All Ontologgers, (01)
First, Steve, this is my further reply to your email below, of
yesterday, in which you had said: (02)
> I'm a little concerned that this Ontology Chemistry theme is more of a
> grand project/product proposal rather than a topic for consensus and
> articulation of a position on the part of the ontology community,
> which is the nature of the Ontology Summit. (03)
I start slightly more tangibly addressing that concern in the expansions
of points 2 and 5 below, where there are important points which do
indicate some of the extreme suitability of the project as an Ontolog
and even an Ontology Summit and Grand Challenge activity. (04)
-------------------------------------------------- (05)
Now, for all Ontologgers, I take Matthew Lange's timely suggestion on
the Forum yesterday (Thanks again Matthew!) and offer a preliminary set
of 5 brief pointers to huge areas. (06)
But the whole elephant being so enormous, I take the liberty of further
expanding each of those 5 points into a further 5 points within it. (07)
The outcome of any such validly-Procrustean exercise is always
incomplete coverage and usually distortion of the issues, whether of
their substance or of their number or of their interrelationships. But
it is usefully indicative of the general nature and range of those
issues. (08)
A preliminary word of warning seems called for. You couldn't be blamed
if you jumped to the conclusion that I might have got a bit carried
away, considering the variety and scope of those 5x5 points. So I must
tell you a little story, with a wise word from Bill Gates in it: (09)
Late 1996 / early 1997 (if I remember correctly), Bill Gates was in
Johannesburg and gave a public talk, also televised to us in Cape Town.
As you will recall, around that time the NC or Network Computer held the
high expectations of the anti-MSDOS crowd (as does the Cloud now). So
he was predictably asked what he thought about that possible menace to
his market dominance. He concluded his reply thus: (010)
> [BG] After all, we've got an 800 million user base [or some such large
> number], they've got zero. And a zero user base is great, it allows
> you to fantasize." (011)
As you can see, that made an indelible impression on me. (I was already
talking a lot about Metaset.) So let me assure you that I have applied
every anti-fantasy check I could lay my hands on, and many, ancient and
modern, have been amply available during the subsequent 15 years. I now
look forward to yours! (012)
-------------------------------------------------- (013)
1. The universal yet simple concept of the suggested Ontology
Chemistry Grand Challenge target product, the Application Operating
System (AOS). (014)
1.1. The AOS as universal event-driven UI and agent (basically
peer-to-peer) (015)
1.2. All events reduced to one canonical pattern of transaction
design and execution (016)
1.3. The agent as complete maintainer of the entity address space,
entity identities and interrelating facts, with all the usual
industrial-strength data-management qualities. (017)
1.4. One single interagent and intertask interface / message
structure (018)
1.5. The agent itself reflectively ontology-driven and self-managed,
thanks to the high genericity everywhere, (019)
-------------------------------------------------- (020)
2. How the AOS leverages ontology, but only after some key
adjustments to conventional conceptions of ontology. (021)
2.1. Ontology enables and defines this architecture's novel
Separation of Concerns. (022)
2.2. Context as a well-defined and key notion. (Object-Orientation
corrected and absorbed.) (023)
2.3. The emerging canonical component market, radically plug-and-play
and agile, all in close accordance with the Chemistry metaphor. (024)
2.4. How the design of the envisaged target AOS release is
formalized, and how it can initially dispense with conventional
algebraic formalization (and how Homer helped a mere programmer think it
up). (025)
2.5. (Very tentatively from that layman:) Towards building on
algebraic formalization of any kind. (026)
-------------------------------------------------- (027)
3. Some originally unexpected but clear, central and key
consequences of the well-founded new architecture (028)
3.1. The AOS concept (though not yet my present Metaset coding!) is
totally architecture-canonicalized. That will greatly leverage the
intrinsic evolvability and migratability of all canonical applications
within the new ecosystem. (029)
3.2. The extreme "least privilege" outcome naturally and simply
dispels many common code-security loopholes. (030)
3.3. Most other security issues catalogued in the Carnegie-Mellon
"Taxonomy of Operational Cyber Security Risks" are more tractable in the
AOS-managed environment, and intrinsically so, not patched-on. (031)
3.4. A much-pruned universal basic operating system comes within
reach. (032)
3.5. In due course the new ecosystem will renew interest in a
