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NASA-Ontolog-KMWG OKMDS mini-series Session-06 - Thu 17-April-2008

  • Session Title: Knowledge Mapping for Sensemaking

OKMDS-06_scrn-1b.jpg OKMDS-06_scrn-2b.jpg

From the SL virtual world event: screenshot-01 screenshot-02

(click on above links to view the full size images) . . . . . .

Background

This "Ontology in Knowledge Management and Decision Support (OKMDS)" mini-series is a collaboration between NASA, Ontolog and the (US) Federal Knowledge Management Working Group (KMWG) and is co-organized by a team of individuals from various related communities passionate about creating the opportunity for an inter-community, collaborative exploration of the intersection between Ontology, Knowledge Management and Decision Support, that could eventually lead us toward "Better Decision Making."

The mini-series will span a period of about six months (Nov-2007 to May-2008), during which we will be featuring Talks, Panel Discussions and Online Discourse on pertinent issues. We expect all the talks and panel discussion events to be offered in both 'real world' (augmented conference calls) and 'virtual world' (Second Life) settings.

Refer to details about this mini-series at the OKMDS project homepage at: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OKMDS

Agenda & Proceedings: OKMDS Mini-series Launch Meeting

  • Session Format: this is a virtual session conducted over an augmented conference call. This virtual event is also featured concurrently at the NASA/JPL Explorer Island in the "Second Life" virtual world settings.

Title: Knowledge Mapping for Sensemaking

Abstracts:

A "knowledge mapping" approach to managing information, knowledge and decisions places the emphasis on the creation of "cartographic" layers, which like spatial maps, weave different kinds of stories over the "raw data" of documents, deadlines, resources, problems. Just as the map is not the territory, neither is a knowledge map neutral, nor necessarily a consensus worldview, and not to be taken as truth. Continuing the spatial planning metaphor, a good knowledge map is a powerful representation for sensemaking: orientation, shared memory, filtering complexity, and maintaining shared attention for planning and decision making. In software, digital maps of such intellectual landscapes exploit the power of hypermedia, folksonomy, social tools, and (where possible) reasoning over formal ontology. The centrality of social processes in negotiating the meaning of a map is unquestioned. The speakers in today's session work from these assumptions, and will take you deeper into their particular approaches.
The panelists' presentations will open with Jeff Conklin introducing wicked problems which is germane to all of the work presented in today's session and provides a key motivation for dialogue and issue mapping.
Then SimonBuckinghamShum will present dialogue and issue mapping as examples of Hypermedia Discourse, and show how Jeff's work has been extended as conversational modelling, show examples, adding in argument mapping, and introducing Cohere.
EricYeh will then tell us about their project work, which takes forward a particular aspect of argument mapping with SEAS evidence mapping.
JackPark will round the presentations off by explaining that all of the above work, as well as other input available on the web, can be seen as sources of entries in layers of federating topics maps that connect them all up, in his process of Knowledge Gardening.

Wicked Problems and their Non-linear Process Demands - JeffConklin

When stakeholders engage with a "wicked problem" the biggest obstacles they face are (i) that they do not agree on a problem definition and (ii) their attempts to define the problem lead them into cross-functional and cross-disciplinary semantic tangles. It is not simply that they disagree about what the problem is, and thus how to proceed in solving it, but that their understandings about the problem-solution space are incommensurable - they don't even make sense to each other. To make sense of the situation they must undertake cognitively demanding conversations on a range of interconnected issues that cover the entire problem-solution space, and these issues interact so tightly that they cannot be settled in a linear fashion - they must be explored in parallel. This talk describes the Dialogue Mapping process, a knowledge mapping technique that facilitates and captures this collaborative learning process.

Hypermedia Discourse & Human-Agent Knowledge Cartography - SimonBuckinghamShum

I'll introduce the Hypermedia Discourse project at the Knowledge Media Institute, which since 1995 has been developing theory and tools for structuring and visualizing dialogue and argumentation. The fundamental assumptions are that meaning lies in the connections that we make between ideas, that we must be able to represent multiple views on an issue, and that we establish common ground and make decisions by talking, arguing if necessary. The ontologies of interest to us are not therefore the conventional codifications of consensus about a problem domain, because we're interested in contested domains, and often, real time decision making in response to unfolding events which may not be formalizable. Instead, the focus is on lightweight discourse ontologies: an agreed language for making and contesting claims about that domain. Illustrations will be taken from mapping the Iraq Debate, mapping deliberations in hostage recovery, and mapping simulated Mars-Earth geological exploration with the NASA Ames Mobile Agents project -- which we believe is the first demonstration of a knowledge mapping tool embedded within a human/software multiagent work system. Tools described are Compendium and Cohere.

