I have a learning opportunity at work but need to read a book first.

A former director general at work in National accounts has introduced me to a history book. So far I am on the first chapter. The story is of Canadian National Accounts that are done and have been done at my workplace. This gentleman who is now retired has offered to discuss the book with me when I have read it. So far, I told him my first impression when I learned a basic definition of national accounts. I said, "That is too large a problem. How can it be done?" Now I am learning it is done as best it can be and by meticulous counting and in the end is not a real account but a giant guesstimate. At any rate this is someone I share office space with this retired director of National accounts.

Our project is moving along we had our walk through meeting yesterday.

I have been really busy with work but basically nine to five except for some library trips at night. At school I have been learning Java. I finally have a computer science professor after many years of learning code on my own. After this step in the project we begin our coding step.

Perl script to make my directed list citations into BibTeX format citations

I am going to research Perl and then write a Perl script that takes my directed list citations in McGill Law student style, that I have used all along with this blog and produce BibTeX citations for all my citations on this blog. I will use the Perl script to process my back up files for this blog and to do that I will first need to save all these back up doc files as plain text files.

Following up on Chapter three references to knowledge representation standards and a couple of common sense reasoning onology projects.

I am planning for my final 4.5 hours of pre-thesis study this long weekend to write this blog entry, using the on screen pdf's I am able to find for the following references. Only two are books and the rest are magazine, journal, or proceedings articles, so should all be accessible from the university library over the library web interface. I will post this entry then later add the citations then post it again. Finally I will repost this entry with follow up discussions after reading each paper.

The references in Chapter three are too knowledge representation or knowledge communication languages or standards including semantic web languages and include DARPA Agent Mark Up Language (DAML) for an SGML example.

The full list of standards and the authors references for these are:

Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF)

Knowledge Query Manipulation Language (KQML)

DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML)

Ontology Inference Layer (OIL)

Web Ontology Language (OWL)

The reference to the "Semantic Web is Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila. The Semantic Web Scientific American, 284(5):34-43, 2001.

There are also some references to the logic and its origins that I won't follow up on.

I will follow up on references to the project to "develop a universal ontology for common sense reasoning... the CYC project." and "smaller projects" with related ambitions... the KM project." Here are the citations for those projects that the authors have given.

CYC

KM

Chapter three was much more readable.

After chapter two covered First Order Logic (FOL) the third chapter connected this representational language with the idea of a Knowledge Base (KB) for a domain. Then entailments were shown to be provable and now chapter four will show how to use contradiction in a proof. Some of this is stuff I already know using different symbols. I did give some thought to the exercises in chapter three. I generally solve exercises in my head for a mathematics textbook and likewise this is what I did for chapter three.

I will now start chapter four. I have studied for about one hour and a half today using this pre-thesis book. So far this book is about logic.

More pre-thesis reading gets done.

Finally more progress with this book

Brachman, Ronald and Hector Levesque. Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (San Francisco, Calf.: Morgan Kaufmann, 2004).

I did get through chapter two which was dense math like symbolic logic and not everything is clear to me but the end of the chapter still made sense. I did not solve the exercises at the end of chapter two. I did start chapter three and it is moving much quicker now. I should be able to finish chapter three and start chapter four today.

I am now more than half way through the book The Making of Second Life.

This book is proving fairly entertaining with just enough history of Second Life,

Pre thesis reading continues this long weekend.

Studies continue for my thesis proposal. This is the book I have been assigned to read. It is almost 400 pages long.

Brachman, Ronald and Hector Levesque. Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (San Francisco, Calf.: Morgan Kaufmann, 2004).

I read more of chapter two while on break at a job I was doing on Saturday. Chapter two is about first order logic. I should complete this chapter two and get started on chapter three today.

Our project team got our assignment done on time and we got a great mark.

We had to write a situation under investigation (SUI) key features document as our first assignment. I was responsible as team leader to see that it got done. I gathered the whole team twice in the library and we talked out the details of our project. I drew a diagram in KDraw and then showed the other team members and one of them did a better diagram in Open Office. I then used Photoshop 6.0 to place all the data models on the diagram. After feedback from the professor we reverted to the the diagram our team mate had made. Data models are supposed to be part of the next step so we got a little ahead into the conceptual model.

Now this week we have an extra assignment of developing a conceptual model. We need to use some windows software the professor has developed to make a conceptual model documentation easier. I tried this evening to install this ABCmod software on my Vista PC but it did not work.I just booted up my XP on the Macbook and and now have to update XP to service pack 3. I installed Java 6 on both the XP and the Vista box. I am going to try to do the majority of the assignment over night now and get it really started. Then this long weekend I can perfect my assignment. We work alone on this assignment.

One of our team mates is working on the second assignment in the project. That assignment is to create the conceptual model for our project. Well I am going back to my XP computer now and posting this update on my school work.

I finished reading Generation Blend.

I completed reading Generation Blend. The author has a web site at http://generationblend.com/. I had chosen to read this to get more nuance in my thesis simulation. I did not yet take away the lesson and technical materials I need but I am now familiar with this book. I returned it to the Morissette library at my university this week before class.