j-Tool (web architecture): CognitiveWeb

The CognitiveWeb is a human-centric web architecture comprised of semantic markup and fuzzy logics designed to support collaborative decision-making, critical thinking and conflict resolution processes. The goal of the CognitiveWeb is to extend human decision horizons by compensating for some intrinsic aspects of selective attention.

The key issues for the CognitiveWeb are:

1. Externalities
2. Decision-horizons
3. Focus of Attention
4. Enlightened Self-Interest 

The CognitiveWeb is based on an expert model of human memory and grew directly from the research of Dr. Lokendra Shastri, Dr. Marvin Cohen, and Bryan Thompson. Much of that research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Navy Research, and the Army Research Institute. There are a series of publications and technical reports available from http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~shastri and http://www.cog-tech.com that represent the published history of this research during the 1980’s and 1990s.

The following potential applications of CognitiveWeb for society and economy:

• Scientific research - By making explicit the argument relationships within and among mental models in the physical and social sciences, the CognitiveWeb will improve the comprehensibility of existing scientific research, and thus motivate critical evaluation of existing work and the creation of new work.   
• Funding and policy - The same means that serve the advancement of science can also further the management and justification of scientific funding, and facilitate, or even propel, technology transfer from research to industry.    
• Education and training - The CognitiveWeb will directly and simultaneously foster the development of critical thinking skills, communication skills, and domain knowledge. The CognitiveWeb will provide a vehicle for the critical review of ideas and the development of thought and planning at all scales    
• Intellectual history - The CognitiveWeb will preserve a historical record — a structured trace — of the development of ideas, policies, and social systems. By using the CognitiveWeb, historians and researchers would be able to identify arguments that supported, and were supported by, the falsified theories, and to identify surprising corollaries of discoveries and cross-domain similarities between of advances. 

Here are some example technologies

• Annotation System - The CognitiveWeb provides a knowledge layer over the existing web. That knowledge layer links subjects into taxonomies and issues within argument models, and then provides ubiquitous process support for critical-thinking, conflict-resolution, and decision-making. Since the knowledge layer needs to touch the existing web everywhere, it must be deployed as an overlay on the existing web. This means that the CognitiveWeb will be deployed as an annotation-based technology. The annotation client will normally reside within the web browser and will communicate with CognitiveWeb services that provide process support for critical-thinking, conflict resolution, and decision-making.
•  REST-ful Workflow Over REST Web Services - Deploying the CognitiveWeb requires that we deploy ubiquitous processes for critical thinking, conflict resolution, and process-oriented decision-making. Those processes provide the basic services of the CognitiveWeb, but are not themselves CognitiveWeb applications. A CognitiveWeb application is built by layering additional, business-specific, processes over the basic CognitiveWeb process infrastructure. The CognitiveWeb advocates an approach based on  exposing business objects and components as REST-ful web services through explicit workflow models. A workflow model exposes precisely the business processes and elements of persistent state that are crucial to scripting web services when creating business-specific applications. A white paper on this subject is currently being developed, along with a technology prototype. See specification and implementation.

Links

• CognitiveWeb Home