Re: [unrev-II] Item #2 ThemeScape: Augment + categories = OHS v0.1

From: John J. Deneen (JJDeneen@ricochet.net)
Date: Sun Jun 25 2000 - 13:31:59 PDT

  • Next message: John J. Deneen: "Re: [unrev-II] Item #2 ThemeScape: Augment + categories = OHS v0.1"

    In regards to item 2, ThemeScape 2.0 targeted at enterprise portals and
    business intelligence that is based on Cartia's proprietary Relational
    Topic Mapping (RTM) technology
    (http://www.cartia.com/products/index.html) may be an example of this
    capability?

    ThemeScape automatically reads large numbers of documents, recognizes
    the informational content, and organizes the collection by topic onto a
    visual map. Version 2 makes the technology accessible via the web.

    The underlying technology of ThemeScape has been in development for more
    than four years, beginning at the Department of Energy's Pacific
    Northwest National Laboratory operated by Battelle. With roots in highly
    classified covert operations, early development was directed by the
    United States federal government to help discover patterns and trends
    within hundreds of thousands of intelligence documents. Among other
    operations, the technology played an instrumental role in analyzing
    Iraqi troop movements after the Gulf War. In 1996, Cartia secured
    exclusive rights to the technology and has since redesigned both the
    mapping engine and user interface for use in commercial applications.

    "ThemeScape helps you rise above individual documents to see the big
    picture," said Mark Goros, CEO of Cartia. "The system is designed to
    rapidly convey information with very little reading. In less than 30
    seconds, it can show you what's inside thousands of documents – and
    that's just the beginning. When you search, the results are visually
    organized by topic, right on the map. You can zoom in for greater
    detail, flag interesting documents and forward them to others. It's a
    new way to work with information."...

    This Relational Topic Mapping (RTM) technology is provided a a free
    service by NewsMaps.com. ..."NewsMaps.com can show you in 15 seconds
    what could take hours of reading," said Mark Goros, CEO of Cartia.
    "Everything is graphically organized by topic. You can look at a NewsMap
    of 500 news articles and pick out the hot spots with almost no reading.
    You can see a discussion forum of 10,000 postings and immediately know
    what people are talking about. NewsMaps are fully interactive so you can
    search, zoom in, read individual documents, and even respond to
    newsgroup postings."...

    .... Because documents are simply points on the map, it is possible for
    ThemeScape to show thousands of documents at once without overwhelming
    the user. Zooming into the map reveals greater detail. For any region on
    the map, a click of the mouse pops up a list of documents with related
    content. Pointing to any document title displays a short text summary.
    A mouse click links the user directly to the original document.....

      ThemeScape is composed of three primary components:

       * ThemeServer is the underlying engine that provides content
         aggregation, map generation, and information distribution to end
         users. Each ThemeServer can support multiple ThemePublishers and
         ThemeReaders.
       * ThemePublisher is the control center for ThemeScape. ThemePublisher
         users can harvest information from local directories, Intranet
         servers, or Internet web sites. They can customize map appearance,
         create time-sliced maps based on document dates, and even
         personalize the application with graphics, user controls, and text
         specific to their business.
       * ThemePublisher also includes all of the capabilities of
         ThemeReader. ThemeReader is a desktop client that allows users to
         view and interact with maps created using ThemePublisher. Users can
         work with the entire information landscape in context,
         progressively disclose greater detail, search for topics and
         themes, and view summaries or individual documents.

