Book Plan
When I was first starting to develop the idea of knowledge infrastructures, I originally intended to write a series of books. However, after reading This Business of Books by Claudia Suzanne (which I would highly recommend to prospective authors), it soon became apparent that the chances of even recuperating costs, let alone getting compensated for my time and effort, would be close to zero. For one thing, a great deal of my material is decidedly technical - with a correspondingly small prospective audience.
So eventually I decided to write a research blog, with the intention of seeing if I could build an audience over the Internet. Nevertheless, the book plan still seems to provide a good way of organizing and thinking about the materials. So in at least some senses, this website / research blog can be thought of as a series of ‘books in progress’. Perhaps one day they might even get published.
What follows is a general outline of my original book plan. This folder will (eventually) contain specific pages associated with each of the books in the plan, which in turn will contain links to materials / articles relevant to that particular book.
Trajectories: experiments in ontological innovation
Knowledge Management: TNGFoundations of General Ontology: An IntroductionAn Introduction to Mathematical OntologyKnowledge Infrastructures: Architectures and Technologies
Artificial Persons
I call the middle four books The Quartet. Trajectories is basically a prequel to Foundations of General Ontology. Artificial Persons is probably best thought of as an extended thought experiment that acts both as a sequel to The Quartet and provides a long-term vision of the ultimate potential for knowledge infrastructures.
Since The Quartet is central, I’ll start by describing each of them in turn. I’ll then move on to give brief descriptions of Trajectories and Artificial Persons.
Knowledge Management: TNG
This is intended to be the book that ‘everyone’ reads - and hence a potential ‘best-seller’ ;-) It is intended for a general audience, probably tilted towards a business perspective. It is intended to assume minimal technical or academic background, and is intended to make the case for the benefits of knowledge infrastructures (and the applications they enable), and hence to motivate people to start taking an interest in these topics.
The other three books are all targeted at more technical audiences. Their purpose is to provide the ‘real substance’ that will inevitably be lacking in a popularization such as KM:TNG.
Foundations of General Ontology: An Introduction
This can perhaps be best thought of as a multi-disciplinary book, where the core discipline is philosophy, but also including the social sciences, linguistics, semiotics, economics, and probably others. In effect, it can be thought of as tackling ‘everything except the math and the technology’, since I’ve come to the conclusion that the gaps between the mathematically literate, the technology literate, and everyone else are simply too great to be usefully bridged in a single volume. Nevertheless, I do intend to provide synopses of the mathematics and technology volumes as appendices in this one (and I expect to do the same with the other two volumes, so that they can be at least somewhat self-contained).
An Introduction to Mathematical Ontology
This is the volume for the mathematically literate (at least good undergraduate background, but also hopefully stuff that even leading-edge researchers will find interesting).
Originally, I’d thought that many of the ideas I’d been developing represented a new approach to the foundations of mathematics itself. At some point, however, I started to realize that it would be better to think of them as foundations for a new discipline that I call mathematical ontology.
As far as I’ve been able to figure out, no-one else is talking about ‘mathematical ontology’ in the sense I mean it. Web searches mostly turn up articles focusing on ‘the ontology of mathematics’. My focus is a generalized analog of ‘mathematical physics’ or ‘mathematical biology’.
I believe that my technical approaches here are quite radical in a number of ways, without (hopefully) going so far ‘out there’ that they come across as being on the ‘mathematical fringe’. I believe that laying solid foundations here is a critical aspect of establishing the overall credibility of what I’m attempting - and as a result is likely to be one of the most difficult and challenging aspects of the overall project.
Knowledge Infrastructures: Architectures and Technologies
Finally, this is the volume targeted at people in both the software industry and in IT. There is essentially a 3-stage value chain involved: tooling, knowledge infrastructures, and the applications that run on them. In addition, each of these stages has to be able to connect and interoperate with existing systems - often in quite essential ways.
The ecosystems involved cover all aspects of IT infrastructures, from databases through application servers through user interfaces, as well as the corresponding management infrastructures. They also need to cover general web infrastructures, as well as specific inter- and intra-institutional computing, communications, and data management infrastructures. Although this is certainly challenging from many perspectives, it is likely to end up being the easiest of the three ‘technical volumes’ in practice - simply because my background (32+ years with Unisys) has given me the broadest preparation in these areas.
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Trajectories: experiments in ontological innovation
As a prequel to Foundations of General Ontology, Trajectories is intended to explore many of the foundational concepts in my approach at the level of an ‘interested layperson’. In a sense, it’s intended as a kind of popularization, but with a focus on explaining the technical aspects of ontology (and mathematical ontology) to an audience that doesn’t have the technical background that will be required for the primary books.
Trajectories consists of three parts:
- Trajectories of comprehension
- Trajectories
- Identities and Masks
For reasons that are still not entirely clear to me, I’ve found it very hard to write about these topics - even though the core ideas are basically very simple and straightforward. Hopefully I’ll have better luck next time I try ;-)
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Artificial Persons
As a sequel to The Quartet, Artificial Persons is intended to provide a long-term vision of the ultimate potential of knowledge infrastructures. It is probably best thought of as an extended thought experiment.
All I want to say about it at this point is that it is based on completely different sets of principles from those associated with AI (artificial intelligence).