Garo Garabedyan- a private blog

Knowledge and information are built up by atoms. This is a small piece of knowledge/ information which after breaking down is not knowledge or information any more.

Printable version: (The Atom of Knowledge and Science 112KB, 6 pages)

This paper presents the view of the author about the existence of the most smallest (tiny) knowledge/ information construction- atom of knowledge. The author claims that any form of knowledge can be serialized up to this atom of knowledge without any lose going through this process. If this knowledge construction is broken down no knowledge/ information is left in its separated or built up in different forms pieces.

Contents:
1. Atom of knowledge: “A is B”
2. ”A is B” and its relations with “A isn’t B”
3. ”A is B” and “If A then B”
4. Using eventBased infrastructure in “If A then B” to break it down in “A is B” statements
5. Knowledge to “A is B” form
6. Analysis of the knowledge atom’s truth level (with example)
7. Abstractions in the atom of knowledge are static and unique references
8. Natural language semantics and development concerning “A is B”
9. Citations

Atom of knowledge: “A is B”
There exists a fundamental sole (only one) atom of knowledge. Every form of knowledge can be presented by using only this atom and basic logic constructions without any change of the knowledge while changing its form. Based on this atom of knowledge thoughts are expressed explicitly.

Knowledge is functional description of observed phenomena and their characteristics. It is functional because we use it to determine in which circumstances what important to us changes (happens). Human knowledge only describes phenomena and empirically proves them, it does not have any power to prove theories about phenomena semantics.

The atom of knowledge is the equivalence and has the form of “A is B” statement, where A and B are abstract models of some concepts. Abstract models usually represent only a few functions (behavior characteristics) of the concepts.

A is B
IS is one way function, we can not say that B is A
A, B are abstractions
IS (equivalence) is the product (output) of the process analogy

L: “A is B”
L is the set of “A is B” atoms. Values like <L atom>.A := <some abstractions>; <L atom>.B := <some abstraction>; <L atom>.Truth:= <Boolean>.

People make decisions in their life by analogy, concludes Marvin Minsky (CSAIL, MIT). He makes a review of the most popular classes computer solutions in AI for general tasks from the real life. He claims that discrete logic environment and statistics are not applicable to the common problems of real life.

Here is an example of thinking by analogy. Lets we have two objects/ phenomena A and B for which we know different functionalities, A: w, m, n; and B: m, n. Thus, by analogy B: w, m, n. In other words we accept that the shared functionality between the both objects in m and n is enough in order to conclude equality for w (in A and B), too.

Analogy is a method not only finding final result, but reveals uncertainty in the problem itself. Determining a problem is approximately always engaged with searching information. In such cases analogy is able to give more certainty and transform the problem to already known. Analogy finds claims which after their acceptance can make the task enough certain.

In the nature there is no such thing that to be fully equivalent to another. But the statement “A is B” has in its own mistake not in the equivalence, but in the abstraction of the concepts A and B from the real world (when they are abstracted not from real world concepts, the abstraction can be 100% equal to the real object).

This knowledge atom is tied in groups of atoms (context) and this way forming knowledge statements about concrete phenomena. Sucked out of this group of atoms (out from the context), every atom has a sense of a general statement which is represented like: “Every A is B”, “Every A is every B”, ”A is every B”.

Based on this atom of knowledge thoughts are expressed explicitly. This atom of knowledge represents the way human thinks, by using analogies. Mathematics which is based on equivalence is a prove about the explicit form of expression of thoughts using “A is B”. Having its genesis in the thought about the shared characteristics of two apples and two bananas, Mathematics’ fundamentals are within equality.

“A is B” and its relations with “A isn’t B”
“A isn’t B” can be transformed to “A is B” but not vice versa. Proves of this are first empirical and second this claim is shared by the view about the creative way of human mind processing. If we have knowledge “A isn’t B” we can say that exists “A is B” knowledge and collect a starting point proves on its’ truth having a base the first statement. If we have “A is B” knowledge we can’t say anything about the truth of “A isn’t B” and we can’t be sure about the letter’s objectively full expression (many and different combination of “isn’t” exists with different proves and truth levels). The most general atom of knowledge should be able to be extracted from any existing form of knowledge without lose of information, “A is B” is the form which any knowledge can fully transform to.

