Perspectives on SPaDE

There are many quasi-geometric structures which illuminate different aspects of the SPaDE project. I thought it might be instructive to gather them together, and this document is my attempt to do so. I’ll gather them into related groups.

By quasi-geometric I mean perspectives which we give labels such as “stack”, “tower”, “hierarchy”, “network”, “lattice”, “graph”, “tree”, and so on.

But pro-tem, to help me do that I’ll just list them here,

• Linear Structures
  • The Epistemological Stack, which organises kinds of declarative knowledge according to their epistemological status.
  • The Focal Tower, which elaborates on the epistemological stack in presenting singular foci.
• Hierarchical Structures
  • The name space hierarchy: this is a downward progressing tree through folders terminating in the signatures associated with extensions in theories.
  • The logical context hierarchy and focal hierarchy: this is a tree of ambivalent sense. One may think of these contexts as reaching upward by progressive extensions to the primitive context provided by the foundation system, or we may think of it genealogically as progressing downward through the relationship between theories and their parents (which they extend) and their children (which extend them). It is also a focal hierarchy since each context is a perfect information space which may be the subject of focal intelligence. The structure of this hierarchy also determines the layered structure of focal intelligence in which the specialist for a context will subcontract to specialists for its subcontexts for subproblems which are confined to those subcontexts.
• Planar Structures
  • The subsystem plane: The three subsystems of SPaDE: knowledge representation, deductive kernel, deductive intelligence.
• Network Structures
  • The specialists of deductive intelligence: The network of specialist intelligent agents cooperating to solve problems which span multiple contexts. This network has relationships with some of the other structures, for example the hierarchical structure of contexts determines the layering of specialists, each specialist subcontracting to specialists in its ancestors in the theory hierarchy for subproblems which are confined to those ancestor contexts.

The SPaDE Arch

This is an attempt to visualise the overall structure not of SPaDE but of its philosophical and architectural documentation in a quasi-geometric way. It is presented as arch-like two-column structure in which the two columns are the epistemic stack on the left and the focal tower on the right, each column showing a vertically tripartite shaft (dictated by epistemological considerations) with a base below and a capital above. The capital on the left is the characterisation of synthetic philosophy and that on the right of deductive engineering, thus the top level account of SPaDE spans the two pillars as an architrave. The base on the left is concerned with logical foundations, and that on the right the architectural consequences of that foundational perspective.

There may be more levels above the architrave which provide context and motivation for SPaDE as a whole constituting the frienze and perhaps cornice of the arch. Below, there may be documents which belong in the base of each column or those which span the two as the crepidoma, all of which approach more closely the implementation level of SPaDE itself.

SPaDE OverArching Documentation
SPaDE
Synthetic Philosophy		Deductive Engineering
Epistemic Stack		Focal Tower
Logical Foundations		Architectural Foundations
Glossary

All aspects of SPaDE which are specific to the distinct layers of the epistemological stack and focal tower will be linked to from the key documents describing those structures and another access route spanning the whole through its special terminology will be through the SPaDE glossary.