Minutes, May 18, 2000 OHS/DKR Meeting at SRI, taken by Howard Liu

In attendance: Su-Ling Yee, Mary Coppernoll, Doug Engelbart, Warren Stringer, Pat Lincoln, Eric Armstrong, Jack Park, Mary Keeler, John Deneen, Rod Welch, Sonny Kirkley, Joe Williams, Howard Liu, Lee Iverson, Cynthia Waddell

Welcomes

Welcome Sonny Kirkley, information in place, inc., Indiana

Welcome invited speaker Mary Keeler, researcher at University of Washington

News

Doug, Pat, Lee, Eric, Eugene met with SourceForge (i.e. VA Linux), portal website for open source software development

Lee: Only requirement for project to be open source (i.e. stamped by OSI)

Want to develop hosting services to large companies that seek hosting service within company

Interested in better tools for software development

Keen on allocation of resources

Can host our development project, or at least track its progress

Doug or Lee invited to upcoming seminar

Doug

Possible to invite our whole group?

Lee

Will investigate

Lee

Other news?

Rob

What knowledge means. Morris and Eric and Rob discussed knowledge management at Intel

Impetus: Bellinger working definitions to guide development

Doug

Need glossary

Joe

Difference between transcode and translate

Lee

Zope is installed on bootstrap.org

Will announce when available to users

John Deneen

Gary Baldwin, tech director, GigaSystems

Berkeley Wireless System

John will bring in their licensing agreement for reference

Doug

Effort to connect Academia Sinica

Doug

Adobe

IBM Almaden

Rob

0.6 requirements exist

Lee

Must think through requirements more carefully

Eric

Narrative is fundamental to object-oriented design

Find nouns and verbs in narrative

Lee

Eugene is working on use cases

Higher level architecture based on Jack and Howard’s meeting with Doug

Jack

Developing architecture is evolving process

Agenda: invited speaker Mary Keeler

Mary: who is the audience?

Lee: SRI, interested people attracted by desire to use the OHS

Mary: How does OHS relate to the DKR?

Lee: Need means to enable and track collaboration for document preparation, management

Mary: How does OHS relate to W3C?

Lee: we want to build on what’s available from W3C

Lee: John Bozak of W3C is interested

Welcome Cynthia Waddell, San Jose City Manager Dept, law and policy, paper on Disability, compliance officer for American Disability’s Act

Doug

Digital government

GSA

Doug

Neil Scott, Stanford, is working on user interfaces for disabled people

Mary Keeler speaks (cont’d)

 

Lee

No need to limit to documents in traditional sense

Mary

see whiteboard

Jack

setting context for her discussion to apply

Doug: What’s an ontology

Mary: an area in classical philosophy that has been abandoned by modern philosophy

The study of what really is there

Existence and reality

Being and existence

Mary

Ancients asked what exists

Moderns gave up questions on existence

Modern philosophers deal only with semantic relations with represented entities---modern logic

KR people picked up terms, e.g. "entity," "attribute," from ontology

Scientist leap to expressed evidence, and take forms for existence

Should go back to find more evidence to be responsible for the existence level

Mary

Raw data; types; symbols

Sequence, not hierarchy: tone, types, token

Possibility, actuality, probability

Potentiality, types, symbols

Blur, lens, image

Raw data: we consider these as the foundation in the DKR, rather than a yet lower level

But we don’t limit documents to mere text

Want to get to the symbols

OHS gets at the symbols

Flow of information

Arguments expressed by OHS users are raw data, so will sink to raw data layer

Will bubble up to symbols again

Logic

Peirce

Lens distorts and help

Role of logic: Logic is a lens

Aristotle

Jack: note, compare Peirce’s notion that theories are always improving parallels Doug’s notion of the OHS/DKR’s evolutionary development

Categories and relations

Because of lens, can see things in blur, but also miss things

Must go back and forget lens focus to see what’s there

"The more precise, the less you see."

Warren: psychology report confirms that for human perception

Think of stages of improving the imperfect lens

In intellectual development, we create new lenses also

Traditional logic does nothing about existence

Peirce: only when we built mechanism to do reality check do we get reliability; just checking validity for relationship between forms is not enough.

Validity is soundness for relations of symbols

Reliability is soundness for relations of symbols grounded in raw data, or what exists

So therefore Conceptual Graph

An example of a means to create lens

A graphical notation to express logic

A lens in itself

Other means exist

Mary (aside):

Peirce liked triads

The notion of Generation is expressed; one cannot express the generation notion without three: two won’t do it

Affector, Affected, and an abstract relation---the act of affecting

Note, the abstract relation is artificial, abstract, and not on the same order of things as Affector and Affected.

How DKR can be that mechanism to do reality check for reliability

The types layer is the lens

Raw data (tone) is messy and left out by positivist, but we must consider that layer

Possibility, actuality, probability

Raw data, e.g. sounds in the room, blur, undifferentiated

In top layer: has committed bias, user world view

In middle layer: tries to be neutral, though never can be, but keep trying to be better at been neutral

Just as a lens can never be perfect

The lens maker keeps trying to evolve a better, more neutral lens

How does phenomenology fit in?

some philosophers wanted to replace Aristotle’s metaphysics with phenomenology

appearance: if we don’t know what things really are, we can deal only with how things appear---positivist

We in the DKR take documents as the existence layer

Lee: people not deal with what is, but what is reported

There’s no perfect lens

we must keep improving the lens

we must keep developing the lens knowing imperfect and will keep improving

we use the lens with the knowledge of its imperfection

Raw data: anything can relate to anything else---we don’t want to establish relations at the raw data layer, i.e. the layer of possibilities

Actuality middle layer: establish relations

Doug: can conceptual graph…?

Mary: Existential graph lots richer than Conceptual Graphs (CG)

Middle layer: impose lens on the blur of potentiality (raw) bottom layer

Middle layer: holds the Conceptual Graphs, which translate readily to natural language, impose a knowledge representation (KR)

Raw data, types, rules---more familiar terms to KR community

Raw: undifferentiated experience---raw data

Caution: communication should not be expected to, and need not, result in agreement

It isn’t a goal to bring different views to the same view

Goal: Must enable clear expression of all those (possibly) different views that they can be compared and talked about

Collaboration should not just come to agreement,

Never should sacrifice diversity to agreement

Instead collaboration should facilitate growing the thing to something greater than itself

Cyclic operation: imperfect lens always, must keep checking for its imperfections so to improve it

Scientists should keep refreshing what they see

Eric: Requirements, design, implementation in software development

Alternatives

If implementation fails, then user can go back to requirements

Lee: collaboration means bringing voices together, tool should expose where consensus exists and where disagreement exists. Tool guarantees validity, not reliability

Want the system to do the boring logic, so human can do more interesting things

Conceptual graph----Alabama. Look for cg community there

Cg systems exist

Cg just an instrument, just an interface that makes apparent

Cg good for machine and human to understand

Think of knowledge as structurally richer data