Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 09:03:07 -0700
| From: | Sandy Klausner |
|
klausner@cubicon.com Reply-To: unrev-II@egroups.com |
| To: | unrev-II@egroups.com |
| Subject: | Towards an Atomic Data Structure |
[Responding to Rod Welch's letter on April 23, 2000 commenting on Eric Armstrong's letter on same date, as follows...]
There has been consideration for the DKR team to create a tool to help software engineering. The things you describe today seem like they might be useful for that task, but also help other tasks, as well. Does this suggest that augmenting "intelligence", which you mention elsewhere, provides an underlying capability that can help everyone do almost anything a little better?
The DKR team has identified two distinct levels of information abstraction that require development to achieve the group's goals. The underlying abstraction appears to be based upon a general system cognitive model based upon deterministic behavior that can machine execute. This technology model could be used as a foundation to design and implement "An interactive tool for discussion and *deliberation* that records decisions and their rationales in a way that allows the knowledge gained in the process to be applied to future projects."
To fully achieve the interactive tool goal, the fundamental capabilities in the underlying technology model must include a robust way to traverse, edit, read, and write untyped text.
In addition, there needs to be a way to intelligently analyze the text in interesting ways to determine fundamental semantics in the symbolic patterns and link these patterns to other passages to anywhere in the web. This text may be linked to typed atomic data that may itself be composed into typed molecular data representing pictures, sounds, and other rich multimedia information. All this information may itself exist as part of a data structure within a domain object within a system.
The SGML community has a long history of developing ways to markup documents to capture semantic knowledge embedded in strings. As processing requirements become more sophisticated, new ways of managing this complexity need to be developed. One possible solution is to move to a clear document model. This model separates concerns by parsing the clear text from the markup information. The clear text is parsed into a collection of linked character nodes, while one or more composite structure processors maintain position and range links into the clear text collection. Each processor may have specialized behavior to analyze and hold semantic information on format, organization, navigation, narrative, reference, graphic control, publication, and filters. The model must be able to allow clear text editing while automatically maintaining the processor links into the clear text collection. Such a model would be able to manage the requirements for a robust DKR environment.
Cubicon Technologies Corporation
Sandy Klausner, CTO
klausner@cubicon.com
(408) 867-1100