Wednesday, August 02, 2006
The Second School of Semantic Science
Key-less Hash Glass Bead Games
On the limits of the OWL standard à [184]
Summary of the discussion up to this point à [186]
Push and Pull Information Flow
Statement of the Issue à [1]
From: Andrew
Hi Paul, [1]
I'm not sure if this helps much or not (it doesn't address a lot of what you're talking about), but it does describe my thoughts on push vs. pull. This is something that my work has spent quite a bit of time discussing in the context of message delivery within an SOA [2].
As you point out, the fundamental issue of the consumer pulling content or other services is, "How do I know what's out there?" At present this is accomplished by pushing directories of information to the masses [3], be it in print, radio, email, television, google or other mediums. What this establishes are touch-points [4]that people know about that hopefully contain sources of content they are interested in. Even if you had a system like Dr. Ballard's which categorized everything in the known universe, if you didn't know where/how to access that repository of information, the system would be effectively non-existent and useless. [5]
However, the power of pull
is that once the consumer knows where to go [6]
to initiate a relationship with the provider of content they think they want,
they can then interact with it using the provided interface(s) to avail of the
services they desire. This may be
ordering flights on a website or buying groceries in a shop. They still have to know the website exists
or where to find the shop, and in both cases, be able to understand how to
interact with the service they've located so they get what they want. I realize I'm stating the obvious here, but
I think this is the crux of the issue of push vs. pull in both real life and in
software systems.
The fallacy of the "Field of Dreams" mantra of "If you build it, they will come," has proven that some sort of push-based bootstrapping is required if you have something to offer the general population [7]. You might get lucky and stumble across something really useful by accident (wandering around the city or "surfing" in the early days of the Web--before Google), but the odds are against you, and it requires a considerable time investment. Like I said earlier, even if you could collect all of the knowledge about what services were available in the real and virtual worlds, you would still need to somehow implant that information in people's brains. [8]
In another communication, you were discussing the OSI model. Even in that case, you have a combination of push and pull mechanisms working at different layers to enable communications between interested parties.
I don't really see how the issue is unique or complex in the context of individual information spaces that you mention. Fundamentally, you can't use what you don't know about, so you have to figure out some way of learning about what you don't know. Even if it is self directed (taking classes, reading books, using google), you're still relying on other people to have pushed information to the wider world. The only exception is stopping random people on the street and asking them if they know anything about X--the physical equivalent of wandering around in the dark. [9]
Maybe I'm oversimplifying, but I think the above is the root reason that the claim of society failing without advertising is actually quite true. Advertising can take many forms, but most of us immediately associate the term with the things we hate: TV commercials, annoying radio blurbs, spam and banner adds. That's not really a fair comparison because even things like the newspaper, books, publishers and storefronts are all advertising as well, but the context is perhaps more limited and you need to be more aware when you're doing the looking. [10]
Andrew
some[1] Footnotes are
used here to extend the discussion, while realizing that Andrew and others
cannot footnote my footnotes. Also we
are dealing only with high-level concepts that may or may not reflect Project intentions.
[2] Message delivery
within SOA is how we are approaching the delivery of information
content where services are asked for by a delivery mechanism. As we see it now, the delivery of content
with advertising can be adjusted to the evolving prototype(s) (or agents) of
the family/user/trust-circle depending on subscription tokens. As mentioned before, we think of the Open
Grid Service Architecture and other SOA architectures as we work on the
finalization of our Project’s actual transaction machinery.
[3] “Pushing directories
of information to the masses? I
feel that this is not happening yet, except in certain areas such as the
military and military procurement, but will be happening more and more as the
SOA (service oriented architecture) use of registries and repositories become
well established.
What
we will be doing, in the near future, is pushing targeted directories of
information (differentially) to individuals based on complex and evolving
profiles/agents/avatars. But our paradigm
is that the individual should feel in complete control of an action perception
cycle. The insistent on action –
perception is not merely something that is “progressive”, but is essential to
the avatar and the persons and the industries measuring real desire and real
intentionality. In bottom line terms,
the systems we have now do not function to create (manufacture) and distribute
the best products at the lowest prices.
The push-pull system we are designing will move our economic system in a
new and productive direction, we claim.
Using
SOA in our Project design is critical, not for what it brings to the Project
merely in terms of design; but because we are convinced that SOA, in some form,
will be around for a long time. There
is a lot of good work reflected in some of the SOA standards, but not in
all. Some of the standards are
complicated and confused, designed to help control markets rather than free the
market to participate in a new paradigm.
There
is SOA “first school” and SOA “second school”, and I do not wish
to be misunderstood. The first school
is doing everything it can to diffuse the actual innovation in the
marketplace. Why? The answer is merely about stability of
existing systems, which happen to not be particularly optimal in terms of over
all value to all of society.
I
and my colleagues are developing second school SOA: www.secondschool.net
[4] Once the technology of
human knowledge representation is better completed, and is “generative” then
these touch points are not required artifacts, at least touch points that the
individual has to be explicitly aware of.