    Jack Park wrote:

    > Painfully longish. Sorry.
    >
    > From: Gil Regev
    > The problem with categories is that they tend to rigidify
    > the knowledge repository, in which case I wonder how dynamic
    > it will be. I was in a conference on trans-disciplinarity a
    > few months ago and one of the presenters said that the the
    > real threat to trans-disciplinarity was the hardening of
    > categories. I a collaborative software (not Knoware) we did
    > in our lab we moved from relying on categories to find
    > information to using a good search tool. We figured that
    > whatever categorization scheme we could come up with, it
    > would be obsolete pretty fast. Having said that, I totally
    > agree that categories are essential but they should be
    > implemented in a way that preserves the dynamics of the
    > system.In Knoware, relationships have no meaning for the
    > software but they do have meaning to the users. The search
    > tool searches for text in relationships as well as in
    > concepts.Gil
    >
    > Gil has a good point here. In fact, George Lakoff wrote a whole book
    > on this (_Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things_). Gil's point, combined
    > with the meeting yesterday, lead me to ponder a couple of issues,
    > which I shall do outloud, even as I type... My take on the meeting
    > yesterday was this: a lot of back-and-forth without a clearly defined
    > ontology on which the banter was founded. Ultimately, even the
    > definition of "document" was up for grabs, not to mention "node." I
    > believe that we waste an enormous amount of human intellectual energy
    > doing battle while not even on the same page. If that sounds like a
    > criticism of one aspect of yesterday's meeting, it is meant to be so.
    > OTOH, the meeting was, indeed, valuable largely since Eugene did a
    > masterful job of summarizing the Use Case issue and presenting it --
    > something that needed (and continues to be needed) to be done. I
    > respectuflly submit that all discussions be preceeded by the
    > development of a concensus ontology. <side note>achievement of a
    > concensus ontology should be a goal of this list</side note> Gil
    > points out what Lakoff and others have been saying: once you get to
    > the ontological level of "category", concensus begins to fall apart.
    > Gil uses the term "rigidify." That works for me, but there are other
    > points of view as well. At issue is the fact that we all categorize
    > the world in our own way. Production-line education tends to enforce
    > standardization in that arena, but we are still individuals with our
    > own non-linearities and so forth. So, just what IS a mother to do? An
    > OHS/DKR is, at root, a vision of a universal tool for collaborative
    > evolutionary epistemology (that's my take on it, your mileage may
    > vary). To be universal, the implication is that everybody has the
    > chance to contribute (both give and take) with the "appearance" of
    > being on the same page as everyone else. Nice trick, if you can do
    > it. As it turns out, Adam, I, Howard, and Peter Yim all work for a
    > company that is working to render this very capability in the B2B
    > space. VerticalNet uses a carefully crafted ontology (on which Howard
    > works) to serve as an "interlingua" or, shall I say, "page renderer",
    > so that enterprises that have their own individual ontology can be
    > mapped onto the playing field. When Mary Keeler and I spoke at one of
    > the meetings recently, we sketched on the board a 3-layered
    > architecture, all of which comprised the DKR and its gateway to the
    > OHS (which I define here as a desktop, palmtop, whatever, window into
    > the DKR). Let me now sketch (in words) that 3 layer architecture and
    > try to show how it has the opportunity to do precisely what Doug asks
    > for, and allows us to build an ontology that serves as an interlingua
    > to all possible users no matter what they make of women, fire, and/or
    > dangerous things. Peirce's theory of categories has it that there are,
    > fundamentally, three categories: Possibilities -- all the "noise"
    > out there, raw data, written/spoken discourse Actualities -- a
    > mapping of the possibilities; Mary calls this layer a "lens."
    > Probabilities -- what you and I do with the actualities. Possibilities
    > resides at the bottom layer of the architecture. This layer is nothing
    > more or less than a database (archive) of human discourse, recorded
    > experience.<side note>if up-down imagery doesn't work for you,
    > substitute left-right, or whatever</side note> Actualities resides in
    > the middle. This layer serves as a lens, mapping the possibilities
    > into structures (an ontology) that can be viewed, inferenced, debated,
    > and so forth. This layer, IMHO, is the crucial one. To get it right,
    > it must consist of a kind of structure that, at once, serves as a
    > universal ontology (tongue ensconsed firmly in cheek on that one), a
    > platform for reasoning and debate, and a permanent record of the
