[peirce-l] Re: Conceptual Structures Tool Interoperability Workshop
Joe, Ben, List, I agree with Joe that Ben should be at the ICCS workshop! Finding your discussion of considerable interest and thinking that Aldo de Moor might as well, I wrote the following: to him (I'd forwarded Aldo most of that earlier exchange, not reproduced below). Hi, Aldo, FYI, Ben Udell replied to Ransdell's query. I've also attached to the bottom of this post Joe's brief reply where he wonders whether we are posing the right questions in the CfP, and that while there is something important happening in this he expresses as well a certain feeling of distrust about it.as being, perhaps, a form of technocracy. Technocracy? What do you think? Best, Gary Here is Aldo's email which he said I could forward to Peirce-l. Dear Gary, A valuable discussion on Peirce-l. Interestingly, we had a similar discussion in the Community Informatics community recently. My being in between the hardcore technological and soft philosophy/community development research communities, it is difficult to explain the exact point satisfactorily to everybody. I will give it a try, though. What we are after is the _opposite_ of promoting technocracy. Technologies both afford and constrain behavior. At the moment, technocratic developers have little understanding of the often subtle requirements of (communities of) users of their technologies, and how these technologies can satisfy or hinder the realization of these needs. On the other hand, philosophy and community researchers often insufficiently try to inform technology and systems developers of their useful insights, even though this is essential for technology to become more appropriate and legitimate. Our mission is, simply put, to build bridges between the technologists and the voices of the community. To make this concrete, I will list three projects I am currently involved in. - A workshop on Community Informatics at the hardcore OTM conference: http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/fedconf/index.html?page=cominf2006cfp Goal of this workshop is exactly to move away from a technocratic approach to technology development, a goal reflected in the definition of Community Informatics adopted by the Community Informatics Research Network (http://www.ciresearch.net/) and used in the CfP: Community Informatics, also known as community networking, electronic community networking, community-based technologies or community technology refers to an emerging set of principles and practices concerned with the use of Information and Communications Technologies for personal, social, cultural or economic development within communities, for enabling the achievement of collaboratively determined community goals, and for invigorating and empowering communities in relation to their larger social, economic, cultural and political environments. - The development of an, applied philosophical if you will, methodology for the diagnosis of socio-technical systems to better balance community requirements with supporting ICTs. See for an explanation and case study: A. de Moor and M. Aakhus (2006). Argumentation Support: From Technologies to Tools. Communications of the ACM, 49(3):93-98. http://www.starlab.vub.ac.be/staff/ademoor/papers/cacm06_demoor_aakhus.pdf - The CS-TIW 2006 workshop being discussed on your list. http://www.iccs-06.hum.aau.dk/tools.htm I can imagine that for Peirce-l members not aware of the ICCS context of this workshop the wording of the call may lead to some confusion. This project indeed has more of a technological (though not technocratic!) focus. The goal of CS-TIW is a very practical one: many Conceptual Structures representation and reasoning tools have been developed over the years, including a whole range of Conceptual Graphs and Formal Concept Analysis tools. Even though these tools support very interesting _formal knowledge_ operations, they do not talk to each other, nor to information systems out there in the real world that could benefit from their functionalities. The goal of the workshop is simply to (1) better understand why these tools do not interoperate and (2) what practical solutions could be developed to address this problem. The rough, narrow definition of a knowledge system is thus a combination of conceptual structures tools and the information systems on which they operate, resulting in more effective and efficient knowledge representation and analysis processes. Getting our technological act together is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for developing more enlightened information and knowledge systems. Of course, we shouldn't stop at just improving formal knowledge representation and analysis. Once we have a better understanding of the technical and organizational interoperability problems focused on in the CS-TIW workshop, we can more systematically examine the relationships of conceptual structures tools with society at large. The more important questions therefore revolve around how knowledge systems
[peirce-l] Re: Conceptual Structures Tool Interoperability Workshop
