htm
3) a Multiple User Domain like the Manor (http://www.madwolfsw.com/index.php ) and a collaborative environment like Groove (http://www.groove.net/home/index.cfm )