Yesterday I read through William Clancy‘s “Notes on Epistemology of a Rule-based Expert System“, the sort of thing I was working on in the late 80s. In the section that’s showing he writes, “I knew what all the words meant, but I couldn’t understand why the rule was correct. … More than a decade would pass before I realized that to have a representation in your pocket is not to be intelligent.” You see, I’ve come to an understanding of how that implicates itself into society’s deliberations concerning public policy, of how it ramifies itself down into the lived experience of the citizen.
Relating to Gnowis, a project of DKFI Knowledge Management Lab, Leo Saurman wrote me with what he called “my motivation for gnowsis:”
* I want to write down information. I want to write down what I know. But language, even hypertext, is not information. Because when writing sentences like “I am writing to Ben about gnowsis” involves concepts about you and gnowsis, resources, ideas, that are connected. By writing down information, we want to express facts about ideas and concepts in your own, subjective world. The gnowsis is a personal semantic web, a personal “digital Weltbild”.
Now the fact is that I’ve forever been a fan of PIMs and writing tools like outliners (“ThinkingCap” for the C=64 was easily the best I’ve ever found … go figure.) But I think there are bigger fish to fry. Or, to put it another way, we have real alligators to fight as we try to keep the swamp from flooding us out of house and home.
What I’m thinking of isn’t just a new sort of forum. (more…)