    > evolving human knowledge base. Whoever builds this layer
    > wins. Probabilities is the top layer in the architecture. It, in fact,
    > is the gateway to the users "out there." Users will have their own
    > mapping tools, perhaps what Doug calls the transcoder. Transcoding
    > can, of course, be accomplished anywhere in the world; at the server
    > (good for wireless), somewhere else in the network, or at the user's
    > client computer. The purpose of transcoding is to allow the user to
    > get or otherwise construct a view that suits his/her
    > tastes/needs/desires. The user should have the ability to directly
    > query actualities, and, through that layer, ask a question like "where
    > did you get that?" and have read-only access directly to the
    > possibilities layer. This capability suggests that each "node" (don't
    > go there, we shall define it eventually) contains pointers into the
    > "document(s)"(hey!, I said don't go there) from which it (the node)
    > was derived. <side note>I believe that transcoding now takes on a
    > larger role; originally it was conceived as a view generation tool.
    > Now, I suspect it also takes the role of ontological mapping</side
    > note> How is this architecture used? Here's a sketch of the
    > appropriate scenario that traces document origination, actualities
    > generation, and user experience. 1- Documents (e.g. articles, news
    > items, books, papers, speaches, etc) are entered into the archive.
    > 2- An engine is turned loose on the archive to perform the task of
    > mapping everything into the actualities layer. (as I said, whoever
    > does this wins). 3- User constructs a view into actualities,
    > perhaps as a query, perhaps as a simple mapping of the knowledge
    > structures contained in actualities to a topic map, for which
    > templates may be available. It doesn't really stop there. Let's
    > pretend user takes exception with something discovered in
    > actualities. 4- User opens a "debate" view after selecting a
    > particular actuality item (node?) 5- DKR creates a new document in
    > possibilities to record the nature of the criticism. 6- DKR alerts
    > subscribers to the debate. 7- DKR maps new document into
    > actuality. From that, we can see that user does NOT have write access
    > to actuality. Only the system does -- and that, of course, is the big
    > issue here. Hesse's Glass Bead Game suggested that there is a Bead
    > Master, one individual that has the ability to do such mappings and
    > control the flow of the epistemological evolution within the system.
    > I tend to think that will not happen, at least in my lifetime. There
    > needs to be a "machine" that does this work, and there is an enormous
    > body of scholarly work being generated that hints of the emergence of
    > this capability. But, given that this capability remains the great
    > "anal sphincter" in our project, the entire architecture I have
    > sketched cannot, by definition, be our Version 1.0. So, we must
    > re-sketch it as something we can do today. Largely, the overall
    > architecture remains the same. We simply do not set out to construct
    > the universal ontology as a middle layer. Rather, we scale it back to
    > some kind of human-generated (perhaps with machine augmentation as
    > that evolves) middle layer, one that represents a concensus ontology
    > for today, but one that is mutible as the concensus evolves
    > (conceptual drift). By constructing the software as a pluggable
    > architecture, we simply plug in software modules as they emerge to
    > enhance the system. <side note>I have a hunch that some activity of
    > the UN, say, the UN/SPSC, will ultimately become the basis for the
    > "universal mapping engine"</side note> Which brings me back (yes,
    > Marth, non-linear types can find their way back) to the original space
    > on which this diatribe is based. The fundamental architecture being
    > espoused within the meeting was that of an engine that mutates
    > original documents by adding links to them. The fundamental approach
    > taken in the architecture I present here is one in which absolutely no
    > modifications are ever performed on original documents. All linkages
    > are formed "above" the permanent record of human discourse and
    > experience. I strongly believe that the extra effort required to avoid
    > building a system that simply plays with original documents will prove
    > to be of enormous value in the larger picture. Thus ends the diatribe.
    > The non-linear one is now leaving the building. While leaving, he
    > wishes to acknowledge that the architecture sketched here has been
    > strongly influenced by Doug (for the big picture), Mary Keeler (for
    > the Peircian vision), Kathleen Fisher (for the knowledge mapping
    > structures, along with John Sowa and others), Eric (for his
    > introduction to IBIS), and Rod (for his web site that tries to keep
    > all this together).
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