Category: Smart Systems

Self-driving Cars & Turing’s Imitation Game

Self-driving vehicles should behave like humans, here is how to teach them so.

3f36d-custer1

Preamble

The eventuality of sharing roads with self-driven vehicles raises critical issues, technical, social, or ethical. Yet, a dual perspective (us against them) may overlook the question of drivers’ communication (and therefore behavior) because:

  • Contrary to smart cars, human drivers don’t use algorithms.
  • Contrary to humans, smart cars are by nature unethical.

If roads are to become safer when shared between human and self-driven vehicles, enhancing their collaboration should be a primary concern.

Driving Is A Social Behavior

The safety of roads has more to do with social behaviors than with human driving skills, as it depends on human ability, (a) to comply with clearly defined rules and, (b) to communicate if and when rules fail to deal with urgent and exceptional circumstances. Given that self-driving vehicles will have no difficulty with rules compliance, the challenge is their ability to communicate with other drivers, especially human ones.

What Humans Expect From Other Drivers

Social behavior of human drivers is basically governed by clarity of intent and self-preservation:

  1. Clarity of intent: every driver expects from all protagonists a basic knowledge of the rules, and the intent to follow the relevant ones depending on circumstances.
  2. Self-preservation: every driver implicitly assumes that all protagonists will try to preserve their physical integrity.

As it happens, these assumptions and expectations may be questioned by self-driving cars:

  1. Human drivers wouldn’t expect other drivers to be too smart with their interpretation of the rules.
  2. Machines have no particular compunction with their physical integrity.

Mixing human and self-driven cars may consequently induce misunderstandings that could affect the reliability of communications, and so the safety of the roads.

Why Self-driving Cars Have To Behave Like Human Drivers

As mentioned above, driving is a social behavior whose safety depends on communication. But contrary to symbolic and explicit driving regulations, communication between drivers is implicit by necessity; if and when needed, it is in urgency because rules are falling short of circumstances: communication has to be instant.

So, since there is no time for interpretation or reasoning about rules, or for the assessment of protagonists’ abilities, communication between drivers must be implicit and immediate. That can only be achieved if all drivers behave like human ones.

Turing’s Imitation Game Revisited

Alan Turing designed his Imitation Game as a way to distinguish between human and artificial intelligence. For that purpose a judge was to interact via computer screen and keyboard with two anonymous “agents”, one human and one artificial, and to decide which was what.

Extending the principle to drivers’ behaviors, cars would be put on the roads of a controlled environment, some driven by humans, others self-driven. Behaviors in routine and exceptional circumstances would be recorded and analyzed for drivers and protagonists.

Control environments should also be run, one for human-only drivers, and one with drivers unaware of the presence of self-driving vehicles.

Drivers’ behaviors would then be assessed according to the nature of protagonists:

DeciMakingTaxo

  • H / H: Should be the reference model for all driving behaviors.
  • H / M: Human drivers should make no difference when encountering self-driving vehicles.
  • M / H: Self-driving vehicles encountering human drivers should behave like good human drivers.
  • Ma / Mx: Self-driving vehicles encountering self-driving protagonists and recognizing them as such could change their driving behavior providing no human protagonists are involved.
  • Ma / Ma: Self-driving vehicles encountering self-driving protagonists and recognizing them as family related could activate collaboration mechanisms providing no other protagonists are involved.

Such a scheme could provide the basis of a driving licence equivalent for self-driving vehicles.

Self-driving Vehicles & Self-improving Safety

If self-driving vehicles have to behave like humans and emulate their immediate reactions, they may prove exceptionally good at it because imitation is what machines do best.

When fed with data about human drivers behaviors, deep-learning algorithms can extract implicit knowledge and use it to mimic human behaviors; and with massive enough data inputs, such algorithms can be honed to statistically perfect similitude.

That could set the basis of a feedback loop:

  1. A limited number of self-driving vehicles (properly fed with data) are set to learn from communicating with human drivers.
  2. As self-driving vehicles become better at the imitation game their number can be progressively increased.
  3. Human behaviors improve influenced by the growing number of self-driving vehicles, which adjust their behavior in return.

That is to create a virtuous feedback for roads safety.

PS: A Contrary Evidence

A trial in Texas demonstrates a contrario the potency of the argument by adopting the alternative policy, making clear that self-driving vehicles are indeed machines. Apart for being introduced as a public transport within a defined area and designed stops, two schemes are used to inhibit the imitation game:

  • Appearance: design and color enable immediate recognition.
  • Communication: external screens are used for textual (as opposed to visual) notification to pedestrians and other vehicles.

Future will tell if that policy is just a tactical step or a more significant shift towards a functional distinction between artificial brains and humans ones.

Further Reading

External Links

 

A Brief Ontology Of Time

“Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”

William Faulkner

Preamble

The melting of digital fences between enterprises and business environments is putting a new light on the way time has to be taken into account.

Joseph_Koudelka_time
Time is what happens between events (Josef Koudelka)

The shift can be illustrated by the EU GDPR: by introducing legal constraints on the notifications of changes in personal data, regulators put systems’ internal events on the same standing as external ones and make all time-scales equal whatever their nature.

Ontological Limit of WC3 Time Recommendation

The W3C recommendation for OWL time description is built on the well accepted understanding of temporal entity, duration, and position:

Cake_time

While there isn’t much to argue with what is suggested, the puzzle comes from what is missing, namely the modalities of time: the recommendation makes use of calendars and time-stamps but ignores what is behind, i.e time ontological dimensions.

Out of the Box

As already expounded (Ontologies & Enterprise Architecture) ontologies are at their best when a distinction can be maintained between representation and semantics. That point can be illustrated here by adding an ontological dimension to the W3C description of time:

  1. Ontological modalities are introduced by identifying (#) temporal positions with regard to a time-frame.
  2. Time-frames are open-ended temporal entities identified (#) by events.
Cake_timeOnto
How to add ontological modalities to time

It must be noted that initial truth-preserving properties still apply across ontological modalities.