so-called Trusted Computing platform, while yet enhancing freedom (033)
-------------------------------------------------- (034)
4. Predictable economic and social consequences, and why education
in general needs the Homeric complexity-facing perspectives (035)
4.1. All canonical applications will be better integrated where
required, more interoperable elsewhere, and everywhere profit from their
more automatic or user-driven quasi-automatic evolvability. (036)
4.2. The simplicity and naturalness of life within the new ecosystem
will be such a contrast with the present complicated and frustrating
chaos. So legacy application owners will tend to want to migrate to it
asap. The ecosystem's intrinsically-natural functioning and facilities
will make conversion and migration of data, procedures and habits far
less of an issue. "It is not change that repels, but confusion." (037)
4.3. The ecosystem being basically a general-purpose marketplace, all
business, governance and Civil Society institutions will travel better
on the new Homeric devices. (That's a wording derived almost directly
from some details in The Odyssey.) (038)
4.4. The strengthening of rights, responsibilities and values will be
made easier by the removal of many practical constraints and
preoccupations due to ubiquitous artificial complications in present
setups. That will help the expansion and spread of effective
compassion. (039)
4.5. Complexity most meaningfully becomes the natural background of
the intellectual universe, enhancing humility and respect while also
helping bring its immense potential more within universal reach. (040)
-------------------------------------------------- (041)
5. Some considerations arising with regard to a Grand Challenge
competition (042)
5.1. A Boot or Seed AOS is a well-definable concept and of the right
scale for a Grand Challenge target, whether merely proof-of-concept or
released into the wild or something inbetween. (043)
5.2. Almost any one of points 3.2 through 3.5 above by itself could
be the basis of unlocking enough funding from relevant government or
business entities. (The points in 4, though very real, would tend at
this stage to seem blatant pie-in-the-sky.) (044)
5.3. But I still have to convey to you convincingly how everything
conspires to make the target perfectly amenable to being attained within
a timeframe suited to a Grand Challenge. (045)
5.4. Fundamentally, it is the ontological (and epistemological and
otherwise philosophical) appositeness of the architecture and future
ecosystem that will guarantee the success of the project that the
Ontolog Forum could surely distill out of the many further discussions
that could easily fit in between now and Summit 2012 time. (046)
5.5. I have no intention of asserting any IPR on anything in any of
the above. (Besides, I have long insisted that is all really very
mainstream!) Moreover, the AOS even comprises a much-improved
infrastructure for Open Source, of itself as of any other
architecture-canonical product. (And yet it will open some most
relevant doors to certain specific forms of IP definition and
management.) (047)
-------------------------------------------------- (048)
I will be led further by any response from you. (049)
Thank you for all the stimuli thus far. (050)
Christopher (also thanking especially Homer but many other teachers and
colleagues too) (051)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Christopher Spottiswoode" <cms@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <steve.ray@xxxxxxxxxx>; "[ontolog-forum] "
<ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, October 25, 2011 2:12 PM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Some Grand Challenge proposal ironies (052)
Steve, (053)
You quite rightly raise that concern. And it sits well with the subject
of the thread you have chosen to add to. (054)
Certainly, the proposal imagines an Ontology Summit more akin to those
of 2008 (Toward An Open Ontology Repository) or 2009 (Toward
Ontology-based Standards), with their quite specific technical subjects,
than to that of 2011 (Making the Case for Ontology). (055)
But I shall resist the temptation to add more general argument here. (056)
I'll address your concern more fully once I have made a different kind
of post to this Forum, in a much more point-wise format. (057)
Best regards meanwhile...
Christopher (058)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Ray" <steve.ray@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "'[ontolog-forum] '" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, October 25, 2011 7:34 AM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Some Grand Challenge proposal ironies (059)
I'm a little concerned that this Ontology Chemistry theme is more of a
grand project/product proposal rather than a topic for consensus and
articulation of a position on the part of the ontology community, which
is the nature of the Ontology Summit. (060)
Steven R. Ray, Ph.D.