“A is B” and “If A then B”
“A is B” is transformable to “If A then B” by insertion of a newly formed variable.
“If A than B” is the first significant form of knowledge in the process of presenting human analytic perceptions. Everything about a phenomena is firstly understood and presented like a behavior. “If A than B” is the first reached complete form of knowledge (such knowledge which can be analysed by mathematics) in the process of examining of new behaviors (functionalities) of unknown and known objects/ phenomena. FSM (Finite State Machine) is the analytic form of “If A than B” knowledge.
After this first stage knowledge is consolidated and abstract ideas are presented (usage of “А is B” form) in order optimization to be implemented where abstractions are connected by analogy to other presented at this moment abstractions to make knowledge “deep”-er (knowledge presentation to be able to not only predict behavior of its object phenomena, but turn it in an environment enabling thinking about the causing circumstances nature of the determined phenomena, which circumstances are invisible while the phenomena has been examined. [1]
“If A then B” contains two conditions. This is one way based on statement construction. Conditions behave the same way as “A is B” does and conditions can be presented as “A is B” sentences. Both have truth levels True, False and Unknown.
A is B => if temp.var.A is A then temp.var.A is B
Doing to opposite transformation from “If A is B” to “A is B” is not enough safe.
If A then B => here A and B are statements and we have two options in examining their objects, if these statements share one object or not.
In general the above statement is like If temp.var.A is sA then temp.var.B is sB. A = (object of A) is sA
After a little reformation:
temp.var.A + temp.var.B = temp.var.AB
If temp.var.AB is sA then temp.var.AB is sB
The last is true reformation, does not lose any information and does not unreasonably add any additional. Virtually merging the objects of the both statements does not produce mistake.
And as a final result:
temp.var.AB is (sA and sB)
This reformation loses a significant piece of knowledge and certainty. It ignores the one way if-then thinking in which A is true if B is true; B is unknown if A is true; A is unknown if B is false or unknown. According to the new form temp.var.AB is sA if temp.var.AB is sB; temp.var.AB is sB if temp.var.AB is sA.

Using eventBased infrastructure in “If A then B” to break it down in “A is B” statements
“A is B if B is not C”

(“A is B”) { “B is not C” } // the {} brackets means that () is based on the statements in {}

Base on: one statement is base on another when by logical or analogical path the first is derived from the second (statement proving). Often in natural language we use “cause” (“because”) to present this kind of relation.

Base on is one way logical path, if statementA is based on statementB, and when statementA is true doesn’t mean that statementB is true.

People use analogy in order to solve problems. Finding the solution about unknown problem by comparison between the unknown problem with its relevance data and known problems and known solutions. “A is B” is the result (output) of the analogical thinking. We have to say that often analogy doesn’t use the all input data, but in general the data which is different (between the observed cases) when it made a comparison in order to be built an analogy.

Understand: it is revealed when adding or cutting atoms of knowledge from arrays of atoms by informing when a conflict between atoms is happen on the base of their statements.

“A is B because B is not C now”

The sentence means in addition that “B is not C” is true:

(“B is not C”) ; ( “A is B”) { “B is not C” }

“A is B if and only if B is not C”

(“A is B”) { “B is not C” }; (“B is not C”) { “A is B” } – or in an isolated case (no other place clues about these statements’ truth levels are found)

“A is B if and only if B is not C”

( “A is B”; “B is not C” ) //eventBased relationship technology is applied here. eventBased model is very strong and closely ties its sentences. When one of the statements becomes unknown, the rest are not true anymore- unknown. The all statements have to be true, in order to continue to be true. All statements become false if some of them are false.