Similarity
analysis based on my work, on Ben’s work, on Tom Adi’s work, NdCore, etc; will
pull the proper elements of evolving information (SOA) repositories “to” the
avatar/profile or the individual/family/trust-circle.
[5] Richard Ballard’s system,
as well as the Cyc Corp system, does not categorize everything in the world;
but is coming close. What is missing is
real time interpretation, what Cyc Corp (Doug Lenat) terms
“microtheories”. Richard has been
somewhat being dealing with interpretation and inference, but this is not
completely transparent as yet. My
“formative ontology” is a generative system that using the technologies of (I
am just giving first names here) David B., Amnon M, and Peter Kr. As well as my
own work to create an action perception cycle creating categories at two levels
and mixing these as a middle level to generate ontological structure about what
a person (or avatar) is about or interested in. This is called the “tri-level” architecture.
Same
theory as Autonomy Inc’s push pull system, but with better generators of
substructural category and anticipatory mechanisms.
[6] But knowing where to go is why the current system is weak as a pull system.
One might claim that users barely know, explicitly, what they might want. But this, conjectured, absence of explicit self-knowledge does not imply the non-existence of a strong implicit intention and willingness to anticipate based on deeply personal behavioral “structure”. The first school explicitly rejects the notion that there are significant individual differences, whereas the second school comes to rely on an understanding of behavioral differences to target structural information. We expect to encode behavioral information using the Human Mark-up Language standard (OASIS).
Take educational services. How many students actually understand (a) themselves as individuals and (b) what the vast repositories of human knowledge hold? Without deep knowledge of both themselves and what knowledge might mean to him or her; how can educational choices be informed?
Pull needs to have an “natural” educational process that is based on natural action perception cycles in which the individual is fully in control of the entire cycle. This means that “responsibility” is centered with the individual.
My
comment here is not to take anything from hard working sale persons, it is to
point out as Nan was doing, that “In my experience, advertising is most
productive when it is perceived as info, that is, it is placed in context.”
The question is of how information is placed into “context”, and who places information into context.
The first school thinking would say that advertisers are the proper origin of information design.
The second school suggests that the individual human must be empowered to design information itself in order to achieve the type of contextualization that the Project seeks to provide to the markets. We have become passive in accepting information that is designed for purpose of extracting wealth from us as individuals. But why should this be acceptable? The answer provided now is that this is OUR system and we should be loyal to it. And of course, there is truth to this answer. But there is a need to move on eventually to an economic system that is not so exploitive and demanding of resources. At the same time, the new system needs to maintain economic flow, while increasing the social value of each things produced and acquired.
[7] We claim that there is
currently a barrier created by dependencies on the advertising model. This barrier was initially a real barrier,
“how to get proper and truthful information to the consumer”. However, over time the barrier has developed
an artificial dependency on the old (first school) technology and information
theory.
[8] I am highly critical of
this paragraph since there are strong assertions that are about the past
natures of information science/systems.
These assertions might not be fully true about the past, and certainly
it is an imposition to assert that there is something about the nature of the
world and human nature that requires that the assertions be absolutely true
about the future.
The
second school is radically different from the first school in precisely the
issues that in this paragraph are treated as invariant and eternally set by
certain past interpretations of experience.
[9] Again this paragraph, like the previous one, is asserting a
number of things as being eternally true when actually there are easy ways of
placing the underlying assertions into doubt.
For
example, there is an assertion of how things are learned, which is that things
are learned from some explicit external source. One can state that this is not final science, because the nature
of human learning is not even approximately comprehended – except perhaps by a
few outstanding scholars who are not well read by the masses.
Specifically
the problem with John Dewey’s educational philosophy comes up. Dewey defined the educational system as the
institution that conveyed past knowledge to the present. It is widely recognized that there is no
place in Dewey’s philosophy for what the individual brings from him or her
self.
American
educational philosophy is plagued with the same limitation in NOT recognizing
that a person is a unique entity and that often the mass treatment of
curriculum harms the individual greatly.
Look at the absurdity of the freshman mathematics curriculum. See:
http://www.ontologystream.com/beads/QuestionOfAccess/AQA.htm
[10] So you finish with the
final set of well-known polemics. It is
as if watching a rock roll down a hillside.
The rock has no choice but to roll once it gets started.
Perhaps
we should ask why it is necessary to reach this set of conclusions?
The
first part of you note is well respected and has great insight. The second part is a series of memetic
expressions that seen required to be said so that the first part is judged to
be ok?
Who
is making this judgment and why? My
answer is that the “first school” actually makes the judgment. What then is the “first school”, but a
philosophical viewpoint that is both extreme and fundamentalist in nature. The second school claims that this judgment
of the first school is enforced much the same way as a religious belief is
enforced. As an IT professional you are
acutely aware of this past re-enforcement – I conjecture.
We
are developing a second school, where the assertions made by the first school
are largely, but not completely, set aside.
This
is hard work, but perhaps the time has come.