Journler Organizational Tool

I use Journler since some weeks now. Trb already blogged about it. It is a great tool to help you get organized, to foresee what you have to do and get things done. It supports keywords, smart folders, calendar, links to directories, documents… many many many great features, it’s a tool I tried to program myself many times (one was named iDoc, another eNotes …) but I never reached the elegancy and supremacy of Journler. I recommend it to every Mac users.

I would love if in the scope of Nepomuk we’d create some applescripts to be able to use Journler as a frontend for our system.

il n’y a pas de méta-modèles.

Méta-modèle est une désignation subjective employée par des scientifiques qui, honteux de leur meta-ignorance, ne peuvent nommer leurs théories que par la position relative à leur incompréhension.

Technorati Tags: Computer Science, Philosophy, Science, Research

The theory of Knowledge.

Technorati Tags: Art, Computer Science, cosa, Nepomuk, philosophy, Research, Software Engineering

Going down

The previous post is almost the top of a long way through abstraction. It is a piece of Art therefore I have no need to justify it. But it is also a theory of Philosophy, so I can let my writings be inspired from it. Another picture will give you already a wider view:

This is my office where I write the dissertation of my PhD. And because its area of Research is Computer Science, I am giving more details.

There is another theory in this thesis:

Software Science is Understanding the World through Software Systems Engineering.

This leads us to the apparition of a new Paradigm which is still to formalize.

The previous diagram is a visual representation of this paradigm.
Our validation is based on the following Case Study:

Collaborative Tagging Systems

Through the study of the creation of such a system in the European Project Nepomuk we give an example of such a process.

The previous figure is an illustration of the task force TF-Cycle of Nepomuk. The status of this task force is “completed”. Its objective was to set up the development cycle of such a project.

We are going to study the case of “Collaborative Tagging” in this cycle. Here is a Usage Scenario:

I now tag this resource with the tag Beautiful.

This scenario leads us to a functionality named “tag” which describes the Act of Tagging. Here is its formal definition:

tag(person, time, resource, tag) is true

The previous formal definition of the scenario could be phrased in an abstraction like that:

From now on the fact that this person knew about this resource from the aspect of that tag is true.

This leads us to a Philosophical Understanding:

The world is everything that is the case.

This statement is the first paragraph of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. An artistic representation of it can be found in the previous post.
The specifications of this system in Leslie Lamport’s TLA+ would be the same:

tag(person, time, resource, tag) is true

Designing this system includes the concepts of storage, users, trust, intelligence, retrieval, clock, facts. In the Architecture, these concepts are implemented as a set of services Distributed Filesystem, Conceptual Users, Security, Semantic Automatic Annotation, Semantic Search, Computers, Humans. If the project is successful, it validates the specification, the abstraction, the theory which is:

Humans know something about the world.
Cédric Mesnage 5 July 2006.

This example illustrates the scientific methodology of Software Science. As the resulting theory tells us something about the world, it validates the second theory too:

Software Science is Understanding the World through Software Systems Engineering.
Cédric Mesnage 5 July 2006.

My thesis will be the development of this research proposal, it will be presented in the Faculty of Informatics of Lugano in the discipline of Systems Research, it is advised by Mehdi Jazayeri.

Technorati Tags: Nepomuk, Paradigm, Philosophy, Collaborative Tagging, Research, Software Engineering, Software Science

Development Cycle

After this great meeting we had in Galway, my understanding of computer science evolved on many aspects. One of these is the notion of development cycle. I started to work on a new diagram which will also evolve as I already know that some pieces of it are still fuzzy in my mind. Anyway here it is.

Specifications
You can see that the specifications in my previous posts were on the requirements side and now they are on the system side… I don’t quite know exactly why I did so, it is like an intuition. The specifications describing the system better than the code itself, I considered it should be part of it.
Architecture
The actual implementation of the system is the architecture. The act of writing code from the specifications is named design. When reverse engineering from an existing architecture one try to understand the specifications the code is based on.
Usages
When hacking, one develop a system testing it continuously.
Scenarios
The case studies lead to the creation of scenarios from real usages.
Functionalities
The functionalities are generalized from identified behaviors in the scenarios.
Abstraction
The abstractions are both a generalization from the functionalities and from the specifications.

Technorati Tags: Computer Science, Nepomuk, Research, Software Engineering