Structured Evidential Argumentation System (SEAS) - EricYeh

The Structured Evidential Argumentation System (SEAS) is a collaborative tool which facilitates analysis of a problem by a group of analysts. SEAS makes explicit the lines of reasoning used to arrive at a conclusion by framing an analysis as a hierarchy of questions, starting from higher-level concepts down to observables. By using a structured approach, the lines of reasoning can be represented as concise graphics, allowing the consumer to quickly situate and understand the driving factors underlying an analysis. SEAS is template based, which allows the re-use and transfer of analytical methods and knowledge, and also sets a base for comparisons against historical precedents and alternative analyses and scenarios.

Federating hypermedia discourse for sensemaking - JackPark

Information resources accumulating on the web, including those created through tools of hypermedia discourse such as dialog mapping, social bookmarking, and relational annotations on the web, represent an opportunity for decision making support. To facilitate that support, a topic map-based portal provides a means by which those information resources can be federated (brought together), indexed, and organized along subject-centric dimensions. We describe a prototype knowledge federation platform and describe how it can be use in a process we call Knowledge Gardening.

About the Speakers

JeffConklin, PhD is the Director of CogNexus Institute, a training, facilitation and research services firm in Napa, California. He has degrees in Biology, Philosophy, and Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence. Dr. Conklin is perhaps best known for his work with the Issue Based Information System (IBIS) method and extensions of it, such as research tools (gIBIS), commercial products (QuestMap), and the open source Compendium knowledge-mapping tool. His book, Dialogue Mapping: Creating Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems, describes an interactive process by which groups get traction on complex and ambiguous problems through collaborative construction of knowledge maps that organize the issues and documents involved.
SimonBuckinghamShum, PhD is a Senior Lecturer at the UK Open University's Knowledge Media Institute. Following degrees in Psychology, Ergonomics and HCI, he has worked on visual hypertext for mapping meetings and argumentation since 1990, and leads the Hypermedia Discourse Project. He co-edited "Visualizing Argumentation" (2003), which brought together leading figures in argument mapping, and "Knowledge Cartography" (2008) expands this. He has received UK and US funding for e-science and e- learning projects, and is co-founder of the Compendium Institute, leading development of the Compendium tool for Dialogue Mapping and Conversational Modelling. He co-chaired the 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web. The most recent knowledge mapping tool is Cohere, which moves towards a Web 2.0 connection management/argumentation platform. Various talks are available.
EricYeh is a software engineer with the Representation and Reasoning program at the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International. He is a team member on the Structured Evidential Argumentation System (SEAS) project, a web-based tool that facilitates collaborative analysis. Eric is also a developer on the Angler project, a web-based tool for exploring a problem space collaboratively by employing divergent and convergent thinking techniques. ... Eric received his BA in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley, and is currently a MSCS student at Stanford University.
JackPark is a research scientist in the AI Laboratory at SRI, International in Menlo Park. He works with Adam Cheyer's integration team on the DARPA-funded CALO project, where he created the prototype from which the team evolved the IRIS desktop knowledge workstation. During employment with VerticalNet, Park served on the XTM Authoring Committee which created the XTM topic maps specification, now a part of the ISO 13250 Topic Maps standard. In a former life, while serving as the president of the American Wind Energy Association, Park was constructing microprocessor-based weather stations used for siting wind energy farms and in agricultural applications. The massive amounts of data being collected by those stations led to investigations into AI applications in data mining and data organization. Ontologies and inference engines naturally followed. Park has crafted Java-based inference engines for a large banking enterprise, a clinical informatics enterprise, and participated in the construction of the VerticalNet B2B ontology editor. Park authored The Wind Power Book in 1981, and co-authored and edited XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web, published in 2002. He has taught university courses in renewable energy resources in the U.S., and lectured on those subjects in the U.S., parts of Europe and Africa. He spends most of his time now evolving applications for subject maps related to the Doug Engelbart call for continuous improvement of human capabilities.

Resources

  • To participate in the online discourse to further explore the OKMDS subject matter, please subscribe to our open archived discussion forum by:
  • To be part of the conversation, it is most appropriate that you should already be a member of either the KMWG community or the Ontolog community. Read on, if you aren't already.
    • For participation in KMWG (US) Federal Knowledge Management Working Group - an open forum for collaboration on issues related to government-focused knowledge management,
    • For participation in Ontolog - an open, international, virtual community of practice devoted to advancing the field of ontology, ontological engineering and semantic technology, and advocating their adoption into mainstream applications and international standards,
  • To subscribe to [ontolog-invitation], the Ontolog event announcement list (one doesn't necessarily have to be a community member), simply send a blank e-mail to ontolog-invitation-join@ontolog.cim3.net, and then confirm to the system generated e-mail address validation message accordingly.

