| Date: Fri, 02 Jun 2000 22:58:17 -0700 | 04 00067 61 00060201 |
Robert E. Kent
rekent@ontologos.org
Ontologos
http://www.ontologos.org/
| Subject: | Request for Ontology Examples |
This afternoon,
Jack Park
with VerticalNet referred your web site for
supporting knowledge management. Jack and I are working
with Doug Engelbart, as part of Doug's seed team to develop a Dynamic Knowledge
Repository (DKR). Pat Lincoln and Lee Iverson with SRI are also supporting the
project.
The aim of the DKR project is to improve productivity of general knowledge work by augmenting human intelligence, as reported on April 23, 2000.
Your work seems like it can contribute.
I spent about an hour this evening reviewing your work, and notice considerable effort to develop procedures for organizing information and providing structure. But it is unclear how to apply your methodology for handling daily working information like writing a letter, reading a book, attending a meeting, performing an experiment, fixing the lawn mower, buying a computer, organizing a heart transplant, and so on.
Can you explain or provide an example that shows the level of effort, skill and time required to use your methodology? Is it accomplished entirely by tools/code, or would a doctor, lawyer, mechanic, engineer, manager need to learn new tasks they are not now doing that will take an additional block of time in order to benefit from the capability you have in mind?
Can you provide a scenario that illustrates the benefit derived from using the methods contemplated on your web site.
For example, a library that organizes books might be improved using your tools. Or, the DKR project might be aided by organizing the record of daily work in meetings, calls, work product and so on that shows the evolution of ideas, which in turn reveals a development opportunity that is not evident absent awareness of a bounded chronology.
Jack seems to indicate that your work supports, or may one day support, processing information to generate or otherwise assign, and possibly manipulate, relationships that might loosely be called "knowledge," as occurs in the human mind.
We are both thinking about the prospect of mathematical modeling of text, perhaps computational linguistics, to help identify chronologies based on subject content, i.e., context, and possibly perform logical operations to suggest inferences that aid human reasoning in maintaining alignment of conduct with objectives, requirements and commitments, also, called by some authorities, "original sources."
I realize everybody is busy these days, but if you could take moment to comment it would be very helpful.
Thanks.
Sincerely,
THE WELCH COMPANY
Rod Welch
rowelch@attglobal.net