Conclusion: OWL Descriptions Should Not Be Confused With Ontologies

Languages are meant to combine two primary purposes: communication and symbolic representation, some (e.g natural, programming) being focused on the former, other (e.g formal, specific) on the latter.

The distinction is somewhat blurred with languages like OWL (Web Ontology Language) due to the versatility and plasticity of semantic networks.

Ontologies and profiles are meant to target domains, profiles and domains are modeled with languages, including OWL.

That apparent proficiency may induce some confusion between languages and ontologies, the former dealing with the encoding of time representations, the latter with time modalities.

Further Readings

External Links

GDPR Ontological Primer

Preamble

European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), to come into effect  this month, is a seminal and momentous milestone for data privacy .

Nothing Personal (Arthur Szyk)

Yet, as reported by Reuters correspondents, European enterprises and regulators are not ready; more worryingly, few (except consultants) are confident about GDPR direction.

Misgivings and uncertainties should come as no surprise considering GDPR’s two innate challenges:

  • Regulating privacy rights represents a very ambitious leap into a digital space now at the core of corporate business strategies.
  • Compliance will not be put under a single authority but be overseen by an assortment of national and regional authorities across the European Union.

On that account, ontologies appear as the best (if not the only) conceptual approach able to bring contexts (EU nations), concerns (business vs privacy), and enterprises (organization and systems) into a shared framework.

Enterprise Architectures & Regulations

Compared to domain specific regulations, GDPR  is a governance-oriented regulation set across business concerns and enterprise organization; but unlike similarly oriented ones like accounting, GDPR is aiming at the nexus of business competition, namely the processing of data into information and knowledge. With such a strategic stake, compliance is bound to become a game-changer cutting across business intelligence, production systems, and decision-making. Hence the need for an integrated, comprehensive, and consistent approach to the different dimensions involved:

  • Concepts upholding businesses, organizations, and regulations.
  • Documentation with regard to contexts and statutory basis.
  • Regulatory options and compliance assessments
  • Enterprise systems architecture and operations

Moreover, as for most projects affecting enterprise architectures, carrying through GDPR compliance is to involve continuous, deep, and wide ranging changes that will have to be brought off without affecting overall enterprise performances.

Ontologies arguably provide a conclusive solution to the problem, if only because there is no other way to bring code, models, documents, and concepts under a single roof. That could be achieved by using ontologies profiles to frame GDPR categories along enterprise architectures models and components.

CakeGDPR_00.jpg
Basic GDPR categories and concepts (black color) as framed by the Caminao Kernel

Compliance implementation could then be carried out iteratively across four perspectives:

  • Personal data and managed information
  • Lawfulness of activities
  • Time and Events
  • Actors and organization.

Data & Information

To begin with, GDPR defines ‘personal data’ as “any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’)”. Insofar as logic is concerned that definition implies an equivalence between ‘data’ and ‘information’, an assumption clearly challenged by the onslaught of big data: if proofs were needed, the Cambridge Analytica episode demonstrates how easy raw data can become a personal affair.

Ideally, a formal and functional distinction should be maintained between data and information, the former tied to transient observations of external instances, the latter defined by the categories of managed surrogates. 

Failing an enshrined distinction between data (directly associated to instances) and information (set according to categories or types), an ontological level of indirection should be managed between regulatory intents and the actual semantics of data as managed by information systems.

CakeGDPR_data
Managing the ontological gap between regulatory understandings and compliance footprints

Once lexical ambiguities set apart, the question is not so much about the data bases of well identified records than about the flows of data continuously processed: if identities and ownership are usually set upfront by business processes, attributions may have to be credited to enterprises know-how if and when carried out through data analytics.

Given that the distinctions are neither uniform, exclusive or final, ontologies will be needed to keep tabs on moves and motives. OWL 2 constructs (cf annex) could also help, first to map GDPR categories to relevant information managed by systems, second to sort out natural data from nurtured knowledge.

Activities & Purposes

Given footprints of personal data, the objective is to ensure the transparency and traceability of the processing activities subject to compliance.

Setting apart (see below for events) specific add-ons for notification and personal accesses,  charting compliance footprints is to be a complex endeavor: as there is no reason to assume some innate alignment of intended (regulation) and actual (enterprise) definitions, deciding where and when compliance should apply potentially calls for a review of all processing activities.

After taking into account the nature of activities, their lawfulness is to be determined by contexts (‘purpose limitation’ and ‘data minimization’) and time-frames (‘accuracy’ and ‘storage limitation’). And since lawfulness is meant to be transitive, a comprehensive map of the GDPR footprint is to rely on the logical traceability and transparency of the whole information systems, independently of GDPR.

That is arguably a challenging long-term endeavor, all the more so given that some kind of Chinese Wall has to be maintained around enterprise strategies, know-how, and operations. It ensues that an ontological level of indirection is again necessary between regulatory intents and effective processing activities.

Along that reasoning compliance categories, defined on their own, are first mapped to categories of functionalities (e.g authorization) or models (e.g use cases).

CakeGDPR_activ1
Compliance categories are associated upfront to categories of functionalities (e.g authorization) or models (e.g use cases).

Then, actual activities (e.g “rateCustomerCredit”) can be progressively brought into the compliance fold, either with direct associations with regulations or indirectly through associated models (e.g “ucRateCustomerCredit” use case).

CakeGDPR_activ2
Compliance as carried out through Use Case

The compliance backbone can be fleshed out using OWL 2 mechanisms (see annex) in order to:

  • Clarify the logical or functional dependencies between processing activities subject to compliance.
  • Qualify their lawfulness.
  • Draw equivalence, logical, or functional links between compliance alternatives.

That is to deal with the functional compliance of processing activities; but the most far-reaching impact of the regulation may come from the way time and events are taken into account.

