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

Global and not fractal
- Sets of definition elements may be adopted fractally?

Composing definition elements

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?
Stories as evidence that a point is populated
Lattice operators on-demand, when categories are socially salient
1. Equivalence of meet as a join operator

Partial, not full lattice

Claim enrichment

Sentence or frame (progressive formalization)
Term selection
Show options
Show claims held true about each option
Show lattice structure? As claim signature.

Claim enrichment

Claim enrichment

After claim enrichment

Reading an enriched claim

A reader identifies an ambiguity

Propose two readings of a term
Explain the distinction
Give examples

Requesting a new distinction

Claim evolution

My claims depends on a term
The term gets a new distinction
My claims gets marked for update
I can choose a single branch
I can review claims

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

Concepts Identity Broker status Marc-Antoine Parent March 21st 2023

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