Audio Recording of this Session

  • To download the audio recording of the session, click here
    • the playback of the audio files require the proper setup, and an MP3 compatible player on your computer.
  • Conference Date and Time: 17-Apr-2008 10:47am~1:06pm PST
  • Duration of Recording: 2 Hour 12 Minutes
  • Recording File Size: 15.2 MB (in mp3 format)
  • Telephone Playback
    • Prior to the Expiration Date of 17-May-2008 0:00 AM PST, one can call-in and hear the telephone playback of the session.
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      • Skype: +990008271111 (free computer-to-computer call)
      • non-Skype callers from other countries can dial into either the US or UK number for the playback (long distance costs apply)
      • Conference ID: 5823120#
      • Recording Reference Number: 156594#
    • suggestion:
      • its best that you listen to the session while having the slide presentation opened in front of you. You'll be prompted to advance slides by the speaker.
  • Take a look, also, at the rich body of knowledge that this community has built together, over the years, by going through the archives of noteworthy past Ontolog events. (References on how to subscribe to our podcast can also be found there.)

For the Record ...

Conference Call Details

  • Date: Thursday, April 17, 2008
  • Start Time: 10:30am PDT / 1:30pm EDT / 17:30 UTC
  • Expected Call Duration: ~2.0 hours
  • Dial-in Number:
    • Direct call from from Skype: +990008275823120
    • When calling in from a phone, use Conference ID: "5823120#"
    • from a US telephone (US): +1-605-475-8590 (South Dakota, USA)
    • from Europe, call:
      • Austria 0820-4000-1574
      • Belgium 070-35-9989
      • France 0826-100-277
      • Germany 01805-00-7649
      • Ireland 0818-270-034
      • Italy 0848-390-175
      • Netherlands 0870-001-932
      • Spain 0902-886-051
      • Switzerland 0848-560-195
      • UK 0870-738-0763
    • callers from other countries please dial into either one of the US or European numbers
  • Shared-screen support (VNC session) will be started 5 minutes before the call at: http://vnc2.cim3.net:5800/
    • view-only password: "ontolog"
    • if you plan to be logging into this shared-screen option (which the speaker may be navigating), and you are not familiar with the process, please try to call in 5 minutes before the start of the session so that we can work out the connection logistics. Help on this will generally not be available once the presentation starts.
    • people behind corporate firewalls may have difficulty accessing this. If that is the case, please download the slides below and running them locally. The speaker(s) will prompt you to advance the slides during the talk.
  • Please note that this session will be recorded, and the audio archive is expected to be made available as open content to our community membership and the public at-large under our prevailing open IPR policy.

Attendees

  • Others we were expecting (and who may have joined us after the roll call):
    • Chales Du [SL: Helion Enzo]
    • Charlotte Linde (NASA/ARC)
    • Keith Walker (Lockheed Martin)
    • Avery Sen (NOAA)
    • Mitch Ringer
    • ... to register for participation, please add your name (plus your affiliation, if you aren't already a member of the community) above, or e-mail <peter.yim@cim3.com> so that we can reserve enough resources to support everyone's participation. ...

Questions, Answers & Discourse

  • (Unless the conference host has already muted everyone) Please mute your phone, by pressing "*2" on your phone keypad, when the talk is in progress. To un-mute, press "*3"
  • If you want to speak or have questions or remarks to make, please "raise your hand (virtually)" by pressing "11" on your phone keypad. You may speak when acknowledged by the speaker or the session moderator. Test your voice and introduce yourself first before proceeding with your remarks, please.
  • You can also type in your questions or comments through the browser based chat session by:
    • point a separate browser tab (or window) to http://webconf.soaphub.org/conf/room and enter: Room="ontolog_20080417" and My Name="Your Own Name" (e.g. "JaneDoe")
    • or point your browser to: http://webconf.soaphub.org/conf/room/ontolog_20080417
      • instructions: once you got access to the page, click on the "settings" button, and identify yourself (by modifying the Name field). You can indicate that you want to ask a question verbally by clicking on the "hand" button, and wait for the moderator to call on you; or, type and send your question into the chat window at the bottom of the screen.
  • For those who have further questions or remarks on the topic, please post them to the [okmds-convene] forum so that everyone in the community can benefit from the discourse. (One needs to be subscribed to this archived mailing list first before posting. See subscription details here.)



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