Time & Events

As noted above, time is what makes the difference between data and information, and setting rules for notification makes that difference lawful. Moreover, by adding time constraints to the notifications of changes in personal data, regulators put systems’ internal events on the same standing as external ones. That apparently incidental departure echoes the immersion of systems into digitized business environments, making all time-scales equal whatever their nature. Such flattening is to induce crucial consequences for enterprise architectures.

That shift together with the regulatory intent are best taken into account by modeling events as changes in expectations, physical objects, processes execution, and symbolic objects, with personal data change belonging to the latter.

Gdpr events
Mapping internal (symbolic) and external (actual) events is a critical element of GDPR compliance

Putting apart events specific to GDPR (e.g data breaches), compliance with regard to accuracy and storage limitation regulations will require that all events affecting personal data:

  • Are set in time-frames, possibly overlapping.
  • Have notification constraints properly documented.
  • Have likelihood and costs of potential risks assessed.

As with data and activities, OWL 2 constructs are to be used to qualify compliance requirements.

Actors & Organization

GDPR introduces two specific categories of actors (aka roles): one (data subject) for natural persons, and one for actors set by organizations, either specifically for GDPR assignment, or by delegation to already defined actors.

Gdpr actors
GDPR roles can be set specifically or delegated

OWL 2 can then be used to detail how regulatory roles can be delegated to existing ones, enabling a smooth transition and a dynamic adjustment of enterprise organization with regulatory compliance.

It must be stressed that the semantic distinction between identified agents (e.g natural persons) and the roles (aka UML actors) they play in processes is of particular importance for GDPR compliance because who (or even what) is behind an actor interacting with a system is to remain unknown to the system until the actor can be authentically identified. If that ontological lapse is overlooked there is no way to define and deal with security, confidentiality or privacy regulations.

Conclusion

The use of ontologies brings clear benefits for regulators, enterprise governance, and systems architects.

Without shared conceptual guidelines chances are for the European regulatory orchestra to get lost in squabbles about minutiae before sliding into cacophony.

With regard to governance, bringing systems and regulations into a common conceptual framework is to enable clear and consistent compliance strategies and policies, as well as smooth learning curves.

With regard to architects, ontology-based compliance is to bring cross benefits and externalities, e.g from improved traceability and transparency of systems and applications.

Annex A: Mapping Regulations to Models (sample)

To begin with, OWL 2 can be used to map GDPR categories to relevant resources as managed by information systems:

  • Equivalence: GDPR and enterprise definitions coincide.
  • Logical intersection, union, complement: GDPR categories defined by, respectively, a cross, merge, or difference of enterprise definitions.
  • Qualified association between GDPR and enterprise categories.

Assuming the categories properly identified, the language can then be employed to define the sets of regulated instances:

  • Logical property restrictions, using existential and universal quantification.
  • Functional property restrictions, using joints on attributes values.

Other constructs, e.g cardinality or enumerations, could also be used for specific regulatory constraints.

Finally, some OWL 2 built-in mechanisms can significantly improve the assessment of alternative compliance policies by expounding regulations with regard to:

  • Equivalence, overlap, or complementarity.
  • Symmetry or asymmetry.
  • Transitivity
  • etc.

Annex B: Mapping Regulations to Capabilities

GDPR can be mapped to systems capabilities using well established Zachman’s taxonomy set by crossing architectures functionalities (Who,What,How, Where, When) and layers (business and organization), systems (logical structures and functionalities), and platforms (technologies).

Rules_GDPR
Regulatory Compliance vs Architectures Capabilities

These layers can be extended as to apply uniformly across external ontologies, from well-defined (e.g regulations) to fuzzy (e.g business prospects or new technologies) ones, e.g:

Ontologies, capabilities (Who,What,How, Where, When), and architectures (enterprise, systems, platforms).

Such mapping is to significantly enhance the transparency of regulatory policies.

Further Reading

External Links

Collaborative Systems Engineering: From Models to Ontologies

Given the digitization of enterprises environments, engineering processes have to be entwined with business ones while kept in sync with enterprise architectures. That calls for new threads of collaboration taking into account the integration of business and engineering processes as well as the extension to business environments.

Wang-Qingsong_scaffold
Collaboration can be personal and direct, or collective and mediated (Wang Qingsong)

Whereas models are meant to support communication, traditional approaches are already straining when used beyond software generation, that is collaboration between humans and CASE tools. Ontologies, which can be seen as a higher form of models, could enable a qualitative leap for systems collaborative engineering at enterprise level.

Systems Engineering: Contexts & Concerns

To begin with contents, collaborations should be defined along three axes:

  1. Requirements: business objectives, enterprise organization, and processes, with regard to systems functionalities.
  2. Feasibility: business requirements with regard to architectures capabilities.
  3. Architectures: supporting functionalities with regard to architecture capabilities.

RekReuse_BFCo
Engineering Collaborations at Enterprise Level

Since these axes are usually governed by different organizational structures and set along different time-frames, collaborations must be supported by documentation, especially models.

Shared Models

In order to support collaborations across organizational units and time-frames, models have to bring together perspectives which are by nature orthogonal:

  • Contexts, concerns, and languages: business vs engineering.
  • Time-frames and life-cycle: business opportunities vs architecture stability.

EASquare2_eam.jpg
Harnessing MBSE to EA

That could be achieved if engineering models could be harnessed to enterprise ones for contexts and concerns. That is to be achieved through the integration of processes.

 Processes Integration

As already noted, the integration of business and engineering processes is becoming a key success factor.

Processes integration

For that purpose collaborations would have to take into account the different time-frames governing changes in business processes (driven by business value) and engineering ones (governed by assets life-cycles):

  • Business requirements engineering is synchronic: changes must be kept in line with architectures capabilities (full line).
  • Software engineering is diachronic: developments can be carried out along their own time-frame (dashed line).

EASq2_wrkflw
Synchronic (full) vs diachronic (dashed) processes.

Application-driven projects usually focus on users’ value and just-in-time delivery; that can be best achieved with personal collaboration within teams. Architecture-driven projects usually affect assets and non-functional features and therefore collaboration between organizational units.

