Ask not what a search company can do for you .., or time to refactor the global knowledge base.
Intro.
The time for great updates in academics has come, -
that's the idea of this post; the companies to refactor the
"spaghetti" global knowledge can be type of Microsoft,
Google, Facebook, Wikipedia. The idea to write the post came
to me when doing Google search with the phrases "language
processing" and "processing language". On the first phrase
the results were mostly related to natural language
processing. On the phrase "processing language" the results
were mostly related to the open source programming language
"Processing" (thanks guys).
I thought that
something wrong was about the search because regardless of
word order, the two words relate to the broad AI-related
scientific concept. But the programming language
"Processing" is just an instance of programming language
concept probably not related to AI at all. The AI scientific
community would need to spend extra time to figure out how
to filter out the results if possible at all. That's not
only about scientist's productivity, that's about quality of
search, quality of scientist's work.
Ask not what a search company can do for you.
So, how to deal with the issue of "blurred
search":
- Are we to ask the search company to
tweak something in their search algorithm, by, say, heavily
enhancing their model to provide the kind of option of
"academic layer"? If a scientist selects the option, the
results would mostly be "academic", about concepts, not
about particular realizations (instances).
- Or
should we ask all the web-content creators to follow some
basic rules when choosing this or that English word to let
their product stay high in search results?
Neither of the above, in my opinion.
Time to refactor the global knowledge base.
These above options are just "patches" to current
working system. But, does it make sense "to patch" the
current working system or, probably, it would be better off
to develop a new approach and build up a new "global
knowledge management system" (without destroying the working
legacy one)?
Let's step back and look at the bigger picture. The
issues are:
- A barrier for a scientist to expose his work.
Publishing is expensive and takes a lot of time. A work that
is not backed up by a good amount of money or authority has
a little chance to serve the science. Instead, a not-so-good
idea backed up by some kind of authority would make its way
up, raise money and pay back to maintain the authority. The
system gets counterproductive, it doesn't always serve the
entire society.
- A barrier for a scientist to
access works of other scientists. The access is mostly not
free. To produce a science-related work one needs to look
through, say, hundred of works of others. Where is he
expected to get the money? To serve science it takes a lot
of money. Is that good? Again, the system gets
counterproductive, the researches, who are willing to
contribute to science, don't always have access to needed
information.
- A barrier for fellow scientists to
review the science-related work. The system is not
transparent in this respect. As far as I understand, there
exists layer of "middlemen" to decide who would peer review
whom. I believe it should work mostly automatic.
- Lack of community feature. The community
should feature not just "peer review" practice. It should
provide tools for collaboration.
- The scientific
works are mostly examples of "spaghetti" knowledge. The
ideas are often NOT a)reasonably normalized, b)separated
into loosely coupled coarse grained items with clear input
conditions, output statements and a body of logic. The
"spaghetti" structure doesn't allow a scientist to reuse the
logic of scientific works in automatic mode.
-
Automatic connection to a "brain" or to a "mind" project
can't easily be done. Reverse engineering of a system
(brain) only makes sense if the understanding of the output
(knowledge base in this context) of the system is not in
"spaghetti" state.
- Can't easily be done
automatic connection to the kind of "Language learner hub"
(see my post
http://sukhotinsky.blogspot.com/2010/11/google-language-learner-hub-or-human.html
) .
- Can't easily be done automatic connection
to the kind of "Pattern Repository and Expert System Over
It" (see my post
http://weblogs.asp.net/sergeys/archive/2011/05/25/pattern-repository-and-expert-system-over-it.aspx
) .
How and whom to refactor the global knowledge base.
-
Concept of the structure of a scientific work. A
company type of Microsoft, probably, would be the best to
lead the development of the concept. The complexity of
products they have been dealing with for decades hints that
their experience can be reused to define what could be a
knowledge item, how to "coarse grain" and decouple knowledge
items within a scientific work, how to "entry point" a
scientific work down to a particular knowledge item, etc
etc.
-
Scientist global identification. The players type of
Microsoft, Google, Facebook are quite good at it.
-
Tools to develop a scientific work, - MS Office and
Visual Studio, Open Office etc.
-
The concept of collaboration. Companies like Facebook
and Wikipedia have proven experience in the area, why not to
reuse it?
-
Search system over the global knowledge base, - major
search companies.
What to start with.
A user identification is working already by
Microsoft, Google, Facebook and others. Next steps could
be:
- Some portal with email address a user can send
his work to. By message_id the publication (content of the
email) should be accessible to everyone.
- A set of
templates for office software or even Visual Studio should
be available to let a user to compose and properly format
his work.
- Some tag system to label the works.
-
Some community functionality to let users to organize into
groups and "peer review" each other.
Probably it's time not to only navigate through academics
or scholar content, it's time to start creating knowledge
in new format and refactor old content.
Thank you.
Sergey D. Sukhotinsky.
http://divergent-boundaries.blogspot.com/
http://weblogs.asp.net/SergeyS
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Message-ID: <DUB119-W2584966068D58EDBF2EE2DBCB0@phx.gbl>
From: Sergey Sukhotinsky <sukhotinsky@live.com>
To: Sergey Sukhotinsky <cognitive.walkthrough@gmail.com>
Subject: Ask not what a search company can do for you .., or time to refactor the global knowledge base.
Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2013 08:31:07 +0300
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