Joe, list, JR wrote: I googled the term knowledge management and immediately found a very informative website, very intelligently structured as an answer to the question of what knowledge management is. Here is the URL: http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/knowledge+management Very informative, particularly taken together with your testimony, which is most helpful, Ben. Yet I can't shake a certain feeling of distrust about it.as being, perhaps, a form of technocracy. --end Joe, I guess it can be looked that way and the distrust is healty, but one can also think of it asestablishing a set of superpersonal habits. A sign that has a function. CSP: It appears to me that the essential function of a sign is to render inefficient relations efficient, -- not to set them into action, but to establish a habit or general rule whereby they will act on occasion. CP 8.332 --- In that case the construction of the sign involves the execution of self control. I think it is here that Claudio's Nonagons may play a healty role. In EE one puts the vaguely defined 'knowledge system'. I guess that EV adresses the technological side of the matter and VV the sociological or whatever import the system is imagined to must have beside the strictly functional one. Etc. If used in this way the nonagon can safeguard for to much of an apparatski character of the system, amongst others. At the very least a nonagon would establishes the habit of addressing the different aspects that have to be taken into account. But I agree withe skeptics that the way in which to proceed with the Nonagons is althougether clear. It mediates between what is and what might become only in a very loose way. And would probably need other methods as a complement like maybe the trikons of Gary R or the proto signs of Sarbo and Farkas or still something I do not know of. It would be great if at Arisbee a node is added in which the different tools/methods that are around can be presented. Auke van Breemen --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: Conceptual Structures Tool Interoperability Workshop
Auke, Thank you for your interesting comments and for the quite pertinent Peirce quotation reminding us "that the essential function of a sign is to render inefficient relations efficient." There seems to me to be a great power in that notion both generally in semeiotic, but also and in particular as it relates to "knowledge representation" and "knowledge management" in our era of tremendous electronic advances leading, for example famously, to the WWW (and its possible evolution as a Semantic Pragmatic Web), virtual community development, etc., and thus to such problems as interoperability both in the narrow (technical) as well as in the more social (pragmatic) sense (Aldo's 'hard' 'soft'). As a supplement to the URL Joe supplied for "knowledge management" I'd like to add several others, all from Wikipedia. First, I would like to suggest that ICCS and CGs are more closely associated with "knowledge representation" than with "knowledge management" while the two over-lap to some extent. knowledge representation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_representation knowledge management: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_management Of course conceptual graphs (CG)--which figure along with formal concept analysis (FCA) prominently at ICCS--are "merely" a form of Peirce's existential graphs (EG) but have in recent years begun to be employed in the development of "ontologies" (which term as used in computer science has a separate meaning from the philosophical one, referring to the modeling of a specific 'domain' in the world for use in libraries, data bases, etc.) conceptual graphs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_Graphs ontology (computer science): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(computer_science) This use (or some would say, misuse) of philosophical language has not been left uncriticized within the KR community itself . See, for example, Peter Ohrstrom's paper "What Has Happened to Ontology" (ICCS05 proceedings) which argues, among other things, that the idea of "ontological commitment" has not been thoroughly analyzed in CS, and that while it is assumed that 'ontologies' as used in modern KR are 'simply' an information practice "that they do in fact presuppose some rather specific, but hidden ontological commitments" and that "a lack of awareness [of these hidden commitments] may turn out to be rather problematic." Those keenly interested in the role of philosophical analysis within these "virtual worlds" have a good amount of important work to do now and in the future. I am pleased to report that within ICCS at least there seems to be a growing respect for the sort of difficult questioning of assumptions which would seem to continue to be an important part of a philosopher's work even--and perhaps especially--in our era of global communications. Gary Auke van Breemen wrote [in part]: Joe, I guess it can be looked that way and the distrust is healty, but one can also think of it asestablishing a set of superpersonal habits. A sign that has a function. CSP: It appears to me that the essential function of a sign is to render inefficient relations efficient, -- not to set them into action, but to establish a habit or general rule whereby they will act on occasion. CP 8.332 --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: Conceptual Structures Tool Interoperability Workshop
Dear Gary, Auke -- Which suggests to me the related notion that the consequences of actions involving objects aresometimes more efficiently determined by thinking them through with signs. Signs are tools for forcasting the outcomes of events -- affording all those who have them a great evolutionary advantage over those who do not. Jim Piat Gray Richmond wrote: Auke,Thank you for your interesting comments and for the quite pertinent Peirce quotation reminding us "that the essential function of a sign is to render inefficient relations efficient." --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: Conceptual Structures Tool Interoperability Workshop
