Steve writes:
Most recently, I worked with other UNM Researchers, Dr's Caudell,
Gilfeather, Lugar, Taha, et al on a project ultimately entitled "Faceted
Ontologies" which was primarily about building, from open source
Intelligence, knowledge structures, developing a normalized model for
them, and providing tools for extracting specific aggregate knowledge
*from* those sources, and very specifically presented *as* a structure,
not simply a list of factoids or simple linear report. The tools from
my former two projects were to be developed further to support the
visualization, as it were, from multiple conceptual viewpoints (aka
"facets" of the ontology). This was a *very* ambitious project and the
basic underpinnings (building formal models of ontologies on top of
Category Theory) were done.
I imagine starting with unstructured graphs of entities and creating
functions. Or in category speak, from objects and edges to precise,
well-typed edges -- morphisms.
Yup... "just like that"...
What is the information agents act upon,
and what are the causal relationships? Can a particular set of agents
and actions be shown to be sound or unsound in the model? More
importantly, the automated means to abductively propose that model.
For example, reject unlikely things like "The Columbian cartel kingpin
arrested the DEA agent."
Yes, we had just begun to try to sort out ideas of inheritence in
ontologies... a much bigger problem that the project was capable of...
the point being to acknowledge that that was one approach (to "subclass
ontologies" as it were).
Dependent type languages like Agda, or functional logic programming
languages like Mercury would seem like good tools -- so that if it
compiles (type-checks), it is sound within the ontology.
Good pointers... it is a stale project (3-4 years now) for me, but
useful if I were to revisit.
Yeah, really diving in to this is complex on many dimensions.
Which of course is what made it interesting! But sadly ultimately
intractable within the timeframe of the funding and within the careers
of several of the researchers (now retired). But I'm hoping some of
the GRAs and PostDocs picked up a bug during that and will give it new
life later.
Not being a creature of Academia so much, it is one of the things I
truly appreciated... the effect of "Academic Lineage"... Advisors of
students who became advisors of students who did interesting things that
could honestly be traced back to seeds planted 2 generations earlier.
- Steve
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