ORB Visualization
(soon)
National Knowledge Project
comments
John,
We will be working on some points to reflect the larger discussion, including your communication. Phone conversations are not being encoded into the public record of the conversation. So the record here is somewhat incomplete.
The next step seems to be to ask for a meeting with Dr. David Alberts at OSD, with you, Dr. MacDonald, and myself attending.
My own technology is within a few weeks and some small income requirements to stand up a (I will use Michael Lissack's term) catalytic indexical (or meme) representation of this discourse over time.
We play with this notion of a Herman Hesse type Glass Bead Game, because it does bring from the community of scholars a broad representation in the arts, literature, mathematics, science and even music (after all Steven Newcomb's work on music annotation lead to HyTime and to some aspects of the Topic Maps standard.)
Readware is providing a type of view over the thematic structure of the social discourse, but we do not have the funds to stand up the Ontology referential base (Orbs) visualization that is demonstrated in a tutorial at:
http://www.ontologystream.com/cA/conceptExtraction.htm
The Orb data model is extremely simple and powerful. The technology works because it depends on human cognitive acuity to produce experienced information and to encode structural invariance (not simply of co-occurrence patterns but also of grammar and/or (as Ballard's work points to) an information theoretic framework. (And yes there is an enormous amount of real work that needs to be done on these issues of language, information and the experience of knowledge.)
Your comment about working on
"superior organization designs and processes rather than by introducing technical enhancements for specific functions"
is an excellent suggestion, and one that has to be addressed positively.
The fact is that anything of the nature that Sandy Klausner, Mike McDonald or I have been talking about will cause rapid changes in how many people are employed. This is simply the nature of what we face.
The budget for managing social change is an order of magnitude larger than the budget for doing the underlying social science and computer science correctly.
Making sure that the science is correct has to be first; in spite of the fact that politics has in the past made this more difficult that one might hope. Because, it is possible to make a large investment in technology deployments when the technology is actually not correct. This is exceedingly wasteful, and yet is how many characterize the current IT procurements in intelligence.
Oh the other hand, my primary focus now is on reinforcing the notion that the knowledge science curriculum is the most important aspect of McDonald's and my joint efforts.
Without there being a deeper appreciation of the natural science related to memetic generation and expression mechanism, then one more round of computer science will not lead ultimately to the social objectives that we have established as first principle.