Concepts Identity Broker status

Marc-Antoine Parent

March 21st 2023

Status report

  • Conceptual model: Almost complete
  • Paper prototype: Just begun
  • Data model: Underway
  • Code: Just begun

Goal: Reuse mutual understanding

  • Misunderstandings based on ambiguous terms
  • Precision is continuously discovered through iterative alignment
    • We ourselves don’t really know what we mean until it’s discussed
  • Alignment proceeds through distinctions (criteria) or examples (stories)
  • Keep track of terms used in those criteria and stories
  • Terms have a private and a public meaning, which have different histories

Some definitions and assumptions

  • Communication is an event stream
  • Anything we can talk about is a Topic (recursively) (aka Concept)
  • We use Symbols to refer to those Topics.
    • Including: Natural language, OWL URIs, UUIDs…
  • Claims assign a Belief state to a Proposition, which is made of Terms
  • At the collective level, belief is a statistic
    • Evidence has entirely different rules!
  • Anything expressed can be interpreted differently

Principles for a data structure

  • An identifier follows the evolution of a concept’s definition
    • Opaque identifiers: No incentive to control
  • Personal reference combines with immutable state
    • Track divergence for massive claim rewrite
  • State as positions in a dynamic partial lattice
    • Equivalence classes of sets of definition elements

Composing definition elements

  1. Given a super-category and two non-empty distinctions, there are 5 basic cases
    1. Identity, Containment either way, Overlap, Disjoint
    2. Also: Is the union exhaustive?
  2. Stories as evidence that a point is populated
  3. Lattice operators on-demand, when categories are socially salient
    1. Equivalence of meet as a join operator

Claim enrichment

Claim enrichment

Claim enrichment

After claim enrichment

Reading an enriched claim

A reader identifies an ambiguity

Requesting a new distinction

Claim evolution

API: Inner knowledge repository

  • Which terms are part of this statement?
  • Which of my statements use this term?
  • Which statements do I use to define this term?
  • Could a statement use a more general / specific term?
  • All or some statements using a term should use another

API: Listening

  • Where does my concept fit in the global concept lattice?
    • likely matches using text match, AI embeddings, etc
    • navigating the formal concept lattice
  • What distinctions are the most salient for this concept? Any new ones?
  • Which definitions or examples for this concept are thought to be clearest?
  • Is this proposition widely believed? disbelieved? divisive? unknown?

API: Updating

  • Publish claims, endorse definitions
  • Propose a new concept, distinction, example
  • Update personal definition of a term and all related statements
  • Claim that two definition elements are related in some way
    • 5 cases: Identity, Containment either way, Overlap, Disjoint
    • Lattice operators on-demand, when categories are socially salient
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