This text [2] by engaging proves and analysing them claims that Data Flow Processing, eventBased Algorithms and Data is the right software architecturing trend in Software development, which targets big and too consolidated systems.

Architecture platform is presented which aims to present declarative programming in software products (and in embedded systems, too) which are dependent of asynchronous events (events which moment of occurrence is unknown to the system).
The blog post presents the view of building of eventBased platform which to help its client- developer to declare the relationships between different modules (the relations of modules to variables placed in different ones). The platform recalculates (executes with the update relevant to the module data) the modules when a relevant parameter have changed.
The author believes that the development of a software product must inherit the architecture of a natural science i.e. physics.
There exists a pure scientific basis in the idea of declaring and defining by formula like tiny modules of code. Programming of its own is translation of one real relation into electronic imitation, every natural science do the same thing of translation but modeling abstract information model.

The history of science development goes through such process. Science tries to properly collect and on this to generalize “if-then” statements defining the behavior of a certain class phenomena to turn them into scientific laws (scientific relations between abstract variables) able to predict the behavior of a system in a moment in future.

An example of real life system which is supposed to implement the described eventBased architecture is a space satellite. This is a a big embedded system which needs things to be known in a small amount of time.

Space satellites are embedded systems, which have for a certain period of time to find the most proper solution of an asynchronous occurred problem. If the solution is not proper its implementation can spend resource which is needed for different operation, if the solution is not found within the required period of time the entire satellite is possible to not exist аnymore.
Finding the best solution of a composition of commands (steps) is done by using decision tree, such data structures like which are used in applications for playing chess, which creates of recursive calculation of the possible command (chess move) and the consequences applied to the current situation for every separate possible command. The maximal period of time for choosing a solution and implementing it is supposed to change during the search and implementation of the chosen solution, this period of time is a dependent from the behaviour of outside (external) variables, whose behaviour is asynchronous to the system.
In order to enable the fast creation of this tree, fast computations of resource spending are required, which volume and quality is important to the outside world.
The author imagines single modules determining outside changes and in every such change the physical variable value is computed, which variable can be important to decision making in future. In the blog the author presents a way of enabling this data updates and a parallel adding of new modules and relationships between variables (formulas).

eventBased relationship model enables adding more than 2 statements in one relation like so: (“A is B”; “B is not C”; “B is not D”; “D is not C”)

“A is B if B is not C or not C is B or both”

(“A is B”) { “B is not C” OR “not C is B” } //logical statements OR is needed at this presentation

“A is B if B is not C and not C is B”
(“A is B”) { “B is not C” AND “not C is B” } //logical statements AND is needed at this presentation

Knowledge to “A is B” form
Knowledge in a scientific manner is having an enough full list of the bases of a statement (which are statements or empirical discoveries) in order to be solved problems about the truthfulness of the main statement. Every statement contains only atoms of this kind and every complicated statement can be serialized up to (is constructed of) many “A is B” statements without any lose of knowledge.

Complicated different in their form knowledge constructions can be serialized up to only one equivalence array of “A is B” statements. One array of “A is B” statements can be transformed up to many different in their form complicated knowledge constructions.

A problem to solve of this kind is to find in which conditions (variations of the lists of bases of the statement- true, false, unknown truth levels of the statements in the list) the main statement changes his truth level which is one of these True, False or Unknown. True and False are known logical states of statements, the new state of Unknown is added in order to present situations of scientific uncertainty.

Analysis of the knowledge atom’s truth level (with example)
Abstractions (“A”, “B”) and “is” in the knowledge atom have truth levels.
Truth levels: True, False, Unknown

mainStatement is based on (aStatement1, aStatement2, aStatement3, aStatement4, anEmpiricalDiscovory1) // list of bases of mainStatement

Statements/ Variations	aStatement1	aStatement2	aStatement3	aStatement4	anEmpiricalDiscovory1	mainStatement
1	True	True	False	True	True	True
2	True	True	False	True	Unknown	Unknown
3	True	True	False	True	False	False
4	True	True	False	Unknown	True	True
5	True	True	False	False	True	False
6	True	True	True	False	True	False
7	True	False	True	False	True	Unknown
8	False	False	True	False	True	False
9	Unknown	False	True	False	True	Unknown

Table for solving problems. The change in the mainStatement’s truth level as a function of the truth levels of the statements on which it is based on. This is state transition table in the view of mainStatement’s state [3].

