SUO: Re: Missing Ingredient
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MI. Note 13
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JS = Jim Schoening
Jim,
You anchored this thread that became a cable, that I'm afraid to say
has become a many-headed Hydra of Websterian entanglements, with the
following thoughts:
JS: There are many ingredients needed to brew a successful standard.
We have a few ingredients, including some starter documents,
a diverse group of experts, a charter from an accredited
Standards Developing Organization (SDO), and a forum to
conduct work.
JS: I see the key missing ingredient as:
JS: | A growing number of organizations attempting to reuse
| any of the starter documents, and willing to submit
| suggested changes.
JS: If we had this ingredient:
JS: 1. The suggested changes would help us improve the documents,
and also build consensus, assuming these individuals joined
the SUO WG.
JS: 2. The improvements would matter to at least one organization
that is actually building something that needs the improvement.
This is important, because the quantity of these improvements
is hopefully feasible to handle, whereas, the quantity of
"improvements for the sake of improvement" is infinite and
would prevent completion and balloting of a document.
JS: 3. As the number of users grows, the document moves closer
to a market-accepted de facto standard. IEEE approval
will not be enough. Some level of market adoption
must be achieved.
JS: So, how do get organizations to attempt to reuse any of our documents?
Or, if they are doing so, how do we get them to submit their suggested
changes?
JS: Any thoughts?
I replied by reflecting some rather tough criticisms of the
way that we have been proceeding for three years now, indeed,
of the way that a lot of work in AI and KR, though not of course
all such work, has proceeded for about as long as I can remember.
Now, I voice these criticisms merely as a toned-down echo, for the
sake of keeping this working group informed about the nature of the
landscape beyond our circle, of far harsher criticisms that have been
visited on our collective efforts in these areas throughout their short
history so far. No matter how unpleasant these brands of feedback from
our industrial and intellectual environments may be to contemplate, much
less to try accommodating, they are real, they are out there, and it will
do us no good in the long run if we fail to acknowledge both what is just
and what is unjust in their general implications for our continuing work.
You have suggested that the missing ingredients is:
JS: | A growing number of organizations attempting
| to reuse any of the starter documents, and
| willing to submit suggested changes.
No doubt we can find "some" organizations that are willing to provide
useful feedback. But any small and opportunistically selective sample
of feedbackers cannot help but to maintain their own special interests,
their own private biases, and thus it is likely to distort our approach
to the goal of developing a broadly acknowledged standard ontology if we
unduly weigh the feedback from any such not-so-random sample of sources.
Consequently I am led to ask: What is the alternative, what is the method that
is most likely to be feasible in the short run and successful in the long run?
How is this Rodney Dangerfield enterprise that we all know and love finally
going to get some respect?
That brings me to the missing ingredient that I believe -- and that
I have been insisting for three years now, just in this forum alone --
is the most crucially missing ingredient from the mix, and that will
continue to reduce this standardization effort to the kind of comedy
that will not be so funny in the end, not when you consider the real
opportunity that will have come to nothing.
The sine qua non of braoder credibility is to recognize that all of
the questions that we seek to address, if not answer here, have been
addressed by many fine minds, indeed, by our finest minds, throughout
human history, and it is simply non compos mentis to think that we can
make any advances on those scores with becoming thoroughly conversant
with the progress that has been made up til now, and to be cognizant
of the brutal fact that whether we personally and severally regard
what has gone before as progress or not, that most of the rest of
the world, most of the real world in which we hope to operate,
already regards and values it as "standard" knowledge.
Many workers in AI and KR have had a cozy parish
all to themselves up till now, though I can tell
you that it has not always been so cozy outside
of the few charmed circles that we all know and
love and read the charms and all the spells of,
but if we begin, as we have just now begun, to
tread on the toes, the turf, and the taxonomies
of people who I know take this T^3 very seriously,
then I do not believe that everybody in this forum
fully comprehends what sort of grief, and what sort
of early demise for our fond wishes, will be visited
on our efforts here.
Line Number? Every guideline on the empty tablet and every line of writing
on the wall so far should tell us that it is simply not possible to acquire
any significant measure of external respect for a standard ontology without
doing far more homework on that subject matter than we have finished so far.
It's not like you heard it here first.
Jon Awbrey
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