Armstrong Consulting
1200 Dale Avenue #100
Mountain View, CA 94040


Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 16:45:48 -0800


From:   Eric Armstrong
eric.armstrong@eng.sun.com
Reply-To: unrev-II@egroups.com

To:     unrev-II@egroups.com

Subject:   Tuesday's meeting

Thanks for looking into that, Adam.

Good to know that I hadn't just missed something obvious.

Consistent terminology makes sense. It's the only tool we have to attack the problem with.

I am totally in love with:

HyperScope -- the viewer

HyperDocument -- the thing viewed (a "slice" taken from a repository)

Open HyperDocument Repository -- where they are kept

OHS: HyperScope + OHR + HyperDocuments

At the moment, I continue to reserve the term "DKR" for future developments. Jack and Howard are constructing the ontology for the OHS, and we need that. But later on they are going to want to build bigger and better ontologies to solve even deeper problems (yes?).

I know that the OHS as currently envisioned will solve a lot of problems, and provide us with the ability to carry on intelligent, far-ranging discussions that can eventually "coalesce" to reach one or more conclusions.

I'm not yet convinced, however, that it will give Jack and Howard *all* the tools they need to play with bigger and better ontologies -- to construct them, operate on them, and use them to deal with information in meaningful ways. Much as I want to see the capability come into existence, it is not all clear to me that the current design will be capable of doing that.

So I tend to use DKR for that still-nebulous thing we hope to get to sometime downstream. In many ways, it is a label for my ignorance -- for all the things I have to understand about what we need, and about how to provide them. (The difficulty I have in following ontology-related discussions convinces me that the system I understand (the OHS) is unlikely to qualify as a DKR.)

[BTW: When I reply to your messages, the automatic quoting feature does not seem to work. Perhaps because it is in HTML form? Or do you use IE, and it is doing something that is incompatible with Netscape's quoting mechansim?]

Sincerely,



Eric Armstrong
eric.armstrong@eng.sun.com