Collaboration: Direct or Mediated

Collaboration can be achieved directly or through some mediation, the former being a default option for applications, the latter a necessary one for architectures.

Cycles_collabs00

Both can be defined according to basic cognitive and organizational mechanisms and supported by a mix of physical and virtual spaces to be dynamically redefined depending on activities, projects, locations, and organisation.

Direct collaborations are carried out between individuals with or without documentation:

  • Immediate and personal: direct collaboration between 5 to 15 participants with shared objectives and responsibilities. That would correspond to agile project teams (a).
  • Delayed and personal: direct collaboration across teams with shared knowledge but with different objectives and responsibilities. That would tally with social networks circles (c).

Cycles_collabs.jpg
Collaborations

Mediated collaborations are carried out between organizational units through unspecified individual members, hence the need of documentation, models or otherwise:

  • Direct and Code generation from platform or domain specific models (b).
  • Model transformation across architecture layers and business domains (d)

Depending on scope and mediation, three basic types of collaboration can be defined for applications, architecture, and business intelligence projects.

EASq2_collabs
Projects & Collaborations

As it happens, collaboration archetypes can be associated with these profiles.

Collaboration Mechanisms

Agile development model (under various guises) is the option of choice whenever shared ownership and continuous delivery are possible. Application projects can so be carried out autonomously, with collaborations circumscribed to team members and relying on the backlog mechanism.

The OODA (Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action) loop (and avatars) can epitomize projects combining operations, data analytics, and decision-making.

EASquare2_collaMechas
Collaboration archetypes

Projects set across enterprise architectures cannot be carried out without taking into account phasing constraints. While ill-fated Waterfall methods have demonstrated the pitfalls of procedural solutions, phasing constraints can be dealt with a roundabout mechanism combining iterative and declarative schemes.

Engineering vs Business Driven Collaborations

With collaborative engineering upgraded at enterprise level, the main challenge is to iron out frictions between application and architecture projects and ensure the continuity, consistency and effectiveness of enterprise activities. That can be achieved with roundabouts used as a collaboration mechanism between projects, whatever their nature:

  • Shared models are managed at roundabout level.
  • Phasing dependencies are set in terms of assertions on shared models.
  • Depending on constraints projects are carried out directly (1,3) or enter roundabouts (2), with exits conditioned by the availability of models.

Engineering driven collaboration: roundabout and backlogs

Moreover, with engineering embedded in business processes, collaborations must also bring together operational analytics, decision-making, and business intelligence. Here again, shared models are to play a critical role:

  • Enterprise descriptive and prescriptive models for information maps and objectives
  • Environment predictive models for data and business understanding.

OKBI_BIDM
Business driven collaboration: operations and business intelligence

Whereas both engineering and business driven collaborations depend on sharing information  and knowledge, the latter have to deal with open and heterogeneous semantics. As a consequence, collaborations must be supported by shared representations and proficient communication languages.

Ontologies & Representations

Ontologies are best understood as models’ backbones, to be fleshed out or detailed according to context and objectives, e.g:

  • Thesaurus, with a focus on terms and documents.
  • Systems modeling,  with a focus on integration, e.g Zachman Framework.
  • Classifications, with a focus on range, e.g Dewey Decimal System.
  • Meta-models, with a focus on model based engineering, e.g models transformation.
  • Conceptual models, with a focus on understanding, e.g legislation.
  • Knowledge management, with a focus on reasoning, e.g semantic web.

As such they can provide the pillars supporting the representation of the whole range of enterprise concerns:

KM_OntosCapabs

Taking a leaf from Zachman’s matrix, ontologies can also be used to differentiate concerns with regard to architecture layers: enterprise, systems, platforms.

Last but not least, ontologies can be profiled with regard to the nature of external contexts, e.g:

  • Institutional: Regulatory authority, steady, changes subject to established procedures.
  • Professional: Agreed upon between parties, steady, changes subject to established procedures.
  • Corporate: Defined by enterprises, changes subject to internal decision-making.
  • Social: Defined by usage, volatile, continuous and informal changes.
  • Personal: Customary, defined by named individuals (e.g research paper).

Cross profiles: capabilities, enterprise architectures, and contexts.

Ontologies & Communication

If collaborations have to cover engineering as well as business descriptions, communication channels and interfaces will have to combine the homogeneous and well-defined syntax and semantics of the former with the heterogeneous and ambiguous ones of the latter.

With ontologies represented as RDF (Resource Description Framework) graphs, the first step would be to sort out truth-preserving syntax (applied independently of domains) from domain specific semantics.

KM_CaseRaw
RDF graphs (top) support formal (bottom left) and domain specific (bottom right) semantics.

On that basis it would be possible to separate representation syntax from contents semantics, and to design communication channels and interfaces accordingly.

That would greatly facilitate collaborations across externally defined ontologies as well as their mapping to enterprise architecture models.

Conclusion

To summarize, the benefits of ontological frames for collaborative engineering can be articulated around four points:

  1. A clear-cut distinction between representation semantics and truth-preserving syntax.
  2. A common functional architecture for all users interfaces, humans or otherwise.
  3. Modular functionalities for specific semantics on one hand, generic truth-preserving and cognitive operations on the other hand.
  4. Profiled ontologies according to concerns and contexts.

KM_OntosCollabs
Clear-cut distinction (1), unified interfaces architecture (2), functional alignment (3), crossed profiles (4).

A critical fifth benefit could be added with regard to business intelligence: combined with deep learning capabilities, ontologies would extend the scope of collaboration to explicit as well as implicit knowledge, the former already framed by languages, the latter still open to interpretation and discovery.

P.S.

Knowledge graphs, which have become a key component of knowlege management, are best understood as a reincarnation of ontologies.

