Views of SPaDE Repositories
This presentation of viewing mechanisms for SPaDE repositories is structured as follows:
- The Content of a Diasporic Repository: A description of the content of diasporic repositories in SPaDE, from which the various views provide selections or perspectives.
- Logical Contexts and Theories: An explanation of how theories provide a way of setting a logical context in which those domains prerequisite to a new development are separated out from a diasporic repository, as well as the primary means of extending the repository with new knowledge.
- The Use of Cryptography: A brief account of how cryptographic techniques are to be employed to ensure integrity and authenticity of declarative knowledge items in SPaDE, and to limit access according to levels of clearance.
- Levels of Assurance: Rather than an LCF style kernelised guarantor of derivability, SPaDE employs a system of levels of assurance which can be associated with declarative knowledge items to indicate the degree of confidence that may be placed in them. A user may select a required level of assurance and receive a view which includes only those parts of the diasporic repository which meet that level of assurance.
- Levels of Clearance: The SPaDE architecture is also intended to allow restriction of access according to levels of clearance, so that sensitive knowledge may be protected from access by unauthorised users. The creator of a theory may select a required level of clearance and his theory or any of its ancestors will be omitted from the view presented to users without sufficient clearance.
- Agentics, External Views, and Smart Contracts: A brief discussion of how the architecture of SPaDE facilitates concrete knowledge acquisition and concrete agentics through the use of external views and smart contracts.
- Views of Diverse Knowledge and Data Sources: Though having its own “native” repository form, SPaDE is agnostic as to the nature of the underlying repositories which can be encompassed by the diasporic repository.
Arbitrary knowledge or data sources may be incorporated into the diasporic repository through the use of views which interpret those structures appropriately.
The Content of a Diasporic Repository
SPaDE offers a conception of a declarative omniverse as pansophic repository in which the entire declarative knowledge of the cosmos may be aggregated.
Applications of that knowledge will never require the whole, and could never reach beyond the confines of one of the diasporic repositories which together comprise the pansophic repository.
Because the manner in which diasporic repositories are merged when diaspora connect is not determined, a model of the whole cannot be given, but it is useful here to provide first a simple abstract model of the content of a diasporic repository as a whole, before looking at why and how that whole may be pared down to more manageable domains.
The short story on this is that the diasporic repository provides a hierarchical name-space in which the vocabulary of declarative knowledge in any domain can be distinguished from that in any other domain and the risk of equivocation leading to incoherence is eliminated.
The creation of a new domain of knowledge is accomplished by introducing the vocabulary necessary to speak of that domain and fixing abstract models of the domain through constraints on the values that those names may take.
Among the names thus introduced may be type constructors whose constraints effectively limit only the cardinality of the new types and therefore admit interpretation of the models in ways which are not purely abstract.
Of these the most important for SPaDE are concrete interpretations, which enable reasoning using models of the concrete world, and whatever ontologies may be deemed necessary for reasoning about values and ethical norms.
Logical Contexts and Theories
The Use of Cryptography
Levels of Assurance
Levels of Clearance
Agentics, External Views, and Smart Contracts
Views of Diverse Knowledge and Data Sources