OSI Public Statement

March 31, 2002

First we will have a bit of definition. We define visual Abstraction (vA) as categorical Abstraction (cA) that has been rendered visually as a three dimensional graph. The rendering can be by other means, including as auditory signal or as a control engine that is designed to change the state of sensors and routing or retrieval engines.

We have made the claim that cA is required in both the notions of

Knowledge Operating System (KOS)
Synthetic Perception System (SPS)

Don Mitchell and Paul Prueitt conceive the KOS as in interactive interface that is responsive to both users actions and changes in machine state. The computer transaction space is ontology with structure and processes. We think generally that the machine state, of a computer transaction space, can be separated into a number of independent finite state engines.

These independent finite state engines can be properly regarded as ontologies only if these engines are constructed to reflect some intrinsic structure. For example the structure of natural language taxonomy can be implemented into a database. XML and other knowledge base type technologies are often considered as a finite state machine. Relational databases are also ontologies.

The conception of a SPS is based on several decades of research and development. Paul Prueitt reports this research in the book manuscript available publicly at the BCNGroup web site. Extensive intellectual properties are contained in this manuscript. Extending this IP in the form of Patent disclosure is the primary focus of OSI and the BCNGroup for the year 2002.

Capitalization of OSI walks hand and hand with this focus. We are seeking $500,000 in pledges to provide capital for Patent development.

The relationship between the knowledge operating system and the synthetic perceptional system was explored in a number of position papers that focused on the issue of a national cyber defense knowledge base. This was the primary focus of OSI during 2001.

For the time being the work on a national cyber defense system based on OSI work has been removed form the public view. However, the relationship between the knowledge operating system and the synthetic perceptional system can be explored in other contexts – not related to cyber defense.

The notion of cA is related to meta-processing and second order cybernetics. The invariance in the data and in data structure is “folded” together to produce aggregation of data into categories. The folding is completed in a single pass topological operator over a in-memory data structure called a structural holonomy.

The structure of the categories is then revealed in various ways as a means to control the state of engines, visualize the information within the data, to otherwise make sense of the “perceived” invariant.

The grounding of computer architecture for the knowledge operating system and the synthetic perceptional system is well established in the experimental literatures in perceptual physics, cognitive science, and the science of memory, awareness and anticipation.

The development of knowledge technology based on the knowledge operating system and the synthetic perceptional system will require a transfer of this grounding in science to the economic engines that control social use of computers and data system. This will take some time.