16 December 2013

Knowledge Management: Domains (Just the Quotes)

"Great discoveries which give a new direction to currents of thoughts and research are not, as a rule, gained by the accumulation of vast quantities of figures and statistics. These are apt to stifle and asphyxiate and they usually follow rather than precede discovery. The great discoveries are due to the eruption of genius into a closely related field, and the transfer of the precious knowledge there found to his own domain." (Theobald Smith, Boston Medical and Surgical Journal Volume 172, 1915)

"Learning is any change in a system that produces a more or less permanent change in its capacity for adapting to its environment. Understanding systems, especially systems capable of understanding problems in new task domains, are learning systems." (Herbert A Simon, "The Sciences of the Artificial", 1968)

"A cognitive system is a system whose organization defines a domain of interactions in which it can act with relevance to the maintenance of itself, and the process of cognition is the actual (inductive) acting or behaving in this domain. Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with and without a nervous system." (Humberto R Maturana, "Biology of Cognition", 1970)

"No theory ever agrees with all the facts in its domain, yet it is not always the theory that is to blame. Facts are constituted by older ideologies, and a clash between facts and theories may be proof of progress. It is also a first step in our attempt to find the principles implicit in familiar observational notions." (Paul K Feyerabend, "Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge", 1975)

"A cognitive map is a specific way of representing a person's assertions about some limited domain, such as a policy problem. It is designed to capture the structure of the person's causal assertions and to generate the consequences that follow front this structure. […]  a person might use his cognitive map to derive explanations of the past, make predictions for the future, and choose policies in the present." (Robert M Axelrod, "Structure of Decision: The cognitive maps of political elites", 1976)

"The thinking person goes over the same ground many times. He looks at it from varying points of view - his own, his arch-enemy’s, others’. He diagrams it, verbalizes it, formulates equations, constructs visual images of the whole problem, or of troublesome parts, or of what is clearly known. But he does not keep a detailed record of all this mental work, indeed could not. […] Deep understanding of a domain of knowledge requires knowing it in various ways. This multiplicity of perspectives grows slowly through hard work and sets the state for the re-cognition we experience as a new insight." (Howard E Gruber, "Darwin on Man", 1981)

"Metaphor [is] a pervasive mode of understanding by which we project patterns from one domain of experience in order to structure another domain of a different kind. So conceived metaphor is not merely a linguistic mode of expression; rather, it is one of the chief cognitive structures by which we are able to have coherent, ordered experiences that we can reason about and make sense of. Through metaphor, we make use of patterns that obtain in our physical experience to organise our more abstract understanding." (Mark Johnson, "The Body in the Mind", 1987)

"There is no coherent knowledge, i.e. no uniform comprehensive account of the world and the events in it. There is no comprehensive truth that goes beyond an enumeration of details, but there are many pieces of information, obtained in different ways from different sources and collected for the benefit of the curious. The best way of presenting such knowledge is the list - and the oldest scientific works were indeed lists of facts, parts, coincidences, problems in several specialized domains." (Paul K Feyerabend, "Farewell to Reason", 1987)

"[…] a mental model is a mapping from a domain into a mental representation which contains the main characteristics of the domain; a model can be ‘run’ to generate explanations and expectations with respect to potential states. Mental models have been proposed in particular as the kind of knowledge structures that people use to understand a specific domain […]" (Helmut Jungermann, Holger Schütz & Manfred Thuering, "Mental models in risk assessment: Informing people about drugs", Risk Analysis 8 (1), 1988)

"Algorithmic complexity theory and nonlinear dynamics together establish the fact that determinism reigns only over a quite finite domain; outside this small haven of order lies a largely uncharted, vast wasteland of chaos." (Joseph Ford, "Progress in Chaotic Dynamics: Essays in Honor of Joseph Ford's 60th Birthday", 1988)

"When partitioning a domain, we divide the information model so that the clusters remain intact. [...] Each section of the information model then becomes a separate subsystem. Note that when the information model is partitioned into subsystems, each object is assigned to exactly one subsystem."  (Stephen J Mellor, "Object-Oriented Systems Analysis: Modeling the World In Data", 1988) 

"While a small domain (consisting of fifty or fewer objects) can generally be analyzed as a unit, large domains must be partitioned to make the analysis a manageable task. To make such a partitioning, we take advantage of the fact that objects on an information model tend to fall into clusters: groups of objects that are interconnected with one another by many relationships. By contrast, relatively few relationships connect objects in different clusters." (Stephen J Mellor, "Object-Oriented Systems Analysis: Modeling the World In Data", 1988) 

"A law explains a set of observations; a theory explains a set of laws. […] a law applies to observed phenomena in one domain (e.g., planetary bodies and their movements), while a theory is intended to unify phenomena in many domains. […] Unlike laws, theories often postulate unobservable objects as part of their explanatory mechanism." (John L Casti, "Searching for Certainty: How Scientists Predict the Future", 1990)