Further Reading

 

Economic Intelligence & Semantic Galaxies

See also: A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Knowledge Galaxies

Thinking About It (Gilles Barbier)

Given the number and verbosity of alternative definitions pertaining to enterprise and systems architectures, common sense would suggest circumspection if not agnosticism. Instead, fierce wars are endlessly waged for semantic positions built on sand hills bound to crumble under the feet of whoever tries to stand defending them.

Such doomed attempts appear to be driven by a delusion seeing concepts as frozen celestial bodies; fortunately, simple-minded catalogs of unyielding definitions are progressively pushed aside by the will to understand (and milk) the new complexity of business environments.

Business Intelligence: Mapping Semantics to Circumstances

As long as information systems could be kept behind Chinese walls semantic autarky was of limited consequences. But with enterprises’ gates collapsing under digital flows, competitive edges increasingly depend on open and creative business intelligence (BI), in particular:

  • Data understanding: giving form and semantics to massive and continuous inflows of raw observations.
  • Business understanding: aligning data understanding with business objectives and processes.
  • Modeling: consolidating data and business understandings into descriptive, predictive, or operational models.
  • Evaluation: assessing and improving accuracy and effectiveness of understandings with regard to business and decision-making processes.
BI: Mapping Semantics to Circumstances

Since BI has to take into account the continuity of enterprise’s objectives and assets, the challenge is to dynamically adjust the semantics of external (business environments) and internal (objects and processes) descriptions. That could be explained in terms of gravitational semantics.

Semantic Galaxies

Assuming concepts are understood as stars wheeling across unbounded and expanding galaxies, semantics could be defined by gravitational forces and proximity between:

  • Intensional concepts (stars) bearing necessary meaning set independently of context or purpose.
  • Extensional concepts (planets) orbiting intensional ones. While their semantics is aligned with a single intensional concept, they bear enough of their gravity to create a semantic environment.

On that account semantic domains would be associated to stars and their planets, with galaxies regrouping stars (concepts) and systems (domains) bound by gravitational forces (semantics).

Semantic Dimensions & the Morphing of Concepts

While systems don’t leave much, if any, room for semantic wanderings, human languages are as good as they can be pliant, plastic, and versatile. Hence the need for business intelligence to span the stretch between open and fuzzy human semantics and systems straight-jacketed modeling languages.

That can be done by framing the morphing of concepts along Zachman’s architecture description: intensional concepts being detached of specific contexts and concerns are best understood as semantic roots able to breed multi-faceted extensions, to be eventually coerced into system specifications.

Galax_Dims
Framing concepts metamorphosis along Zachman’s architecture dimensions

Managing The Alignment of Planets

As stars, concepts can be apprehended through a mix of reason and perception:

  • Figured out from a conceptual void waiting to be filled.
  • Fortuitously discovered in the course of an argument.

The benefit in both cases would be to delay verbal definitions and so to avoid preempted or biased understandings: as for the Schrödinger’s cat, trying to lock up meanings with bare words often breaks their semantic integrity, shattering scraps in every direction.

In contrast, semantic orbits and alignments open the door to the dynamic management of overlapping definitions across conceptual galaxies. As it happens, that new paradigm could be a game changer for enterprise architecture and knowledge management.

From Business To Economic Intelligence

Traditional approaches to information systems and knowledge management are made obsolete by the combination of digital environments, big data, and the spreading of artificial brains with deep learning abilities.

To cope with these changes enterprises have to better integrate business intelligence with information systems, and that cannot be achieved without redefining the semantic and functional dimensions of enterprise architectures.

Semantic dimensions deal with contexts and domains of concerns: statutory, business, organization, engineering. Since these dimensions are by nature different, their alignment has to be managed; that can be achieved with conceptual galaxies and profiled ontologies.

Functional dimensions are to form the backbone of enterprise architectures, their primary purpose being the integration of data analytics, information processing, and decision-making. That approach, often labelled as economic intelligence, defines data, information, and knowledge, respectively as resources, assets, and service:

  1. Resources: data is captured through continuous and heterogeneous flows from a wide range of sources.
  2. Assets: information is built by adding identity, structure, and semantics to data.
  3. Services: knowledge is information put to use through decision-making.
CaKe_DataInfoKnow
Economic Intelligence: Bringing data mining, information processing, and knowledge management into a single conceptual framework

An ontological kernel has been developed as a Proof of Concept using Protégé/OWL 2.

Examples

Data

Wikipedia: Any sequence of one or more symbols given meaning by specific act(s) of interpretation; requires interpretation to become information.

Merriam-Webster: Factual information such as measurements or statistics; information in digital form that can be transmitted or processed; information and noise from a sensing device or organ that must be processed to be meaningful.

Cambridge Dictionary: Information, especially facts or numbers; information in an electronic form that can be stored and used by a computer.

Collins: Information that can be stored and used by a computer program.

TOGAF: Basic unit of information having a meaning and that may have subcategories (data items) of distinct units and values.

Galax_DataInfo
System

Wikipedia: A regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole; Every system is delineated by its spatial and temporal boundaries, surrounded and influenced by its environment, described by its structure and purpose and expressed in its functioning.

Merriam-Webster: A regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole

Business Dictionary: A set of detailed methods, procedures and routines created to carry out a specific activity, perform a duty, or solve a problem; organized, purposeful structure that consists of interrelated and interdependent elements.

Cambridge Dictionary: A set of connected things or devices that operate together

Collins Dictionary: A way of working, organizing, or doing something which follows a fixed plan or set of rules; a set of things / rules.

TOGAF: A collection of components organized to accomplish a specific function or set of functions (from ISO/IEC 42010:2007).

Further Reading

Ontologies as Productive Assets

Preamble

An often overlooked benefit of artificial intelligence has been a renewed interest in seminal philosophical and cognitive topics; ontologies coming top of the list.

The Thinker Monkey, Breviary of Mary of Savoy
The Thinker Monkey, Breviary of Mary of Savoy

Yet that interest has often been led astray by misguided perspectives, in particular:

  • Universality: one-fits-all approaches are pointless if not self-defeating considering that ontologies are meant to target specific domains of concerns.
  • Implementation: the focus is usually put on representation schemes (commonly known as Resource Description Frameworks, or RDFs), instead of the nature of targeted knowledge and the associated cognitive capabilities.

