9 research outputs found
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Knowledge cartography in the sustainable environment
This paper presents the authors' contributions to an interdisciplinary scoping study into ways of understanding the mapping and interpretation of the knowledge understood and used by powerful players who make decisions that affect the urban environment. We use glass recycling as an issue that seems to be clear-cut, but that exposes extraordinarily difficult issues for decision-makers. Glass recycling is well understood from both scientific and technological perspectives, whereas the social and political aspects of glass recycling are much more complex. The public understanding of recycling in a sustainable urban environment is almost directly at odds with the scientific and technological realities. Packaging of all types, including glass, has a relatively small environmental impact yet is the most high profile of all public recycling activities. Here, we consider how to classify knowledge that is used at different levels of decision making to achieve the economic, political and environmental ends espoused by decision-makers in the urban environment. We present a matrix of subjects and institutions/players that understand and use knowledge in different ways to extend their influence far beyond their immediate spheres of activity. Our matrix covers the subject domains of Politics, Legislation, Economics, Sociology, Science and Technology. Against this axis are the institutions and power brokers that use knowledge to make decisions. These range from the individual entrepreneur, through legal bodies and secondary industries to civil services and legislatures. Over this matrix we rank and order different typologies of knowledge according to the level of decision-making. These typologies are informed by understandings that, for example, differentiate between explicit, implicit and tacit knowledge or typologies that differentiate between Mode 1 formal knowledge and Mode 2 practitioner knowledge. Considering how this knowledge can be portrayed by different approaches to knowledge mappings, both computational and non-computational, completes our pape
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Message passing between individual and socially acquainted objects in Smalltalk
This paper reports additions to the commercial, object-oriented language, Smalltalk-80 and their incorporation into a knowledge based environment, POISE.
These additions are suitable for the purposes of knowledge representation of engineering design. A dynamic, knowledge representation scheme is supported that allows temporary associations between objects residing in separate, static, hierarchical structures.
Message passing between these associated objects is dynamic. Messages are passed, incompletely satisfied, between socially acquainted objects in order to complete a computation.
We show that a computing paradigm previously achieved by a specific language, written in the Actor tradition, can also be achieved in a strictly class-instance based language which is then used to create a design knowledge representation environment.
A simple, accessible example is used to illustrate the power and generality of the new language
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Access Enhancement Objects for data management in Smalltalk
This paper reports an approach to persistence in object-oriented languages, such as Smalltalk, that require a memory-resident image for computation. The architecture uses a selective persistence that provides sufficient data-handling, with support to evolutionary data description and data consultation, for an engineering domain application without any special syntactic extension to the application language.
The approach is oriented to knowledge representation and has been tested on materials data information, from several sources, that informs engineering design modelling.
The architecture described is an extension of Smalltalk that uses Access Enhancement Objects, which we term Persistence Enhancers, for data management, in conjunction with a storage model optimized for domain modelling
Language fundamentals for design-support architectures
This paper illustrates a diversity of object-oriented languages which differ fundamentally in their support to evolutionary object specification and part-contents manipulation, which are features basic to the modelling of creative design. A case is presented for the modelling of properties as part-objects within a language's object-description scheme. The authors identify a genre of commonly available object-oriented languages as presenting limitations to the flexible description and manipulation of part-objects for the purpose of representing design. Our in-house knowledge-programming language, Splinter, is introduced as contributing a policy for representing concepts with highly structured properties in a way which usefully supports the description of evolving dependency information. The thesis here is that semantically rich description languages may be devised as the domain independent vehicles from which creative-design modelling architectures can be more directly developed.