And this way for all the 125 (5 statements and 3 possible levels) possible variations of truth levels of all the statements in the base list of mainStatement.

At the view of mathematics analysis main statement can be presented as function and the statements in relation to it as parameters with values their truth levels.

Abstractions in the atom of knowledge are static and unique references
Abstractions are in this case: (called up here “the most tiny”) static and unique reference
unique: to point the reference objects it is only needed and only enough to know this abstraction action.
static reference: nothing within the context is relevant to the action of finding the objects of reference.

“Static reference” and “unique” are synonyms in this case in the view of their concrete behaviour.

(True about approximately all analogies)

Analogy in this case is dynamic. The “is” can be relevant to the context, the first to be a caused by other circumstances placed in the context.

Analogy can be based on some circumstances.

The reference is an empirical method and the analogy is close to it, but not identical to. The reference has not the full functionality of the knowledge atom. The atom of knowledge is related to the concrete topic of the context and is analysable in truth level while the reference is always true and has no direct relation to the case topic, but only indirect providing role.

Natural language semantics and development concerning “A is B”
Every natural word of its own is a declarative calling of a function which works over the “A is B” statements.

Complicated abstractions are references built on analogy and in some cases are too virtual so can not be implemented without additional information to give certainty. Sole natural words (without proper nouns) are analogies out of many references and keep the most important shared characteristics of these references. Word “dog” contains all the shared characteristics of every individual dog no matter its race of distinctive characteristics. Every word as an abstraction can be used in such situations (context) where it’s sole usage is not enough to reach the required at the situation certainty. The abstraction of “dog” used in some cases is an example of such complicated abstraction. The sentence “Have you seen the lost dog?” without any previous information about the particular race and distinctive characteristics of the reference of abstraction “dog” is uncertain.

The above explained abstractions are not static in general because they change with their everyday usage. No matter of the idealize statistical application of every natural word, humans use words which are the most cheapest to use at the particular situation and in fact change the meaning of the used words. By binding the meaning of a word with a concrete phenomena/ characteristic which can at all be not suitable (not best choice) the listeners/ readers of this text learn this new usage as a meaning of the word. It is something not curious while the most important purpose of words is to not be an output of statistical research, but a way to communicate. Communication environment develops by its usage by people and their particular skills of learning to communicate while communicating.

Natural language develops empirically. It is only based on references to actions, characteristics and objects.
Knowledge develops analytically and handles uncertainty. It is based on analogies to important characteristics of phenomena behaviours.

Citations
1. Kline, Morris; Mathematics and the search for knowledge
2. http://garabedyan.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/data-flow-processing-eventbased-algorithms-and-data/
Garabedyan, Garo; Data Flow Processing, eventBased Algorithms and Data
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_state_machine

I have got a conversation with Luis Suarez, Knowledge Manager, Community Builder & Social Computing Evangelist in the IBM Software Group division (www.elsua.net/), through ITToolBox network.
I have received the right to publish it in my blog.

TO Luis Suarez FROM Garo Garabedyan

http://garabedyan.wordpress.com/2008/05/26/migrate-e-mail-conversation-to-a-wiki/

Above is a blog post, where I try to dream about a new automatic way to migrate from long e-mail conversations to a Wiki.
Based on a service, which creates a wiki page for every conversation (by default recognizes a bunch of e-mails as a part of a conversation) and automatically gives rights of Read&Write or only Read to the collaborators according the TO, FROM and CC tags.

I have downloaded your presentation: Тhinking out of the inbox more collaboration through less email.

4th slide- a map of people in a collaboration. I think that in IBM was a social tool which tries to present the relations in a such graphical diagram.

