Thursday, June 03, 2004
National
Knowledge Project
We are looking at the
formation of an
anticipatory web of
information.
Social/economic activity can be at the functional or structural level, or both.
One works at the functional level when one philosophizes about what might be needed for health care delivery, educational reform in mathematics and science education, or for National intelligence information systems.
Without reform oriented functional definitions, structural aspects do not make sweeping changes in the “system” no matter how obvious the benefit to well-defined functional objectives might be. True transformation requires both a functional change and changes in structural activities supporting practical projects defined in the language of the new functions.
Opening access to higher learning is a function that we feel must be addressed in a specific fashion if HIP (Human-centric Information Production) technology is to find a market.
We can take an example where public attention has been focused by recent events. In the National intelligence information system activity sphere most, or all, of the contracted activity is structural. The policy leaders want to achieve clear and timely transmission of human knowledge capital. But process rules require that these functional objectives be achieved using the structures that are at hand; relational database systems, the current generation of coding languages, current modeling methodologies, first order predicate logic, machine ontology, etc. The process rules also require that the current incumbent think tanks and consulting firms be gatekeepers.
The mismatch between structural activity and desired functions is ignored as long as the structural activity can be isolated from outcomes metrics that are defined in terms of function. Such outcome metrics are hard to impose, because they put great pressure on the process rules.
Total Information Awareness, for example, might have achieved several important functional objectives. But for one reason or the other Poindexture un-correctly identified the best technology and or one reason or the other helped cause a public reaction to the concept. Again, for whatever reasons, the defense industry contractors have not engaged in the types of structural activities that could put a TIA capability in place.
The structural work is poorly done because the defense contractors do not have an alignment between functional requirements and structural requirements. There is confusion.
The specific argument that the BCNGroup Founders have made, over the past three years, is that critically needed functional National intelligence objectives cannot be achieved using the current structural activities created by computer science and information technology communities.
The BCNGroup has argued for the past fourteen years that a new type of structural activity can achieve a well-defined set of functional objectives. At first, the issues were seen as limitations to the connectionist paradigm, artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms, and to the various forms of machine learning and knowledge acquisition paradigms. In other words, the limitations were due to the limitations of formal mathematics as a means to model the cognitive process and human communication.
Then later, we begin to appreciate that information production requires human in the loop activity to the degree that current software structure cannot support.