"Generally speaking, problem knowledge for solving a given problem may consist of heuristic rules or formulas that comprise the explicit knowledge, and past-experience data that comprise the implicit, hidden knowledge. Knowledge represents links between the domain space and the solution space, the space of the independent variables and the space of the dependent variables." (Nikola K Kasabov, "Foundations of Neural Networks, Fuzzy Systems, and Knowledge Engineering", 1996)

"Inference is the process of matching current facts from the domain space to the existing knowledge and inferring new facts. An inference process is a chain of matchings. The intermediate results obtained during the inference process are matched against the existing knowledge. The length of the chain is different. It depends on the knowledge base and on the inference method applied." (Nikola K Kasabov, "Foundations of Neural Networks, Fuzzy Systems, and Knowledge Engineering", 1996)

"An individual understands a concept, skill, theory, or domain of knowledge to the extent that he or she can apply it appropriately in a new situation." (Howard Gardner, "The Disciplined Mind", 1999)

"Knowledge maps are node-link representations in which ideas are located in nodes and connected to other related ideas through a series of labeled links. They differ from other similar representations such as mind maps, concept maps, and graphic organizers in the deliberate use of a common set of labeled links that connect ideas. Some links are domain specific (e.g., function is very useful for some topic domains...) whereas other links (e.g., part) are more broadly used. Links have arrowheads to indicate the direction of the relationship between ideas." (Angela M. O’Donnell et al, "Knowledge Maps as Scaffolds for Cognitive Processing", Educational Psychology Review Vol. 14 (1), 2002) 

"We build models to increase productivity, under the justified assumption that it's cheaper to manipulate the model than the real thing. Models then enable cheaper exploration and reasoning about some universe of discourse. One important application of models is to understand a real, abstract, or hypothetical problem domain that a computer system will reflect. This is done by abstraction, classification, and generalization of subject-matter entities into an appropriate set of classes and their behavior." (Stephen J Mellor, "Executable UML: A Foundation for Model-Driven Architecture", 2002)

"A domain model is not a particular diagram; it is the idea that the diagram is intended to convey. It is not just the knowledge in a domain expert’s head; it is a rigorously organized and selective abstraction of that knowledge." (Eric Evans, "Domain-Driven Design: Tackling complexity in the heart of software", 2003)

"Domain experts are usually not aware of how complex their mental processes are as, in the course of their work, they navigate all these rules, reconcile contradictions, and fill in gaps with common sense. Software can’t do this. It is through knowledge crunching in close collaboration with software experts that the rules are clarified, fleshed out, reconciled, or placed out of scope." (Eric Evans, "Domain-Driven Design: Tackling complexity in the heart of software", 2003)

"Effective domain modelers are knowledge crunchers. They take a torrent of information and probe for the relevant trickle. They try one organizing idea after another, searching for the simple view that makes sense of the mass. Many models are tried and rejected or transformed. Success comes in an emerging set of abstract concepts that makes sense of all the detail. This distillation is a rigorous expression of the particular knowledge that has been found most relevant." (Eric Evans, "Domain-Driven Design: Tackling complexity in the heart of software", 2003)

"Perception and memory are imprecise filters of information, and the way in which information is presented, that is, the frame, influences how it is received. Because too much information is difficult to deal with, people have developed shortcuts or heuristics in order to come up with reasonable decisions. Unfortunately, sometimes these heuristics lead to bias, especially when used outside their natural domains." (Lucy F Ackert & Richard Deaves, "Behavioral Finance: Psychology, Decision-Making, and Markets", 2010)

"This is always the case in analogical reasoning: Relations between two dissimilar domains never map completely to one another. In fact, it is often the salient similarities between the base and target domains that provoke thought and increase the usefulness of an analogy as a problem-solving tool." (Robbie T Nakatsu, "Diagrammatic Reasoning in AI", 2010)

"Conceptual models are best thought of as design-tools - a way for designers to straighten out and simplify the design and match it to the users’ task-domain, thereby making it clearer to users how they should think about the application. The designers’ responsibility is to devise a conceptual model that seems natural to users based on the users’ familiarity with the task domain. If designers do their job well, the conceptual model will be the basis for users’ mental models of the application." (Jeff Johnson & Austin Henderson, "Conceptual Models", 2011)

"A model or conceptual model is a schematic or representation that describes how something works. We create and adapt models all the time without realizing it. Over time, as you gain more information about a problem domain, your model will improve to better match reality." (James Padolsey, "Clean Code in JavaScript", 2020)

"Knowledge graphs use an organizing principle so that a user (or a computer system) can reason about the underlying data. The organizing principle gives us an additional layer of organizing data (metadata) that adds connected context to support reasoning and knowledge discovery. […] Importantly, some processing can be done without knowledge of the domain, just by leveraging the features of the property graph model (the organizing principle)." (Jesús Barrasa et al, "Knowledge Graphs: Data in Context for Responsive Businesses", 2021)

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