15th slide- e-mail and wiki. Using attached documents in e-mails is not very well presented in wiki. Which particular engine you picture, is there a such engine which provides Document revisions (like the Wiki) for Office files. I will
be very interested in such a service.

I am a student and I will be happy to hear advise from you. Do you share some of my views?

Garo Garabedyan
Sofia, Bulgaria

TO Garo Garabedyan FROM Luis Suarez
Hi Garo,

Thanks a lot for the feedback comments and for the information details! Very insightful, indeed, and glad I am not the only one thinking along these terms as well. Very very good!

I think your idea of an automated process that would convert e-mails into wiki pages with the right level of access and interactions is something that would prove really really useful and I hope to be able to see it at some point in time. Alas, we are not there yet, at least, from what I know of the various wiki engines that I have been exposed to so far, but, like I said, it would be really nice to see it at some point! Because it clearly indicates the way we would need to follow!

With regards to your comments on the slide deck, yes, inside IBM we do have that tool that provides such visualisations and it surely provides a really nice functionality of identifying your experts from a specific community, as well as the weak links from that social network, which will prove to be very handy, specially when you are looking for the right people for the right job!

On the slide of the e-mail and the wiki, I must say that the slide is not from me, the graphic is from Wikinomics and it doesn’t represent a specific wiki engine that supports extremely well attachments, in fact, very few wiki engines do. Wikis are more down to earth towards building content on top of each other’s content but more down to text and hyperlinks than attachments, so I doubt they would ever provide such excellence of support for attachments that you are asking for. If you look into Wikimatrix you will see how not many of them place the focus on attachments, which I think is the right approach. It is more about building the content linearly and in a single interface, instead of having to force people to attach, detach, download, upload, that specific file. I think that was not the purpose wikis were designed for in the first place, I am afraid.

Thanks again for the really nice feedback! Greatly appreciated!

Cheers!
Luis Suarez

TO Luis Suarez FROM Garo Garabedyan
Hello,

Thank you for your answer and that you have spent time reading my message.
I want to keep a conversation with you and with a project manager of a close to this topic product of IBM.

I think that Wiki pages over E-mail conversations is possible. I can give you short examples of some conversations which will look beautiful if are processed over Wiki.

When I have saw that diagram about sending e-mails with attachments I thought that it is already implemented to have a Document revisions of Office Docs (which I am passioned of). I think that there are a lot of things to be done in this approach. Recognizing the user behavior with Ajax in order to conclude if the user is Adding, Erasing or Editing content, and on the base of this analysis to form a very successful diagram of revisions of every piece from the document and for the whole document. [ http://garabedyan.wordpress.com/2007/11/18/ajax-wiki-editing/ # Document revisions]. This way solving a big problem of IT theory, recognizing document revisions.

I believe that my dream of a wiki over e-mail conversation is possible and I think that eventBased Algorithms and Data ( http://garabedyan.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/data-flow-processing-eventbased-algorithms-and-data/ , http://garabedyan.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/event-based-content-editor/ ) are able to do this job.

I truly thank you and I ask you to contact me with a specialist in the practice field, I want to share my thoughts with both of you.
You as a philosopher with a wide range of ideas.
He/She as a practical implementor.

PS: Social networking can truly change the nowadays web, turning it into more safer and healthy world (http://garabedyan.wordpress.com/2008/03/08/virtual-world-as-a-place-to-meet-and-interact-with-people-on-web-page/).
A lot of my friends are becoming zombies while using their computers, I think that by presenting social connections while (i.e.) browsing web page surfers will be protected by this modern disease of IT workers.

Would you be so kind to paste some pieces from your message as comments to the blog post ( http://garabedyan.wordpress.com/2008/05/26/migrate-e-mail-conversation-to-a-wiki/ ). Now I am studying in Bachelor program in Technical University of Sofia- Bulgaria for 1st year. I work on the blog in order to find valuable remarks and use them in order to continue my education in Europe.

