Developing and Apprehending Difficult and Complex Ideas

What we are trying to achieve.

§1 memeio is a technology that enhances the development, refinement, and apprehension of difficult and complex ideas.

§5 The field of my research, the foundations of logic and apprehension, includes asking hard questions about how we develop ideas and reason about them. Ironically this involves the actual development of complex and difficult ideas about the development of complex and difficult ideas.

§6 Unfortunately, familiar tools¹ do not meet the needs of highly technical individuals² creating, analysing and developing those ideas.

§16 I do a lot of my development with pencil and paper. Word processing systems and other publishing systems tend to just get in the way, they have the wrong focus. They provide no means to support and manage concept development. And they provide no support for analysing earlier work and incrementally building upon it.

§17 Our current systems mimic practice at a time before high technology, a time when we did business simply by passing around pieces of paper. There has to be a better way. It's time for new approaches and a new kind of digital document.

Features

What memeio does.

§19 memeio is designed to meet the very particular needs of an individual, whether author or reader, with a strong interest in the detailed structure and composition of the concepts they are dealing with; many of which may be new. But what exactly is memeio and what does it do?

• memeio is a “structured text” concept repository.
• It provides concept reconciliation and analysis.
• And produces decorated interactive documents with these concepts.

§23 The memeio implementation applies certain theoretical elements of my work. These fall under the general heading of “semeiotic theory,” a physical and epistemological theory of how we apprehend the world and develop concepts.

§25 memeio does not construct formal tautologies in a rigorous logic, it simply provides a structured grammar for natural English with a method and tools for reasoning about the concepts therein. The logical status of the conceptual structure formed by the body of work in the database is the subject of memeio reconciliation and analysis.

§26 The existing components of memeio are:

• XML Schemas for document sets, document context, and actions upon them. In addition, there are schemas for conceptual structure, the “Structured Text” constrained English grammar, and presentation.
• An XML database (eXist) containing document sets and consolidated concepts.
• Schema aware functions and transformations to support memeio functionality.
• Strict XHTML output with decoration supported by YUI.
• Concept visualization in standard FreeMind format (see the example for this page below).
• Support for the Oxygen-XML Author editor.

Structured Text

A constrained English grammar.

§27 “Structured Text” provides a framework, a constrained English grammar, that maintains creative flexibility and remains familiar. It encourages more formal reasoning than ad hoc English without diverging into the rigors of symbolic logic. It is a language able to explicitly express many of the intentional properties ordinarily implied in English text. It aids a thorough and systematic analysis of the conceptual content.

§29 The formal nature of the language should pass unnoticed. Yet it should refine our intuition as English speakers with a tautological narrative in which the premises are clearly identified and unambiguous. Ultimately this can allow the author to produce a document with the conceptual rigor of formal logic without abandoning the familiar form and narrative of natural language.

§30 It does this by providing a transparent formal framework for reasoned argument, document decoration that provides immediate assistance to comprehension, document restructuring, a concept structure that enhances navigation and deals with “ways of speaking” and “necessary distinctions,” and tools for managing concept development and analysis that deal with contradiction, overloading, and uniqueness.

Applications and Collaborations

How can you help and how may memeio help you?

§31 In addition to it's usefulness for people like me developing difficult and complex ideas, memeio is helpful in any kind of detailed document analysis.

§32 For example, if you are a CTO or other Intellectual Property agent with a body of established intellectual property then we'd like to move the conceptual content of that documentation into memeio, rewrite it in “Structured Text” and subject it to our analysis.

§33 This will give you an intellectual property repository, a meaningful way to query that repository and to develop it further. It also provides an entirely new and powerful documentation set that will make the ideas in your repository more accessible. It provides us with a case study. And we would like to tell you something new about your intellectual property, perhaps we can point you in a new direction, or perhaps we can help you realise the potential of an old direction.

§34 I expect to have some sample memeio repositories to share with you in the near future.

§35

§36 With respect:

Dr. Steven Ericsson-Zenith.

Principal Investigator

Sunnyvale, California. USA.

January 28th, 2010

♦

End Notes

¹ I am referring to familiar tools for the development of significant documents, especially research documents and scholarly books and papers. In particular, I refer to so-called “word processors” and mark up systems like LaTeX, concept maps and concept databases.

Recent efforts using XML in the technical writing community are aimed at the perceived needs of corporate technical writers but do not serve the needs of the producers and developers of ideas within those same organizations.

The Carroll minimalism and Horn structure in DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) may indeed help the reuse of text in reference applications for simple tasks. But the loss of narrative breaks all natural constructive methods of apprehension and conceptual development. The DITA notion of “Topic Maps” provides no innovation for rigorous conceptual development nor does it provide the reader with any additional insight.

It seems also that concept development tools developed over the past two decades lack theoretical foundations and context.

There is, for example, a surprising absence of semeiotic theory and often only a vague intuition of how historical work in logic may apply. This typically leads to a superficial notion of concepts as a glossary of term usage.

Similarly, work related to concept databases appear divorced from the authoring of documents in which the concepts appear. That just can't be right.

Conversely, methods and tools that begin with formal logic do not really help the early stages of concept development. The journey from intuition to formal syntax is a long and difficult one that rarely begins with the rigor of formal statements.

Formal logic and mathematics frequently play only a supporting role in the conceptual narrative, if present at all. And ad hoc English, now widely accepted as the language of science and engineering, provides only a grammar of conventional usage. It provides no logical underpinning for reasoning about conceptual content. Here I am in search of a methodology and tools that effectively lead, or at least improve, the move from intuition to formal syntax in the context of English documents, in which these concepts are refined and from which they are apprehended.

² By “highly technical individuals” I am referring to people like myself: research scholars, technologists, CTOs and other Intellectual Property agents.

Concepts

complex idea: A complex idea consists of a number of distinctions, all of which may be familiar, that are difficult to apprehend together.

concept reconciliation: The process by which concepts are normalized.

concept repository: A database of reconciled concepts that appear in the available document sets.

decorated interactive documents: Interactive documents designed to aid the apprehension of the concepts they contain.

difficult idea: A difficult idea contains distinctions that are unfamiliar.

memeio: memeio, unsurprisingly, derives from meme and io and is meant to imply the input and output of contagious ideas.

new kind of digital document: Current communication and development of digital documents is a lot like the traditional paper counterparts. The networked digital environment is largely untapped for the new things that it may enable that assist the development and apprehension of new scientific and engineering ideas. This is the conceptual space of our inquiry. What new things, what new kinds of document, do digital environments enable for academic and industrial research and development?

semeiotic theory: A “Semeiotic Theory” is a model in the science of logic and apprehension. It deals with signs as differentiated experiences and the biophysical processing of them, a process that is called “semeiosis” in such theories. In many respects Semeiotic Theory deals with the gap between physics and epistemology.

Structured Text: “Structured Text” is a constrained English grammar designed to aid conceptual refinement and analysis.