Minutes: May 18, 2000    (01)

4-6pm, SRI Engineering Building, EK255
By Howard Liu <hliu@verticalnet.com>    (02)

Present    (03)

• Eric Armstrong    (04)
• Mary Coppernoll    (05)
• John Deneen    (06)
• Doug Engelbart    (07)
• Lee Iverson    (08)
• Mary Keeler    (09)
• Sonny Kirkley    (010)
• Pat Lincoln    (011)
• Howard Liu    (012)
• Jack Park    (013)
• Warren Stringer    (014)
• Cynthia Waddell    (015)
• Rod Welch    (016)
• Joe Williams    (017)
• Su-Ling C. Yee    (018)

Welcome Sonny Kirkley, information in place, inc., Indiana. Welcome invited speaker Mary Keeler, researcher at University of Washington.    (019)

News: Doug, Pat, Lee, Eric, Eugene met with SourceForge (i.e. VA Linux), portal website for open source software development    (020)

Lee: Only requirement for project to be open source (i.e. stamped by OSI).    (021)

Want to develop hosting services to large companies that seek hosting service within company    (022)

Interested in better tools for software development    (023)

Keen on allocation of resources    (024)

Can host our development project, or at least track its progress    (025)

Doug or Lee invited to upcoming seminar    (026)

Doug: Possible to invite our whole group?    (027)

Lee: Will investigate.    (028)

Lee: Other news?    (029)

Rod: What knowledge means. Morris and Eric and Rod discussed knowledge management at Intel.    (030)

Impetus: Bellinger working definitions to guide development    (031)

Doug: Need glossary    (032)

Joe: Difference between transcode and translate    (033)

Lee: Zope is installed on bootstrap.org.    (034)

Will announce when available to users    (035)

John Deneen: Gary Baldwin, tech director, GigaSystems    (036)

Berkeley Wireless System    (037)

John will bring in their licensing agreement for reference    (038)

Doug: Effort to connect Academia Sinica    (039)

Doug    (040)

Adobe    (041)

IBM Almaden    (042)

Rod: 0.6 requirements exist    (043)

Lee: Must think through requirements more carefully    (044)

Eric: Narrative is fundamental to object-oriented design    (045)

Find nouns and verbs in narrative    (046)

Lee: Eugene is working on use cases    (047)

Higher level architecture based on Jack and Howard's meeting with Doug    (048)

Jack: Developing architecture is evolving process    (049)

Invited speaker Mary Keeler    (050)

Mary: who is the audience?    (051)

Lee: SRI, interested people attracted by desire to use the OHS    (052)

Mary: How does OHS relate to the DKR?    (053)

Lee: Need means to enable and track collaboration for document preparation, management    (054)

Mary: How does OHS relate to W3C?    (055)

Lee: we want to build on what's available from W3C    (056)

Lee: John Bosak of W3C is interested    (057)

Welcome Cynthia Waddell, San Jose City Manager Dept, law and policy, paper on Disability, compliance officer for American Disability's Act    (058)

Doug: Digital government    (059)

GSA    (060)

Doug: Neil Scott, Stanford, is working on user interfaces for disabled people    (061)

Mary Keeler speaks (cont'd).    (062)

Lee: No need to limit to documents in traditional sense    (063)

Mary: see whiteboard    (064)

Jack: setting context for her discussion to apply    (065)

Doug: What's an ontology    (066)

Mary: an area in classical philosophy that has been abandoned by modern philosophy    (067)

The study of what really is there    (068)

Existence and reality    (069)

Being and existence    (070)

Mary    (071)

Ancients asked what exists    (072)

Moderns gave up questions on existence    (073)

Modern philosophers deal only with semantic relations with represented entities---modern logic    (074)

KR people picked up terms, e.g. "entity," "attribute," from ontology    (075)

Scientist leap to expressed evidence, and take forms for existence    (076)

Should go back to find more evidence to be responsible for the existence level    (077)

Mary: Raw data; types; symbols    (078)

Sequence, not hierarchy: tone, types, token    (079)

Possibility, actuality, probability    (080)

Potentiality, types, symbols    (081)

Blur, lens, image    (082)

Raw data: we consider these as the foundation in the DKR, rather than a yet lower level    (083)

But we don't limit documents to mere text    (084)

Want to get to the symbols    (085)

OHS gets at the symbols    (086)