Those misconceptions, often combined, may explain the limited practical inroads of ontologies. Conversely, they also point to ontologies’ wherewithal for enterprises immersed into boundless and fluctuating knowledge-driven business environments.

Ontologies as Assets

Whatever the name of the matter (data, information or knowledge), there isn’t much argument about its primacy for business competitiveness; insofar as enterprises are concerned knowledge is recognized as a key asset, as valuable if not more than financial ones, and should be managed accordingly. Pushing the comparison still further, data would be likened to liquidity, information to fixed income investment, and knowledge to capital ventures. To summarize, assets whatever their nature lose value when left asleep and bear fruits when kept awake; that’s doubly the case for data and information:

  • Digitized business flows accelerates data obsolescence and makes it continuous.
  • Shifting and porous enterprises boundaries and markets segments call for constant updates and adjustments of enterprise information models.

But assessing the business value of knowledge has always been a matter of intuition rather than accounting, even when it can be patented; and most of knowledge shapes up well beyond regulatory reach. Nonetheless, knowledge is not manna from heaven but the outcome of information processing, so assessing the capabilities of such processes could help.

Admittedly, traditional modeling methods are too stringent for that purpose, and looser schemes are needed to accommodate the open range of business contexts and concerns; as already expounded, that’s precisely what ontologies are meant to do, e.g:

  • Systems modeling,  with a focus on integration, e.g Zachman Framework.
  • Classifications, with a focus on range, e.g Dewey Decimal System.
  • Conceptual models, with a focus on understanding, e.g legislation.
  • Knowledge management, with a focus on reasoning, e.g semantic web.

And ontologies can do more than bringing under a single roof the whole of enterprise knowledge representations: they can also be used to nurture and crossbreed symbolic assets and develop innovative ones.

Ontologies Benefits

Knowledge is best understood as information put to use; accounting rules may be disputed but there is no argument about the benefits of a canny combination of information, circumstances, and purpose. Nonetheless, assessing knowledge returns is hampered by the lack of traceability: if a part of knowledge is explicit and subject to symbolic representation, another is implicit and manifests itself only through actual behaviors. At philosophical level it’s the line drawn by Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”;  at technical level it’s AI’s two-lanes approach: symbolic rule-based engines vs non symbolic neural networks; at corporate level implicit knowledge is seen as some unaccounted for aspect of intangible assets when not simply blended into corporate culture. With knowledge becoming a primary success factor, a more reasoned approach of its processing is clearly needed.

To begin with, symbolic knowledge can be plied by logic, which, quoting Wittgenstein again, “takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.” That would be true on two conditions:

  • Domains are to be well circumscribed. 
  • A water-tight partition must be secured between the logic of representations and the semantics of domains.

That could be achieved with modular and specific ontologies built on a clear distinction between common representation syntax and specific domains semantics.

As for non-symbolic knowledge, its processing has for long been overshadowed by the preeminence of symbolic rule-based schemes, that is until neural networks got the edge and deep learning overturned the playground. In a few years’ time practically unlimited access to raw data and the exponential growth in computing power have opened the door to massive sources of unexplored knowledge which is paradoxically both directly relevant yet devoid of immediate meaning:

  • Relevance: mined raw data is supposed to reflect the geology and dynamics of targeted markets.
  • Meaning: the main value of that knowledge rests on its implicit nature; applying existing semantics would add little to existing knowledge.

Assuming that deep learning can transmute raw base metals into knowledge gold, enterprises would need to understand, assess, and improve the refining machinery. That could be done with ontological frames.

A Proof of Concept

Compared to tangible assets knowledge may appear as very elusive, yet, and contrary to intangible ones, knowledge is best understood as the outcome of processes that can be properly designed, assessed, and improved. And that can be achieved with profiled ontologies.

As a Proof of Concept, an ontological kernel has been developed along two principles:

  • A clear-cut distinction between truth-preserving representation and domain specific semantics.
  • Profiled ontologies designed according to the nature of contents (concepts, documents, or artifacts), layers (environment, enterprise, systems, platforms), and contexts (institutional, professional, corporate, social.

That provides for a seamless integration of information processing, from data mining to knowledge management and decision making:

  • Data is first captured through aspects.
  • Categories are used to process data into information on one hand, design production systems on the other hand.
  • Concepts serve as bridges to knowledgeable information.

CaKe_DataInfoKnow

A beta version is available for comments on the Stanford/Protégé portal with the link: Caminao Ontological Kernel (CaKe).

Further Reading

External Links

Open Ontologies: From Silos to Architectures

To be of any use for enterprises, ontologies have to embrace a wide range of contexts and concerns, often ill-defined for environments, rather well expounded for systems.

Circumscribed Contexts & Crossed Concerns (Robert Goben)

And now that enterprises have to compete in open, digitized, and networked environments, business and systems ontologies have to be combined into modular knowledge architectures.

Ontologies & Contexts

If open-ended business contexts and concerns are to be taken into account, the first step should be to characterize ontologies with regard to their source, justification, and the stability of their categories, e.g:

  • Institutional: Regulatory authority, steady, changes subject to established procedures.
  • Professional: Agreed upon between parties, steady, changes subject to accords.
  • Corporate: Defined by enterprises, changes subject to internal decision-making.
  • Social: Defined by usage, volatile, continuous and informal changes.
  • Personal: Customary, defined by named individuals (e.g research paper).

Assuming such an external taxonomy, the next step would be to see what kind of internal (i.e enterprise architecture) ontologies can be fitted into, as it’s the case for the Zachman framework.

The Zachman’s taxonomy is built on well established concepts (Who,What,How, Where, When) applied across architecture layers for enterprise (business and organization), systems (logical structures and functionalities), and platforms (technologies). These layers can be generalized and applied uniformly across external contexts, from well-defined (e.g regulations) to fuzzy (e.g business prospects or new technologies) ones, e.g:

Ontologies, capabilities (Who,What,How, Where, When), and architectures (enterprise, systems, platforms).

