Talk:Knowledge Science
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Note, Alfred Bork of UCI has been contacted to encourage his contributions to this article. Thanks for being patient. This article is an important contribution to not only Wikipedia, but to the knowledge economy at large since it represents the foundation of the next wave of computer technology. Dennis L. Thomas
Note: References for the University of California, Irvine / NSF funded Physics Computer Development Project have been added to the reference section below. Other references to follow as the article is expanded.
This article is highly misleading and tendentious, and much of it is incorrect. It should be deleted. The 'field' it purports to describe does not exist under this name, and the article does not refer to the actual fields which address this general research area or areas.
The definition of the 'field' as given encompasses a huge range of real science, including all of cognitive psychology, AI and much of what is now called 'cognitive science'. All of these are genuine academic research fields with many universities, research centers involved world-wide. In contrast, the term "Knowledge Science" is used only by one small company which makes overblown and exaggerated claims for its non-existent product.
The brief history given of this non-existent subject is a fantasy, omitting almost all of the actual work done by real scientists in these areas. It does not mention what is generally acknowledged to be the first AI conference, in 1956 at Dartmouth, nor the fact that the early NSF initiatives cited were only a small part of an on-going series of government-sponsored initiatives, chiefly funded through DARPA. It does not mention the stable research projects, many now academic departments, at major universities (MIT, Stanford, Illinois, Edinburgh, Oxford; too many to list.) It is also full of factual errors. In particular, the suggested link between CYC (which itself is considered an AI project by its creator) and Berners-Lee's early CERN work which gave rise the WWWeb is incorrect. Berners-Lee did not invent hyperlinks, which were pioneered many years earlier by Doug Engelbart. Hypertext systems (notably Apple's Hypercard) were already in widespread use when HTML was being devised; and HTML itself is a simplification of SQML, which was already standardized as a markup language. The WWWeb is not, and was never proposed to be, concerned with how "machines "know," "learn," "change," and "adapt" their own behaviors." At best, this might be used to describe the more recent initiative called the "Semantic Web" (SWeb), but even there it would be a ludicrously over-stated description; and the SWeb work so far has been exclusively based on established AI techniques which are not mentioned in the article. ON the other hand, to give this much space to the relatively obscure and unpublished ideas of Richard Ballard is highly misleading. To the best of my knowledge, Ballard has made no scientific contribution to any related scientific field since the early 60's; whereas the total volume of published work in AI and cognitive science now amounts to perhaps several tens of thousands of refereed publications, and AI technologies (robots, visual perception, voice recognition, rapid search techniques) are used throughout industry. -- Pat Hayes (Fellow, AAAI and CSC) Patherick 20:58, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