Flow of information    (087)

Arguments expressed by OHS users are raw data, so will sink to raw data layer    (088)

Will bubble up to symbols again    (089)

Logic    (090)

Peirce    (091)

Lens distorts and help    (092)

Role of logic: Logic is a lens    (093)

Aristotle    (094)

Jack: note, compare Peirce's notion that theories are always improving parallels Doug's notion of the OHS/DKR's evolutionary development    (095)

Categories and relations    (096)

Because of lens, can see things in blur, but also miss things    (097)

Must go back and forget lens focus to see what's there    (098)

"The more precise, the less you see."    (099)

Warren: psychology report confirms that for human perception    (0100)

Think of stages of improving the imperfect lens    (0101)

In intellectual development, we create new lenses also    (0102)

Traditional logic does nothing about existence    (0103)

Peirce: only when we built mechanism to do reality check do we get reliability; just checking validity for relationship between forms is not enough.    (0104)

Validity is soundness for relations of symbols    (0105)

Reliability is soundness for relations of symbols grounded in raw data, or what exists    (0106)

So therefore Conceptual Graph    (0107)

An example of a means to create lens    (0108)

A graphical notation to express logic    (0109)

A lens in itself    (0110)

Other means exist    (0111)

Mary (aside): Peirce liked triads    (0112)

The notion of Generation is expressed; one cannot express the generation notion without three: two won't do it    (0113)

Affector, Affected, and an abstract relation---the act of affecting    (0114)

Note, the abstract relation is artificial, abstract, and not on the same order of things as Affector and Affected.    (0115)

How DKR can be that mechanism to do reality check for reliability    (0116)

The types layer is the lens    (0117)

Raw data (tone) is messy and left out by positivist, but we must consider that layer    (0118)

Possibility, actuality, probability    (0119)

Raw data, e.g. sounds in the room, blur, undifferentiated    (0120)

In top layer: has committed bias, user world view    (0121)

In middle layer: tries to be neutral, though never can be, but keep trying to be better at been neutral    (0122)

Just as a lens can never be perfect    (0123)

The lens maker keeps trying to evolve a better, more neutral lens    (0124)

How does phenomenology fit in?    (0125)

some philosophers wanted to replace Aristotle's metaphysics with phenomenology    (0126)

appearance: if we don't know what things really are, we can deal only with how things appear---positivist    (0127)

We in the DKR take documents as the existence layer    (0128)

Lee: people not deal with what is, but what is reported    (0129)

There's no perfect lens    (0130)

we must keep improving the lens    (0131)

we must keep developing the lens knowing imperfect and will keep improving    (0132)

we use the lens with the knowledge of its imperfection    (0133)

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    (0134)

Actuality middle layer: establish relations    (0135)

Doug: can conceptual graph?    (0136)

Mary: Existential graph lots richer than Conceptual Graphs (CG)    (0137)

Middle layer: impose lens on the blur of potentiality (raw) bottom layer    (0138)

Middle layer: holds the Conceptual Graphs, which translate readily to natural language, impose a knowledge representation (KR)    (0139)

Raw data, types, rules---more familiar terms to KR community    (0140)

Raw: undifferentiated experience---raw data    (0141)

Caution: communication should not be expected to, and need not, result in agreement    (0142)

It isn't a goal to bring different views to the same view    (0143)

Goal: Must enable clear expression of all those (possibly) different views that they can be compared and talked about    (0144)

Collaboration should not just come to agreement,    (0145)

Never should sacrifice diversity to agreement    (0146)

Instead collaboration should facilitate growing the thing to something greater than itself    (0147)

Cyclic operation: imperfect lens always, must keep checking for its imperfections so to improve it    (0148)

Scientists should keep refreshing what they see    (0149)

Eric: Requirements, design, implementation in software development    (0150)

Alternatives    (0151)

If implementation fails, then user can go back to requirements    (0152)

Lee: collaboration means bringing voices together, tool should expose where consensus exists and where disagreement exists. Tool guarantees validity, not reliability    (0153)

Want the system to do the boring logic, so human can do more interesting things    (0154)

Conceptual graph----Alabama. Look for cg community there    (0155)

Cg systems exist    (0156)

Cg just an instrument, just an interface that makes apparent    (0157)

Cg good for machine and human to understand    (0158)

Think of knowledge as structurally richer data    (0159)