That “divide to conquer” strategy is to serve two purposes:

  • By bridging the gap between internal and external taxonomies it significantly enhances the transparency of governance and decision-making.
  • By applying the same motif (Who,What, How, Where, When) across the semantics of contexts, it opens the door to a seamless integration of all kinds of knowledge: enterprise, professional, institutional, scientific, etc.

As can be illustrated using Zachman concepts, the benefits are straightforward at enterprise architecture level (e.g procurement), due to the clarity of supporting ontologies; not so for external ones, which are by nature open and overlapping and often come with blurred semantics.

Ontologies & Concerns

A broad survey of RDF-based ontologies demonstrates how semantic overlaps and folds can be sort out using built-in differentiation between domains’ semantics on one hand, structure and processing of symbolic representations on the other hand. But such schemes are proprietary, and evidence shows their lines seldom tally, with dire consequences for interoperability: even without taking into account relationships and integrity constraints, weaving together ontologies from different sources is to be cumbersome, the costs substantial, and the outcome often reduced to a muddy maze of ambiguous semantics.

Knowledge graphs have tackled the difficulty by setting apart representation (e.g RDF) and contents semantics (aka ontologies), and their impressive performances across a wide range of domains bear witness of the soundness of the approach.

The governance-driven taxonomy introduced above deals with contexts and consequently with coarse-grained modularity. It should be complemented by a fine-grained one to be driven by concerns, more precisely by the epistemic nature of the individual instances to be denoted. As it happens, that could also tally with the Zachman’s taxonomy:

  • Thesaurus: ontologies covering terms and concepts.
  • Documents: ontologies covering documents with regard to topics.
  • Business: ontologies of relevant enterprise organization and business objects and activities.
  • Engineering: symbolic representation of organization and business objects and activities.
KM_OntosCapabs
Ontologies: Purposes & Targets

Enterprises could then pick and combine templates according to domains of concern and governance. Taking an on-line insurance business for example, enterprise knowledge architecture would have to include:

  • Medical thesaurus and consolidated regulations (Knowledge).
  • Principles and resources associated to the web-platform (Engineering).
  • Description of products (e.g vehicles) and services (e.g insurance plans) from partners (Business).

Such designs of ontologies according to the governance of contexts and the nature of concerns would significantly reduce blanket overlaps and improve the modularity and transparency of ontologies.

On a broader perspective, that policy will help to align knowledge management with EA governance by setting apart ontologies defined externally (e.g regulations), from the ones set through decision-making, strategic (e.g plate-form) or tactical (e.g partnerships).

Open Ontologies’ Benefits

Benefits from open and formatted ontologies built along an explicit distinction between the semantics of representation (aka ontology syntax) and the semantics of context can be directly identified for:

Modularity: the knowledge basis of enterprise architectures could be continuously tailored to changes in markets and corporate structures without impairing enterprise performances.

Integration: the design of ontologies with regard to the nature of targets and stability of categories could enable built-in alignment mechanisms between knowledge architectures and contexts.

Interoperability: limited overlaps and finer granularity are to greatly reduce frictions when ontologies bearing out business processes are to be combined or extended.

Reliability: formatted ontologies can be compared to typed programming languages with regard to transparency, internal consistency, and external validity.

Last but not least, such reasoned design of ontologies may open new perspectives for the collaboration between cognitive humans and pretending ones.

Further Reading

External Links

2018: Clones vs Octopuses

In the footsteps of robots replacing workmen, deep learning bots look to boot out knowledge workers overwhelmed by muddy data.

Cloning Knowledge (Tadeusz Cantor, from “The Dead Class”)

Faced with that , should humans try to learn deeper and faster than clones, or should they learn from octopuses and their smart hands.

Machine Learning & The Economics of Clones

As illustrated by scan-reading AI machines, the spreading of learning AI technology in every nook and cranny introduces something like an exponential multiplier: compared to the power-loom of the Industrial Revolution which substituted machines for workers, deep learning is substituting replicators for machines; and contrary to power looms, there is no physical limitation on the number of smart clones that can be deployed. So, however fast and deep humans can learn, clones are much too prolific: it’s a no-win situation. To get out of that conundrum humans have to put their hand on a competitive edge, e.g some kind of knowledge that cannot be cloned.

Knowledge & Competition

Appraising humans learning sway over machines, one can take from Spinoza’s categories of knowledge with regard to sources:

  1. Senses (views, sounds, smells, touches) or beliefs (as nurtured by the supposed common “sense”). Artificial sensors can compete with human ones, and smart machines are much better if prejudiced beliefs are put into the equation.
  2. Reasoning, i.e the mental processing of symbolic representations. As demonstrated by AlphaGo, machines are bound to fast extend their competitive edge.
  3. Philosophy which is by essence meant to bring together perceptions, intuitions, and symbolic representations. That’s where human intelligence could beat its artificial cousin which is clueless when purposes are needed.

That assessment is bore out by evolution: the absolute dominance established by humans over other animal species comes from their use of knowledge, which can be summarized as:

  1. Use of symbolic representations.
  2. Ability to formulate and exchange representations of contexts, concerns, and policies.
  3. Ability to agree on stakes and cooperate on policies.

On that basis, the third dimension, i.e the use of symbolic knowledge to cooperate on non-zero-sum endeavors, can be used to draw the demarcation line between human and artificial intelligence:

  • Paths and paces of pursuits as part and parcel of the knowledge itself. The fact that both are mostly obviated by search engines gives humans some edge.
  • Operational knowledge is best understood as information put to use, and must include concerns and decision-making. But smart bots’ ubiquity and capabilities often sap information traceability and decisions transparency, which makes room for humans to prevail.

