Distributed Knowledge? (01)
1) The interpretation of (some) natural language requires knowledge of what
is being spoken about, and not just grammar and the meaning of individual
words - compare the meaning of "flies" between "Fruit flies like a banana"
and "Time flies like an arrow". Here the knowledge used might be of the
habits of Drosophila or the analogies for time. (02)
2) As a working definition, knowledge is information used intelligently, and
intelligence is inference moderated by knowledge. (To avoid non-circularity,
one might say something like knowledge and intelligence are two aspects of
the same thing, or that knowledge and intelligence are emergent properties
of the combination of inference and information.) (03)
3) If one to read Pierce naively, one might assume that the sign <b>is</b>
the information that is used to invoke the interpretant sign. Perhaps better
that the sign is the trigger for inference and that inference uses knowledge
intelligently to generate the interpretant sign (otherwise how would I
understand the difference between 'Fruit flies' and 'Time flies') (04)
4) Situation awareness is a measure of how well a person understands a
situation. A typical human factors analysis identifies three levels of
situation awareness: perception, comprehension and projection.
- perception: I see a man with a sword and he is waving it
- comprehension: the man is preparing to use the sword
- projection: in the near future, the man will attack me.
The transition from one level to the next depends on (background) knowledge
and intelligence of the person. (05)
5) The OASIS-fp6 project developed a message - the Tactical Situation Object
(TSO) to share situation awareness for the emergency services across
European borders. Part of the function of the message is to describe the
situation through a code or codes (this allows automatic translation into
different languages). Analysis of existing codes showed that all code
systems were service and nationality specific, with only limited
commonality. It was suggested that this was because the code reflected an
analysis of the situation by the organisation creating the codes. That is,
the code encodes the comprehension level of situation awareness. For
example, a fire in a thatched cottage requires the same response from an
ambulance as a fire in any other domestic building, but for the fire
service, this escalates the incident from a two pump to a six pump (i.e.
major) fire since the roof is flammable. For example, a fire in an
automotive in a forest in Spain in summer ranks as potentially a major
incident since it may spread to the forest. (06)
It is not practical to create a single, unified set of event codes at the
comprehension level for all the services in all nations for all
circumstances - even if there was agreement on the set of codes needed, it
would require each service to understand how the other services evaluated
the incident, and without the data (in the TSO) they based their evaluation
on, this would not be possible. (07)
Therefore the event code was replaced by a set of five event-factor codes
(scale, type, actor, location-type and environment-type) at the perception
level - i.e. they could be elicited from an untrained observer. This will
allow each service to generate their own comprehension level code, according
to their own procedures. (08)
6) The implication is that the TSO transmits only the information relating
to perception, and does not transmit the knowledge and intelligence to
convert the perception level information into comprehension level
information. Conversely, to transmitted comprehension level codes that are
to be understood in the same way, either
a) the recipient must have the same knowledge and intelligence as the
sender, or
b) the information and inference rules of the sender must be sent along with
the codes. (09)
THEREFORE
On the semantic web, to share common understanding between different
cultures (national cultures, business cultures, youth/greybeard cultures,
etc.) requires either
a) we restrict ontologies to the perception level, or
b) we need to ensure that the recipient has the same knowledge base and
intelligent processing that the sender has, since otherwise they will infer
different facts from the same information, and thereby have a different
understanding of the situation. (010)
Note: in b, the interpretation of "same" as "identical" is probably too
strong, but I don't know the extent to which it can be weakened. However, in
practice, I would guess that (a) is the only practicable option. (011)
One might also observe that to base everything on a single, comprehensive
ontology, one would need to be omniscient. (012)
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