Today (or probably yesterday) an interesting phenomenon appeared on the internet. A teacher in a small town, in an even smaller primary school had published a text on the topic of science. The text was published at the official web page of Moltemyr school and was, well, quite radical in the way we usually think about science. The text is now removed from the official page, but of course Google had cached it, and so did I, and Google is ready to translate it.

In general the motivation of the text was clearly to shed light on the topic of critique of science and that not all “sciences” are necessarily true – and one should have a “built-in” scepticism towards scientific texts and in general any other information. The principle is great – and I support it strongly – one should always have a sense of scepticism towards new knowledge – however, common sense is necessary – neglect and denial are not.

Briefly summarized the text by Trond Baugen critiqued Darwin’s theory, the Big Bang theory and in general the scientific method of measuring time (i.e. C14 dating method). Which is quite bold topics to aim at. Best case scenario could be a revolution in the way we think and perform science! Unfortunately that was not the case. The argumentation of the text was quite ad-hoc, and well, not scientific – which is a bit paradoxial. From my perspective it was clearly a statement of the authors personal belief, lacking of solid arguments, and appeared to me more entertaining than a source of knowledge.

The fact that it was published on the schools official pages quickly got snapped up by several bloggers and twitterers (?), as a response to this social shaking on the web several of the largest news papers in Norway and other large web pages published the story – and well, the witch hunt had started. Of course throughout academia the text was refuted, critiqued, teared apart and mocked. The author was of course also “reviewed” by a storm of critique on being a Christian fundamentalist, creationist, fanatic intelligent designer (?:) and similar.

Personally, well, yeah, I support the witch hunt. However there are two fundamental reasons for my support. (1) It was published on the official web page of a primary school. Which signals that the school has accepted this as information that is suitable to include in the education. (2) The text is extremely one-sided. Highly subjective with a lack of proper argumentation. Every text, especially propositions of radical thoughts, must include an argumentation which discuss and preferably favours the reasonableness of the ideas presented. If not – it is just a subjective idea that potentially is very difficult for others to grasp – or find the reasonableness in.

Another interesting aspect of this is the Internet’s role in this.  Without the internet this text would never, ever, ever, received this much attention. Unfortunately Moltemyr school is clearly not up for this rapid “peer reviewing” of their published material. When they received the attention – they removed the text – and all similar “radical” texts. Well, this is a decision that can be argued in favour of – maybe it was an error that it was published, maybe they got hacked – who knows. And it’s just that! Who knows? Well, not me, because all I see when I go into Moltemyr’s web pages is that they got a new fax-number, then there are some news on the new swimming program, some adventurous adventures – but nothing, not a note even, on the extreme amount of attention they have received the past 48 hours, nothing except removal of the texts.. What is this communicating? Lack of control? Lack of courage? Lack of proper mechanisms for dealing with attention?

Why not admit that an error occurred? If that was the case.

I’m deliberately not going into the discussion on the ideas presented in the text by Trond Baugen – as that is something already done, by several others, and a whole other discussion.

A plea to everyone – especially teachers of any sort: If you have a radical idea that lacks a solid acceptance and argumentation – make a blog – write it there! Do not publish it as part of an educational material – and do not force your personal views on children!

Atle came up with, and manifested, a great idea, namely to write some words on what he does on his master project and some background. Aimed at the regular human being (i.e. not very nerdy). The pros are way in favor of the cons for doing this – and I will as such try to do the same. Hopefully I will try to post an update on the project with (ir)regular intervals – however, I will not promise this.

So, what is the title?

“Quality aspects of combined cartographic maps and conceptual models”

Fancy title eh? The motivation for the title is to be as general as possible as well as keeping the topics I’m interested in. Some background is probably needed here. Conceptual modelling is a science from computer science, which roughly said focus on software and enterprise modelling. Well known examples of such modelling techniques are UML (Unified Modelling Language), DFD (Data Flow Diagrams), ER (Entity Relationship) and BPMN (Business Process Modelling Notation), to mention a few. These modelling techniques captures and describes an abstract representation of some reality, and is very useful for many purposes, especially to make complex problems less complex (through the abstraction).