Garo Garabedyan

TO Garo Garabedyan FROM Luis Suarez
Hi Garo,

Thanks for the follow up and for the feedback comments. Appreciated. RE: “I think that Wiki pages over E-mail conversations is possible. I can give you short examples of some conversations which will look beautiful if are processed over Wiki.” > Oh yeah, I know PLENTY of those, too! Starting with this one! As far as I can see almost everything that would not be consider a one-on-one conversation discussing a subject of a sensitive or confidential nature would be considered possible to go into a wiki. And even in the latter example, it could still go into it, if it would be a fully protected wiki, which I have seen far too many. So from what I can see plenty of e-mails could have their space in the wiki-sphere. What I am just trying to say is that as soon as you work with attachments in e-mail that becomes more difficult to manage in a wiki, since wikis have not been built to store attachments, but more to build content ad-hoc amongst a group of people. That’s all what I meant.

With regards to document revisions, I am thinking that a similar thing is what you would get with Recent Changes, right? I mean, they are not as fancy and sophisticated as Office documents, but they surely get the job telling you who made those updates, when, and what content changed, which for the basic purposes of document revisioning may be good enough to get things going. Nothing fancy, nothing more complex. Just gets the job done. And you can syndicate that content, something Office documents don’t offer. So I would find them to have a bit of an advantage in that space, for sure.

Hummm, interesting that you say that e-mail is a collaboration tool, when it is not. Don’t confuse communication vs. collaboration. There are two completely different things. The fact that all of us have abused e-mail as a way to spread information does not mean it will make it as a collaboration tool. In fact, it doesn’t. It does such a poor job at helping collaboration flow in a natural way that it becomes a nightmare, after a few instances, so let’s just try to consider how wikis vs. e-mail, as collaboration tools just don’t compare. Issues like openness, public, awareness, co-creation, co-authorship, etc. etc. just won’t happen in e-mail whereas they really thrive in wiki systems.

With regards to your final comments on contacting a specialist in the practice field, I am sorry to disappoint you, but you won’t find any, main reason being that distinction I mentioned above where e-mail and wiki are two completely different beasts, one to communicate and the other to collaborate, so doubt you would ever find anyone out there in this area. And I think if you are trying to move forward in that direction to make that distinction as well, it would help you save a few headaches along the way.

And with regards to your comments about quoting some of the interactions through e-mail into your blog, I would be more than happy, in fact, I would be more than happy to carry out the conversation through the blog as it would help everyone else out there benefit from such exchange. So, by all means, go ahead and quote those bits and pieces and use a link to my main blog: http://www.elsua.net (I can’t track the links to ITtoolbox’s blog at the moment, trying to fix it as we speak) and will be chiming in accordingly.

Hope that helps and thanks again for the helpful comments and insightful feedback!

Regards
Luis Suarez

TO Luis Suarez FROM Garo Garabedyan
About Document Revisions:

http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/papers/history_flow.pdf

Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations
by
Fernanda B. Viégas
MIT Media Lab
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
fviegas@media.mit.edu

Martin Wattenberg
IBM Research
Cambridge, MA 02142 USA
mwatten@us.ibm.com

Kushal Dave
IBM Research
Cambridge, MA 02142 USA
kdave@us.ibm.com

eventBased Content Editor, + eventBased Philosophy

http://garabedyan.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/event-based-content-editor/

http://garabedyan.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/data-flow-processing-eventbased-algorithms-and-data/

By using a declarative approach about the relations between pieces of the content which are fast (and asynchronously) edited by many authors (in example wiki, no one can know how many authors what exactly will edit) to: a) trace changes and inform the interested readers (authors), b) present an excellent data flow diagram of document revisions

Scenario about a):
You add an information about some event and present the needed stuff and declare relations of this stuff to the content about the weather forecast. Some people declare interest of the event.
If this forecast changes, the system traces which content is related to the changed one and informs the authors of the related content about the change.
Next, the authors update the related content by applying the change in the forecast.
You have two choices, to update the information or to not, depending what you think about the importance of the change in the forecast.
System informs the interested readers that a change occurs in the page about the event, if you have updated it.

