[port-peer-review] Martin paper review
Reviewing: (01)
http://lab.bootstrap.org/port/papers/2002/martin.html (02)
First: I must say up front that since he got his well thought out
reviews out before anyone else it will be hard for my review of
Martin's paper to not be a response to Martin's review of the paper I
helped with. This is especially true because in some ways the two
papers represent two divergent views of similar tasks. (03)
Second: I'm on a crappy connection at the moment so I'll happily
blame any and all typos I make in this message (there are sure to
be plenty) on that. :) (04)
Third: I have very little experience with conceptual graphs. (05)
Fourth: It is very nearly the end of the weekend, and I believe
that was some kind of deadline. This is done both as a review of
the paper and to some extent the PORT project itself. I'm not
reviewing the paper so much as some of its fundamental
assumptions. (06)
Which leaves me at the following review: While I can see the
value formal structures have in collaborative environments, I see
little in Martin's paper to suggest how any user, except for
those quite trained in the system, would effectively interface
with the WebKB encoding methods. Once the representation has been
created it is useful, but what is the method for creating it?
Once the knowledge has been formally represented it is possible
to perform transformations and computations, but how does the
knowledge go in? Unless I'm missing something (entirely possible,
as the entry aspect of the examples was rather glossed) there is
some step between identification of document elements (DE) and
connecting "them to other DEs or statements" in the WebKB formal
structure. The author acknowledges this step is "the most
difficult and time-consuming for the users." (07)
http://lab.bootstrap.org/port/papers/2002/martin.html#nid013 (08)
What's the step? The step is identifying the relationships
between statements and then entering those relationships in the
system. As a novice in Frame-CG I can say quite readily that I'd
rather do something else. If my interest is to engage in
intellectual collaboration with scholars on the writings of a
polymath and associated commentary, I'd really rather not deal
with some language other than my own. (09)
My criticism of an apparent love affair with inaccessible, and
what seem to be unusable, methods can be levied against the PORT
project as a general rule. Perhaps it is the nature of the beast,
but the need for a "precise, flexible and
exploitable-for-inferencing approach"
(http://lab.bootstrap.org/port/papers/2002/martin.html#nid013)
gets, to my eye, in the way of collaboration. Humans are not
precise, computers are not flexible. (010)
While it is true that computers must have formal constructs to
operate, we deny ourselves the elegance of our humanity if we
ignore the "interface and integration issues" which are the
stress of this year's workshop
(http://lml.bas.bg/iccs2002/PORT.htmI) and show that humans make
funny and fuzzy associations. It's those fuzzy associations that
I think are the best ones: they reach across voids and form new
knowledge. (011)
Formalisms amongst humans work in small groups and fail in the
world at large. A group that insists on formalisms runs the risk
of not reaching across voids, but only reaching within to find
the same thing over and over again, thinking it new because it
was found by a new type of link in the graph. (012)
WebKB provides an interesting way of representing knowledge, and
the paper explains this well, albeit with perhaps a bit too much
jargon. Provided a method for creating those representations is
created, it may well be very useful to PORT. I don't see a direct
path. (013)
Interestingly, I think small simple tools, such as the purple
numbers used to provide a high(er) level of granularity of access
to the papers in this review process promise a much more
immediate style of progress that will accelerate (and bootstrap)
inquiry. Waiting for the perfect knowledge representation will
take forever. (014)
--
Chris Dent <cdent@burningchrome.com> http://www.burningchrome.com/~cdent/
"Mediocrities everywhere--now and to come--I absolve you all! Amen!"
-Salieri, in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus (015)