Cartography is, roughly said, the science of map design, primarily geographic maps. Cartography is a very old science with several hundred years of history. The legacy has brought a strong emphasis towards paper representation and highly traditional geographic maps. However in newer times, computer supported map tools have been the de-facto standard of making and (often) viewing maps. As such cartography is undergoing a change. In response to this change new or re-engineered techniques are needed. One such change that I believe is necessary is the understanding of quality in cartography. The phrase “understanding of quality” is somewhat complex, however, the general idea is that cartography needs a set of general, comprehensive and accepted guidelines that guides the making and evaluation of maps. One attempt to create such a framework of guidelines was undertaken last fall and the result was MAPQUAL. MAPQUAL attempts to adapt the quality framework SEQUAL from conceptual modelling into a cartographic context.

So, that was a bit theoretic background. Over to my master project.

Conceptual models have recognized the inherent importance of geographical location for a long time (Zachman). However little exploitation of this has been made, so far. The underlying goal for the project is to experiment with models (maps and conceptual) that exhibits both geographical information and conceptual information and from that, design a set of guidelines that support such models.

Pfuh. So, for the practical stuff.

The case that I have choosen is in collaboration with COSTT, a research project that focus on transparency in the health sector. The case focus on visualizing relevant information, supporting self coordination for the user.

Typical example of such information need; A doctor (user) has a set of pre-defined tasks during a day (schedule) and a set of patients that are of particular interest (responsibility for, scientific interest, etc). Both the patients and the tasks have a location in the hospital, so does the doctor. As well, patients have a state that they’re in (say; healthy, crashing etc..), tasks does also have much non-geographical information attached to them (if equipment is ready, OR ready, all staff members ready etc). As you can see, this information need exhibits both geographical and conceptual information. Although the geographical information is position in a geography the actual need is for instance; “how fast can I move from here to the location of Patient 1″, and as such a temporal aspect is also included.

The idea is to visualize as much as this information space which is relevant to the individual user – and preferably come up with some good ideas for visualizing such information.

More practical aspects to the project. Experiments are probably going to be loose proof-of-concept implementations, but mostly paper-prototype-like methods. However some consideration is going to be taken towards the geographical information space and the temporal aspects needed – this is most likely to be solved using PostGIS with some extensions.

I can easily see that this project is covering aspects that are not at the moment very popular – although, I believe the ideas can be worth something to someone:)

Not so much fancy pictures, diagrams and such yet, but probably some graphics will come:) I realize that this post was a bit ad-hoc, and maybe it lacks some examples/topics that could be of interest – however that may spawn to new posts – which is a good thing:)

For the bleeding edge notes on my project you can browse my wiki which I use as a virtual notepad – so do not trust what you read there:)

So, now for your thoughts. Was this text very complicated (language and/or content)? Is the idea any good? Do you have any other examples of information that exhibits both geographical and conceptual information?

Several years ago I read a discussion on whether pirate music is an economic deficit or benefit for the music business as a whole. The argument were that the small, “indie” and non-label artist (and their music) got a significant increase in the market as well as the more commercial big labels artists didn’t decrease that much. So combined, they argued that the sum of the “tail” of the popularity graph, relative to the genre/labels/artists, was larger than the sum of the commercial labels, or the most popular music.

This fascinates me alot, and more recently I witnessed another exploitation of this “sum of tail” phenomenon on a FAST presentation during ITovation conference (video stream of fast presentation). FAST recognize that the sum of the “smaller” enterprises that needs enterprise search is larger than a single focused search strategy (public web search, i.e. Google, Yahoo etc).

Inspired by this combined with an interest of knowledge management, creation and acquisition, I thought of the way we acquire knowledge over a period of time. A study is a nice, illustrating, example for this. Over a defined period of time, say 5 years, we are in a process of acquiring a certain set of knowledge, for instance learning certain math skills, software development skills and similar. The set of intentional knowledge is pretty well defined, and we can assume that we learn most of it. However, in the same period of time we acquire other knowledge, often the result of a certain interest or more accidental. Knowledge motivated by special interest can be assumed to be a bit smaller in degree of specialization. Accidental knowledge may be a viril discussion, random web page, TV show and similar. Together this can be a graph similar to the one mentioned earlier.

Knowledge Acquisition over a period of time

So, the essential question. Is the sum of the “tail” of knowledge greater than the “body”? Seperation of tail and body is reasonable to put somewhere in the intersection of interest and accidental. I hypothesize that the tail is larger.