| April 24, 2001 | 03 00050 61 01042402 |
Mr. Morris E. Jones
Business Unit Manager
morris.jones@intel.com
Cable Network Operation
Intel Corporation
350 East Plumeria; Mail Stop CHP3-105
San Jose, CA 95124
408 765 8080
| Subject: | Progress on OHS/DKR Project |
Dear Morris,
In our call yesterday, you asked about progress on my association with the OHS/DKR being pursued by Engelbart and SRI. I think I indicated things seem to have ground to a halt.
I have a letter into Jo McKenzie, Curt Carlson's secretary, for a follow up to the meeting with Curt and Pat Lincoln on 010122 about SRI using SDS to learn how to do KM. Curt is SRI's CEO. The latest word is he is busy scrambling for dollars because of the weak economy, so this is not likely to move forward.
Today, received in the mail notice of an actual software program called "Plink" which was produced by a new comer to OHS/DKR. you can click on the links to see what the engineer proposes, and I think it is available to download the source code and the program to try.
My general sense from the email traffic the past few months, and from reading the engineer's product description, is that Plink puts anchors on paragraphs in documents. Doug Engelbart has called for this capability since April of last year, with the aim of improving communication as set out in his letter to the group on October 25, 2000.
Doug's aim is fairly straight forward to strive toward SDS capability, as reported by Eric Armstrong from a meeting he had with Doug on August 24, 2000.
Not-with-standing this objective, for some reason the work product has wound up imitating a procedure Doug's people at SRI created in the 60s for a program called Augment. The result is, what seems like, a link at the end of every para that goes to an anchor at the beginning of every para. This was useful in the 60's as a navigation aid, but doesn't seem needed at this time.
Additionally, there seems to be a lot of effort to identify, or, otherwise associate, links with a variety of parameters, including version control.
Off hand, it seems like this is approximately the linking feature you demonstrated on June 24, 2000 at your place, showing MS Word can create links.....
Please let me know if you see anything promising in Plink, per attachment.
John Deneen has been working on marketing for SDS. His latest effort seems directed toward an event he says is planned for two years hence to demonstrate technology of the future, presumably a KM-based thing. Sounds like the kind of event Intel was planning to support in 1996. I tried to get Dave to promote SDS at that time, but he was not comfortable with the idea. At Asilomar he at least said IT causes problems, and the problems will get worse, but he would not support a solution using SDS. Two years later Dave wanted to use SDS but couldn't get it approved; then, a year later he wrote a letter saying SDS does everything I claimed it did in 1996. The point is that it seems to take a long time to educate people about this thing we call SDS.
John's efforts seem to require convincing the sponsor that SDS is great. He has the SDS record on the web to demonstrate this capbility. However, the latest discussion with John on Sunday, indicated this initiative is not moving very fast, could have something to do with the economy.
Will send you another letter that came in today with a link to a DARPA project in AI that notifies about an "ontology."
Anyway, that is the status. It seems very slow at this time.
Sincerely,
THE WELCH COMPANY
Rod Welch
rowelch@attglobal.net