Jack Park
Street address
Palo Alto, CA Zip


Memorandum

Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2000 07:50:06 -0700

From:   Jack Park
jackpark@verticalnet.com
Reply-To: unrev-II@egroups.com

To:     unrev-II@egroups.com

Subject:   Knowledge Representation 1


At Eric's suggestion, I'm gonna take a shot at it. Thanks also to Paul for contributing. This post starts a new thread. There will likely be a Knowledge Representation 2 thread, and more. The notion I am putting forth is that there will be several aspects to a rigorous discussion of KR, and each aspect is worthy of its own thread. Given that design is often iterative in nature, I would expect that there could be several threads running at the same time.

My personal approach to design tries to combine a top down, big picture approach with a bottom up, fan the flames approach. This post begins the top down discussion.

For a platform for this discussion, I suggest that those who wish to participate take a look at the vu graphs built by Dr. Nancy Glock-Grueneich at...

http://www.higheredge.org/mandala1.ppt

She presented this talk to the EOE group mentioned by Doug yesterday.

The talk presents one complete view of the big picture of what is needed: she calls it a Knowledge Mandala. In particular, she develops a pie chart that depicts the 5 aspects of knowledge. They are:

The first two can be thought to be general in nature. They concern our ways of representing the things of our universe and the way we think about them. Those constitute the real issues in KR and involve the signs, symbols, ontologies, and so forth of the universe we plan to construct. It is at this level that we should be concerned with a uniform ontology, one which satisfies the needs of a (presumably) multicultural DKR <>, and the systematics of our universe.

The second two become more specialized. They concern the ways we make meaning (semantics) out of our experiences, and enumerate our specific experiences. For instance, Rod Welch...

http://www.welchco.com/

...has constructed a powerful system for enumeration of experience.

The last is simply the tools we bring to bear. They are twofold in nature: there are those tools we have at hand, our skills in the form of wetware and our tools in the form of software and so forth -- the routine stuff; and there are those skills we bring to bear on problems for which we have no specific tools, our critical thinking and problem solving skills -- the non-routine stuff.

Viewing knowledge from within this universe, we should be able to pick and choose those aspects of KR we wish to tackle. Given that the DKR is, itself, to be an evolved tool, it does not seem necessary to attack all aspects of KR at once; we must, however, strive (IMHO) to design with evolution in mind.

So, in the big picture, my view is that we need to choose from among the 5 aspects of knowledge denoted by Nancy. To start this thread, I offer the following suggestion:

Start with Cases. Here, we wish to enumerate those use cases we wish to be able to represent with Analytical Forms, Systems Dynamics, and Meaning Constructs.

By starting with Use Cases, we should be able to then -- presumably in other threads -- attack the specific issues in Analytic Forms, Systems Dynamics, and Meaning Constructs, which arise from specific cases.

I very much suspect that the approach I espouse here should be discussed further, so I would propose that Use Cases be the topic of Knowledge Representation 2, a completely different thread, and each of the others as follows:

I imagine that more than one of these will be running at any given time. Those of us blessed with large doses of "fire-em-up-itis" will likely jump into some threads long before their time. So be it.

Remember, according to the thesis I pontificate here, Use Cases will go into a thread titled Knowledge Representation 2. Discussions about, for, against, and other rants on the approach I am suggesting stay here.

Thus spake

Sincerely,


Jack Park
jackpark@thinkalong.com