Distinguished Research Fellow
Carnegie Mellon University
NASA Research Park
Building 23 (MS 23-11)
P.O. Box 1
Moffett Field, CA 94305-0001
Email: steve.ray@xxxxxxxxxx
Phone: (650) 587-3780
Cell: (202) 316-6481 (061)
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Christopher
Spottiswoode
Sent: Friday, October 21, 2011 11:37 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: [ontolog-forum] Some Grand Challenge proposal ironies (062)
All, (063)
Here are the first questions I imagined as your very valid responses to
my post introducing the notion of "Ontology Chemistry" as the basis of a
Grand Challenge that I am asserting will revolutionize Software
Engineering (SE). (That post is now archived at
http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/2011-10/msg00088.html .) (064)
Q1: On the wiki at
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit/Suggestions the
target you propose for a Grand Challenge is a bootstrap for an intended
new ecosystem. Presumably that involves producing a programmed product? (065)
A: Yes indeed, that's the basic starter platform. It's that initial or
seed "Application Operating System" (or AOS) I've already introduced on
this forum at odd times. (066)
Q2: But why make a Grand Challenge of what is normally an in-house
product development? (It even seems to have started out as one?) (067)
A: (Yes it did, and I've already done some significant C coding for it
in a win32 environment.) The Challenge answer starts on slide 21 of the
X Prize presentation referred to on the Ontolog page you've just cited.
These are the first questions for anyone trying to design a Grand
Challenge: (068)
> Have you targeted a problem where a market failure exists?
> Where the normal forces of capitalism will not solve the problem?
> Does your prize address the underlying market failure? (069)
Q3: So the "market failure" you're addressing here is your own? (070)
A: Though you realize that's not really what they had in mind, yes,
that is partly the case. Sure. But my failure so far has not been in
the conception of the product or its market. (Far from it! To a
remarkable degree there has for several decades been an ever greater
convergence of many current trends with the course I've long been
embarked on.) No, my failure has primarily been in not having been able
to sell the still productless idea to colleagues as possible
collaborators, despite having tried on the web from time to time since
1996. (071)
But that failure is for quite objective reasons too. Anybody can relate
to the suggestion that one notion can be said to underlie the need side
of the universal market I claim to be addressing: complexity.Complexity
and our continual disasters as we fail to handle it appropriately.
Surely we can better broach and deal with the given complexity of
reality? There's no need to wax all philosophical about it either,
because it's commonly a very real and pressing problem in our everyday
social and individual lives, as it is in our SE domain. "Complexity" was
even the title of Chapter 1 of the 1994 book, Object Oriented Analysis
and Design with Applications, by Grady Booch of the Three Amigos behind
UML. But naming the problem is not solving it. (072)
So it is probably rather misguidedly that I have long tried to describe
the objective of the proposed product as "to help people simplify
complexity together". Depending on whom I'm talking to, it has
unfailingly fallen flat and - I imagine - been generally dismissed as
either useless clichi or abstract mystification. (073)
In such ways I have been trying rather ham-handedly for some years to
find others to join in on the project. But after all it's no surprise:
that elephant seems so gigantic, the basic reality is so horrendous, so
any project facing up to it has to be deemed incredible, tantamount to
"boiling the ocean", probably delusional, and at least "impractical for
us". Lesser obstacles have been NIH, and my still too idiosyncratic
depictions of the concept and project. (074)
More interestingly, there's also a rather fundamental and inescapable
bug in the whole notion (though we'll be accepting it as an important
feature of the proposed new scene too): evolution in general
suboptimizes with merely stepwise improvements. And here I am,
proposing that we try to leap that canyon? (075)
Q4: So the idea of a Grand Challenge is to dare to leap the Grand
Canyon? (076)
You could put it that way. (077)
Q5. But then surely it is indeed delusional to try? (078)
It would seem so. So my next posts will be immeasurably more positive.
The "phenomenon of knowledge" throughout our past shows us how we might
in future more confidently and appropriately grasp the nettle of
complexity. (079)
Widespread present SE market failures also provide useful perspectives,
as well as opportunities for leapfrogging many serious obstacles in the
present Internet-based SE ecosystems. (080)
All that background will be handy for an enumeration of many possible
arguments to use when approaching potential funders. (081)
Then with such bogeymen less feared, we can start getting down to the
relevant detail of the proposed new architecture and AOS. More detailed
and appealing outlines of the suggested Grand Challenge will emerge. (082)
Christopher (083)
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