Garo Garabedyan

TO Garo Garabedyan FROM Luis Suarez
Hi Garo, and me thinking that every single change that you do to most wiki engines would get registered into the system and therefore easy to track. Your comments below suggest otherwise. I am thinking as well that apart from Wikipedia I doubt there would be other wikis at that level and with level of complexity that you are mentioning and as such I doubt it would be even worth while tracking all of that activity. For what purpose, to track active contributors? Wouldn’t that be obvious already? To track doc revisioning? Hummm… interesting but I thought that doc revisioning would be done for documents, in most cases, considered critical or essential to the project or business, and for that I bet there are better tools than wikis, specially when you get involved with Intellectual Capital, Intellectual Property and IP Law.

I am certainly not disagreeing here with your point of view. I think it is a fascinating interesting new aspect of the complexity aspects of a wiki. I am just saying that perhaps a good majority of the folks who regularly use wikis don’t care, and therefore would not want to complicate their user experience.

Thanks for sending the links along! Will keep digging into your research, although with the travelling I am doing at the moment, I am not sure I would be able to get much done before end of June, but will try in between now and then and see how much I can get through.

Thanks again for very enlightening conversation. Take care and have a good one!

(Need to catch a flight to Munich)
Regards
Luis Suarez 

TO Luis Suarez FROM Garo Garabedyan
Hello,

I was busy this month with the final exams in my university.
I want to ask you about your opinion on using ontology in wiki pages.

You know how Wikipedia presents a lot of tags which indicates to the visitors that the information presented here can be a little bit old and not complete. If calling this as an ontology mechanism where people are free to write their opinions in natural language, but are free to mark some pieces of it as related somehow to something out there. Is this kind of collaboration commercially interesting.

I want to give you an example. Imagine a business application which handles all the tasks of the workers and keeps tracking what percent of the work they have done according their own reports. Is this replaceable by a custom designed ontology Wiki. Such a wiki which has tags (like XML) which lets editors to edit task page wikis by setting the percent of the done work.

Is the common application user interface tag presentable (with all the calls up to the database about types in check boxes and list boxes) and in this sense is editing a wiki page become more powerful? Editors can be free to bind this discrete values in such a way like they are in one DataBase and use them around the all wiki pages, when the letter is aimed to a business tasks.

I respect your professional view. What you thing?

Garo Garabedyan,
Sofia, Bulgaria 

TO Garo Garabedyan FROM Luis Suarez
Hi Garo,

Thanks a lot for the message and for the feedback details. I think you are on to something when you are proposing to put together a tagging / folksonomy infrastructure added further add to the contributions of a wiki. More than anything else because you are making the content of the wiki itself much easier to search & find it at the same time that you give people the opportunity to build a second entry of knowledge based on such tagclouds, as well as the overall content from the wiki itself. If you combine that with a potential fixed taxonomy, a limited, but original one, that a wiki may well have you are putting together some really good advantages towards encouraging knowledge workers to collaborate further having that massive index, or tagcloud, of key terms spread around the wiki.

Interesting challenge would be though how to put such folksonomy to the test of proving useful to the business and not just the knowledge workers. I can imagine that the business would be interested, but it would need to see the buy-in. It would work on an individual basis for each of the knowledge workers contributing, but not sure the business will buy it. In fact, there aren’t many businesses out there exploting the power of the tag in a business context to create dynamic taxonomies combining them with folksonomies and I guess that’s mostly due to the fact that people who have been managing those taxonomies in the past may not feel very comfortable with letting that control go.

Not sure whether you would be aware of this or not, but Thomas van der Wal, the guy who coined the term folksonomy, has done some fascinating research around the world of tagging and how it can improve the way people share information as well as find it at a later time. You may want to contact him and see if he would have some other ideas he could throw on the table on the kind of impact it could have on a wiki…

Hope that helps get some discussion going…
Thanks!
Luis Suarez