[peirce-l] Re: Conceptual Structures Tool Interoperability Workshop

[Steven Ericsson Zenith]

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 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 angry -- indignantly, self-righteously angry -- to go into a library and see someone sitting at an information desk, waiting for people to come up with questions when all such time and resource-wasting jobs could be eliminated at any time by nothing more difficult to engineer than an automated system of computer query and retrieval, and this, he believed, was generally true of librarial functions. It struck me as funny at the time that he had no awareness of the enormously complex system of practices,developed both by librarians and by users of books, that were represented in the individuals sitting or standing at those desks that in fact made them vastly more efficient for the needs they served than any computational system that could have been implemented at that time. And since then I have come to think that the remarkably rapid development of the new technologies on the technical side on up through the latter part of the 90's, at least, reinforced the worst tendencies of the otherwise admirable idealism that was and still largely is to be found among people who have come into this from the computer side to regard the problem of the user's perspective, as given by pre-existing practices, as something to be solved by someone who never had such a problem to begin with but who is in possession of a lot of ingenious solutions to a lot of problems already solved that seem at least somewhat similar to it. Even now I see a lot of discussion of technical solutions to technical problems but not much realistic discussion of the realities of practices that are in desperate need of reform as well as technological enablement. Joe Ransdell ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gary Richmond" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Peirce Discussion Forum" <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu> Cc: "Aldo de Moor" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, March 26, 2006 8:15 AM Subject: [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 affect individual and communities of users and society. This is not the main focus of this workshop (although certainly not ignored), but is addressed in much more detail in the first two projects described above. It will also get more attention in future editions of CS-TIW. This year, your invited talk on "Philosophy Meets Design" should at least help us keep our "summum bonum" in sight :-) Best wishes, Aldo PS Feel free to forward my reply to your list. --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com