Gary, Auke, and Ben: My initial response was due in part to having first encountered the idea of knowledge management in contexts in which the knowledge managers were in fact what I regard as aspiring technocrats, namely, university administrators who were -- at least in that context -- concerned primarily about university property rights as regards both copyright and patents considered as economic assets of universities. It is possible that they were also concerned with the sort of thing Ben described, but if so it was not readily apparent, and my acquaintance with university life suggests to me that they probably were not, in which case it may be that knowledge management as practiced in academia is a different sort of thing than knowledge management as practiced elsewhere. (I say as practiced elsewhere, not as conceived elsewhere; for it is a peculiarity of academic life that the theorizing that goes on within it is rarely applied to it. Thus this is consistent with the fact --- supposing it is a fact -- that the theorists of knowledge management will often or even mostly be found in universities.) In any case, in the context in which I first heard of knowledge management, those who talked from what seemed to be that perspective were clearly thinking of the universities as knowledge factories the chief products of which are the cognitive products of faculty research (publications, inventions, and methods of material production), and the argumentation going on was couched chiefly in terms of economic profit and loss, e.g. questions about electronic rather than paper based publication were being settled on the basis of economic calculations. I notice that Aldo seems to be thinking primarily in terms not of the knowledge systems of corporations, though, be they commercial or governmental or academic, but rather of communicational communities and their communicational technologies, with the general aim of addressing the distinctive problems involved in understanding how to solve the technological problems that would enable them to communicate more efficiently and effectively as communities, while recognizing that focus on the technology leaves unaddressed the questions that might be raised about them as regards the efficiencies and effectiveness of the practices that these technologies are designed to enable and subserve, which involve considerations of a quite different sort -- considerations about goals and motivations and what sort of practices are important or valuable in view of those considerations and what these practices are actually like. I think he correctly diagnoses the cause of my uneasiness about the possible technocratic implications of the development of knowledge management as a field of study; for it is indeed typical of the technocratic mentality to think of the potentialities of the technological revolution purely in terms of how to gain control over the technology itself -- how to position themselves at strategic positions of use of the new instruments -- in order to gain control of the practices they enable and inform. I will take his word for it that he is also quite aware that getting our technological act together is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for developing more enlightened information and knowledge systems. It seems to me -- and Aldo might agree -- that the reason why the idealism of the information technology revolution, which was so evident and inspiring up to the time of, say, the commercialization of the web, has undergone such rapid deflation in recent years is due to not keeping enough focus on the problem of learning what the needs really are which actually motivate people to engage in the practices they already engage in but which serve them poorly or hardly at all. When I first got interested in this sort of thing myself and perceived (vaguely of course) that there might be something important in the offing in the development of computer networking -- this was at the time when Steve Jobs was about to start marketing his beautiful black box, labeled as the interpersonal computer because it was to establish itself on the basis of being designed ab initio as an instrument of communication rather than computation -- I discovered that there were really only two significantly large groups of persons in academia that were fully aware of and enthusiastic about this: on the one hand, there were the computer professionals, and on the other, the librarians. With exceptions, administrators had no interest in the topic nor were there a significant number of the established or about to be established faculty, and this continued to be true up until about the time the web became available with a graphical interface in the mid-90's. The difference between the two factions that were interested, though, was a sharp one, epitomized in the attitude of a friend of mine in the computer world with whom I was then collaborating who spoke about how it made him
[peirce-l] Re: Conceptual Structures Tool Interoperability Workshop
