1
Funes the Memorious

• Issues in long term knowledge retention in
  engineering
• Chris Rusbridge

2
Contents

• DCC
• Last year?
• Funes, and the cobbler
• Knowledge, engineering, information, longevity
• Next

3
Mission

• The over-riding purpose of the DCC is to
  support and promote continuing improvement in the
  quality of data curation, and of associated
  digital preservation

4
Goals

• Strategic leadership in digital curation
• Influence and inform policy
• Provide advocacy and expert advice
• Provide resources and tools
• Raise levels of awareness and expertise
• Strengthen the community
• Continue links with leading edge research

5
Status of DCC

• Phase 2 funded 3/2007 to 2/2010
• Associated project DCC SCARP to 4/2009
• Includes immersive case study approach including
  engineering/architecture at Bath
• Just starting!

6
Last year at LTKR

• Established importance of problem
• Critical standards exist (STEP, OAIS) helpful
  but not sufficient?
• Identified some issues limitations
• Wanted engineering information in (format)
  registries
• Identified some archiving problems
• Listed some requirements

7
Funes the Memorious

• Story by Jorge Luis Borges 1
• Funes remembers everything
• 70,000 memories a day how to classify?
• Puzzled why the dog at 314 (seen from the side)
  should have the same name as the dog at 315
  (seen from the front)
• I suspect, however, that he was not very capable
  of thought. To think is to forget differences,
  generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming
  world of Funes, there were only details, almost
  immediate in their presence.

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The cobbler?

• People

• Organisation

• Processes

• Knowledge

• All in one person!
• Un-scalable, and mortal

9
Abstraction and domain areas

• Peak, Lubell,
• Srinivasan
• Waterbury,
• JCISE 2004 2

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Scalability bring on the M names?

• ILM?
• Digital curation? No, 3rd party storage
  management
• KM?
• Integrate processes and agents through shared
  knowledge?
• With added requirements for long-term?
• death/autism of KM?
• Cultural change barriers knowledge sharing
  still
• Person to person
• Just in time (if youre lucky)
• Problem-oriented
• PLM?
• Proprietary 3rd party? Trust me
• Standards-based

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Whats going on?

• Compliance period
• archival

• Economic period
• Product database

Curation begins here!
Soft transition

• Retain
• After life

• Maintain
• during life

• Design

• Build

• Product information repository

• Completeness, accuracy,
• versions, process, efficiency

• provenance,
• longevity

• Continuing interpretability

12
Archive/repository

• Preserves information (OAIS)
• For a Designated Community
• Receives Submission Information Packages (SIPs)
• Negotiated
• Data in files
• Metadata
• Context provenance, etc

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Designated Community

• An identified group of potential Consumers who
  should be able to understand a particular set
  of information
• Here future engineers (and accident
  investigators!)
• Will 22nd century engineering concept set
  vocabulary be superset of todays?
• No! Gradual concept drift
• But likely discoverable by determined
  investigator.

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Slippery words

• Polysemantic concepts such as information can be
  fruitfully analysed only in relation to
  well-specified contexts of application Floridi
  3
• Understand
• Knowledge
• Knowing that, knowing how
• Information
• Factual, instructional, process
• Data
• difference that makes a difference
• Files

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Files, databases, packets

• No naked data
• In any independent existence the data are always
  packaged in some way
• Encoded serialisation of data representing
  information linked to an information model and/or
  conceptual schema?
• Packaging adds extraneous information
• Confuses the archivist! (Most digital
  preservation discussions relate to preserving
  files or at best digital objects)

16
ISO 19101 model

• ISO 19101

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Information

• Standard definition of information Floridi
• Comprises data that
• is well-formed
• and meaningful
• OAIS definition
• Any type of knowledge that can be exchanged. In
  an exchange, it is represented by data.

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Representation information

• Heavy load!
• Representation Information accompanying a
  digital object, or sequence of bits, is used to
  provide additional meaning. It typically maps the
  bits into commonly recognized data types such as
  character, integer, and real and into groups of
  these data types. It associates these with
  higher-level meanings that can have complex
  inter-relationships that are also described.

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Interpreted using

• Today software tools
• (although OAIS implies RepInfo often a text
  description)
• Tomorrow
• Same software running on a VM (emulation)?
• Different software specially built using the
  RepInfo?
• Maybe tool to interpret RepInfo eg in EAST?
• Maybe new software implementing legacy forms?
• Maybe transform old data for new software
  (migration)?
• Outcomes enhanced if information in widely-used
  standards-based form!

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OAIS a Reference Model

• Not a design
• Not an architecture
• There need be no element labeled RepInfo
• but the CONCEPT of RepInfo should exist!
• Ie explicit relationship between data/files and
  information according to a recorded information
  model

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Engineering RepInfo?

• Do you have an underlying engineering information
  model?
• What would representation information be for
  engineering information (say encoded in STEP)?
• Definitions of appropriate STEP elements (eg the
  standard)
• Additional refinements added by the tools used
• ???
• What about what cannot be encoded in STEP?
• Or what information would an engineer need who
  had never used STEP or your analysis tools?

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Final questions

• What else makes your encoded product information
  fragile?
• What can you do to make it more robust?
• What further tools, techniques, training and
  infrastructures do you need to do a better job?

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References

• 1 Borges, Jorge Luis. (1962) Labyrinths,
  Selected Stories Other Writings. Penguin Books
• 2 Peak, R., Lubell, J., Srinivasan, V.,
  Waterbury, S. (2004). STEP, XML, and UML
  Complementary Technologies. Journal of Computing
  and Information Science in Engineering 4 (4),
  379-90
• 3 Floridi, L. (2005). Is Semantic Information
  Meaningful Data? Philosophy and Phenomenological
  Research, Vol. LXX, No. 2