So humans can find a clear competitive edge in this knowledge dimension because it relies on a combination of experience and thinking and is therefore hard to clone. Organizations should make sure that’s where smart systems take back and humans take up.

Organization & Innovation

Innovation being at the root of competitive edge, understanding the role played by smart systems is a key success factor; that is to be defined by organization.

As epitomized by Henry Ford, industrial-era thinking associated innovation with top-down management and the specialization of execution:

  • At execution level manual tasks were to be fragmented and specialized.
  • At management level analysis and decision-making were to be centralized and abstracted.

That organizational paradigm puts a double restraint on innovation:

  • On execution side the fragmentation of manual tasks prevents workers from effectively assessing and improving their performances.
  • On management side knowledge is kept in conceptual boxes and bereft of feedback from actual uses.

That railing between smart brains and dumb hands may have worked well enough for manufacturing processes limited to material flows and subject to circumscribed and predictable technological changes. It didn’t last.

First, as such hierarchies necessarily grow with processes complexity, overheads and rigidity force repeated pruning. Then, flat hierarchies are of limited use when information flows are to be combined with material ones, so enterprises have to start with matrix organization. Finally, with the seamless integration of digital and material flows, perpetuating the traditional line between management and execution is bound to hamstring innovation:

  • Smart tools may be able to perform a wide range of physical tasks without human supervision, but the core of innovation core as well as its front lines are where human and machines collaborate in processing a mix of material and information flows, both learning from the experience.
  • Hierarchies and centralized decision-making are being cut out from feeders when set in networked business environments colonized by smart bots on both sides of corporate boundaries.

Not surprisingly, these innovation trends seem to tally with the social dimension of knowledge.

Learning from the Octopus

The AI revolution has already broken all historical records of footprint (everything is affected) and speed (a matter of years). Given the length of human education cycles, appraising the consequences comes with some urgency, beginning with the disposal of two entrenched beliefs:

At individual level the new paradigm could be compared to the nervous system of octopuses: each arm gets its brain and neurons, and so its own touch of knowledge and taste of decision-making.

On a broader (i.e enterprise) perspective, knowledge should be supported by two organizational layers, one direct and innovation-driven between trusted co-workers, the other networked and knowledge-driven between remote workers, trusted or otherwise.

Postscript

Further Reading

External Links

Transcription & Deep Learning

Humans looking for reassurance against the encroachment of artificial brains should try YouTube subtitles: whatever Google’s track record in natural language processing, the way its automated scribe writes down what is said in the movies is essentially useless.

A blank sheet of paper was copied on a Xerox machine.
This copy was used to make a second copy.
The second to make a third one, and so on…
Each copy as it came out of the machine was re-used to make the next.
This was continued for one hundred times, producing a book of one hundred pages. (Ian Burn)

Experience directly points to the probable cause of failure: the usefulness of real-time transcriptions is not a linear function of accuracy because every slip can be fatal, without backup or second chance. It’s like walking a line: for all practical purposes a single misunderstanding can throw away the thread of understanding, without a chance of retrieve or reprieve.

Contrary to Turing machines, listeners have no finite states; and contrary to the sequence of symbols on tapes, tales are told by weaving together semantic threads. It ensues that stories are work in progress: readers can pause to review and consolidate meanings, but listeners have no other choice than punting on what comes to they mind, hopping that the fabric of the story will carry them out.

So, whereas automated scribes can deep learn from written texts and recorded conversations, there is no way to do the same from what listeners understand. That’s the beauty of story telling: words may be written but meanings are renewed each time the words are heard.

Further Reading

Why Virtual Reality (VR) is Late

Preamble

Whereas virtual reality (VR) has been expected to be the next breakthrough for IT human interfaces, the future seems to be late.

Detached Reality (N.Ghesquiere, G.Coddington)

Together with the cost of ownership, a primary cause mentioned for the lukewarm embrace is the nausea associated with the technology. Insofar as the nausea is provoked by a delay in perceptions, the consensus is that both obstacles should be overcame by continuous advances in computing power. But that optimistic assessment rests on the assumption that the nausea effect is to be uniformly decreasing.

Virtual vs Augmented

The recent extension of a traditional roller-coaster at SeaWorld Orlando illustrates the difference between virtual and augmented reality. Despite being marketed as virtual reality, the combination of actual physical experience (roller-coaster) with virtual perceptions (3D video) clearly belongs to the augmented breed, and its success may put some new light on the nausea effect.

Consciousness Cannot Wait

Awareness is what anchors living organisms to their environment. So, lest a confusion is introduced between individuals experience and their biological clock, perceptions are to be immediate; and since that confusion is not cognitive but physical, it will cause nausea. True to form, engineers initial answer has been to cut down elapsed time through additional computing power; that indeed brought a decline in the nausea effect, as well as an increase in the cost of ownership. Unfortunately, benefits and costs don’t tally: however small is the remaining latency, nausea effects are disproportionate.

Aesop’s Lesson

The way virtual and augmented reality deal with latency may help to understand the limitations of a minimizing strategy:

  • With virtual reality latency occurs between users voluntary actions (e.g moving their heads) and devices (e.g headset) generated responses.
  • With augmented reality latency occurs between actual perceptions and software generated responses.

That’s basically the situation of Aesop’s “The Tortoise and the Hare” fable: in the physical realm the hare (aka computer) is either behind or ahead of the tortoise (the user), which means that some latency (positive or negative) is unavoidable.

That lesson applies to virtual reality because both terms are set in actuality, which means that nausea can be minimized but not wholly eliminated. But that’s not the case for augmented reality because the second term is a floating variable that can be logically adjusted.

The SeaWorld roller-coaster takes full advantage of this point by directly tying up augmented stimuli to actual ones: augmented reality scripts are aligned with roller-coaster episodes and their execution synchronized through special sensors. Whatever the remaining latency, it is to be of a different nature: instead of having to synchronize their (conscious) actions with the environment feedback, users only have to consolidate external stimuli, a more mundane task which doesn’t involve consciousness.

Further Reading

External Links