Dear Joe et al., Let me add a computer science POV here. I think that Joe is right in almost every respect. However, "Knowledge Management" is a widely used term and the work in this area is not entirely academic - IOW, there is a lot of work that has been developed independent of Universities. Indeed, I think there is a good case that in this area most of the work has happened outside of Universities. Most large corporations undertake knowledge management in their IT departments and they are served by an array of knowledge management solutions providers that serve that market. Occasionally, those ventures utilize university research but more often the technologies and the associated theory is developed in house. I am confident that somewhere in IBM there is a "knowledge management" research group that focuses on the issues as they pertain to the "Fortune 500" companies. I am confident also that Oracle and Microsoft have research groups that focus on these areas - and I do mean research groups in the real sense of the word. True, the visible developments are often faddish and driven by perceived needs in the market - and all concerned like to dominate the concept space by introducing new and often irrelevant notions in the cause of product differentiation and branding. Ultimately the research is presented to the world by the marketing departments of these organizations. Without checking, my guess is that the Lotus division of IBM with its "Notes" product and Documentum - with their product of the same name, still dominate that field. SAP would be another company where I would expect to find products and work ongoing. In addition, there is a continuous variety of start-ups here in Silicon Valley that attempt to offer new solutions - and I myself have been a part of several of them over the years. More than one of those dealt with new theories of knowledge management - but that theory has to get beaten down in the cause of meeting market needs and simplifying the message. Within Computer Science there is a very real effort to address the questions - but Computer Science is a very inevitably a commercial endeavor. This conference appear to be a manifestation of some of the things going on in CS currently. Unfortunately, the exposure in computer science to semeiotics and those foundational issues is limited in my experience. Computer scientists tend to see the world in terms of computational logic and very few of us are tackling the foundations of logic. Human Factors (the CS term for some of these issues) as it relates to Knowledge Management is a field well turned but whose results are measured by the success or failure of products in the field that have prematurely attempted to apply the results (and so the contributions the research can make is now dismissed). AI as it relates to Knowledge Management has taken it's knocks too. David Gelernter at Yale, whom I have worked with in the past, (I am thinking of his Life Streams) and others have proposed a variety of new models over the years. In variably someone turns them into products, most of which never make it. The streets of Silicon Valley is paved with now worthless patent IP in the area. The whole thing is limiting really because those that do actually succeed (Google, for example) are locked into a market dynamic that ultimately limits innovation no matter how hard they try to make real breakthroughs. True innovation happens rarely, advances are mostly incremental and stay within market and shareholder expectations. Lamentably, there is - in fact - little room for real theoretical advances in the face of "market inertia" and "it ain't broke." I would say that Knowledge Management is still a space that is interesting and begging for something new and startling from an investors point of view. However, most successful available solutions, such as Notes or Documentum do in fact mirror established best practice, often provided by Library sciences. There are even a few extinct technologies - like expert systems - that were supposed to solve the Knowledge Management problem but failed. Existing solutions are often considered "good enough" and any new idea has to address the ROI question before it can get funded. For many, the last great step forward in Knowledge Management is XML. Before that, relational databases which still today are not really using the Codd relational model for the most part, as far as I can tell. Life Streams is a good example of an apparently good new idea with fatal flaws in practice. It increases your litigation liability. Pragmatics like that are often not appreciate in University research. BTW: A "tool interoperability" workshop is not something that I would expect anyone here to find interesting - even if the tools do deal with "conceptual structures" - which means, in this case, schemas and their instances. With respect, Steven Joseph Ransdell wrote: Gary, Auke, and Ben: My initial response was
[peirce-l] Re: Conceptual Structures Tool Interoperability Workshop
Steven Ericsson Zenith wrote:
BTW: A "tool interoperability" workshop
is not something that I would
expect anyone here to find interesting - even if the tools do deal with
"conceptual structures" - which means, in this case, schemas and their
instances.
Steven,
I'm giving the keynote address for this workshop do find issues
of conceptual structures tools of considerable interest (especially as
these relate to other interoperability concerns, as they most certainly
do--and indeed to concerns of entire "communities of interest"). So, I
would like to know why you see "conceptual structures" as conceived by,
for example, Sowa and de Moor (and others), as reduced "in this case"
to "schemas and their instances." In short, why do you say that tool
interoperability should be philosophically uninteresting?The tools
involved do relate to conceptual structures (Sowa's CGs == Peirce's
EGs for example). Why shouldn't the scheme-instance structure to which
you see it reducedallow for conceptual structures of some
philosophical interest for someone ("anyone")?
Gary
---
Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
