Nooron FAQ
https://nooron.org/know/nooron_faq
An FAQ about Nooron, what it is and how to use it.
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Table of Contents
1. The faqs
1.1. U00100
1.1.1. Q
1.1.2. A
1.2. U00200
1.2.1. Q
1.2.2. A
1.3. U00205
1.3.1. Q
1.3.2. A
1.4. U00210
1.4.1. Q
1.4.2. A
1.5. U00211
1.5.1. Q
1.5.2. A
1.6. U00300
1.6.1. Q
1.6.2. A
1.7. U00310
1.7.1. Q
1.7.2. A
1.8. U00400
1.8.1. Q
1.8.2. A
1.9. U00500
1.9.1. Q
1.9.2. A
1.10. U00600
1.10.1. Q
1.10.2. A
1.11. U00700
1.11.1. Q
1.11.2. A
1.12. U00900
1.12.1. Q
1.12.2. A
1.13. U01000
1.13.1. Q
1.13.2. A
1.14. U01100
1.14.1. Q
1.14.2. A
1.15. U01200
1.15.1. Q
1.15.2. A
1.16. U01300
1.16.1. Q
1.16.2. A
1.17. U01400
1.17.1. Q
1.17.2. A
1.18. U01500
1.18.1. Q
1.18.2. A
1. The faqs
A frequently asked question.
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1.1. U00100
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1.1.1. Q
What is Nooron?
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1.1.2. A
I finally got really annoyed with how hard it is for people to think
clearly together. So I decided to [try to] solve the problem once and for
all [cue mad-scientist-music] by creating an online digital ecosystem in
which knowledge, logic and presentation can all evolve in a
globe-spanning, self-organizing, peer to peer system of web servers which
is simultaneously the handiest, most flexible piece of software
everybody[!] uses and also the software substrate for an emergent global
collective intelligence. Take your pick. See How to Build a Global
Brain for an expanded form of this vision. [Best keep the
mad-scientist-music playing though.] The somewhat more sober Nooron White
Paper covers the motivation for Nooron rather well, but is otherwise
quite out of date.
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1.2. U00200
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1.2.1. Q
I don't give a hoot about all this global brain stuff. I just need a ...
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1.2.2. A
OK, OK, lets skip the big picture for the moment. How about if we just
look at the handy stuff that Nooron does right now. - it comes with
some demo 'Nooron Apps' for publishing your own 'Pattern Language', 'Web
Log', 'FAQ' or 'PERT Chart'
- it already knows how to present the
above information in HTML, DocBook and graphical forms (using
Graphviz)
- anybody who can create HTML manually or has a bit of
programming experience should be able create new Nooron Apps
- It
is possible to merge knowledge bases, for example: your personal schedule
with your workmates personal schedules (once scheduling is ontologized,
that is)
- in short, Nooron 0.2.x is a system for publishing
arbitrary knowledge through diverse multimedia XML templates ['garments'
in Nooron parlance]
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1.3. U00205
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1.3.1. Q
What other, concrete, features will it have by version 1.0.0?
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1.3.2. A
See The Nooron Pattern
Language for the whole conceptual tour, but you asked for a concrete
answer. - A pervasive collaborative filtering system (based on
user-contributable criteria and
evaluations) will provide the advantages of both peer review and
evolutionary pressure on all contents of Nooron: knowledge, logic and
presentation. Criteria and evaluations are a simple model which
encompasses a broad range of meatspace phenomena, including: opinion
polling, voting, petitioning, recommending, peer review and application of
selection pressure.
- It will always be possible for the user to
specify whose evaluations to heed and how to summarize and weight multiple
evaluations. Always possible for the user to be specific about heeding
particular evaluators in particular knowledge-based contexts.
- Automatically generated data management forms (all knowledge driven,
of course) will mean that the creators of new Nooron Apps won't have to
worry about creating add and edit screens, just new ontologies. Of course,
they will also be able to create custom add and edit screens if the needs
of the app are so specific. Likewise, it might be that all they will
prefer to merely create a custom widget for some slot and let it be
automatically used by the form generation facilities, and inherited by
subclasses.
- Nooron will be both Fully Automatic)
and Fully
Adjustable) because it will, throughout, be sensitive to settings
which will be guided by worldviews or specific criteria if not explicitly
overridden by user preferences.
- A novel identity and preference
system called Not So Basic
Authentication will permit users to log onto any Nooron server without
ever having to register, just by entering, instead of a userid, the URL of
a knowledgebase containing pertinent identity information and preferences.
[This is equivalent to issuing a capability to a user's publicly knowable
information.]
- Nooron apps' constituents (ontologies, wardrobes,
garments, data) and criteria, worldviews, reviewboards, etc will be able
to propagate among Nooron servers in realtime. This can be seen as the
automation (or elimination) of the typical software distribution
cycle.
- Rich visualization of numerical slot values as well as
people's opinions (their evaluations according to criteria) will be
pervasive. Again, all aspects of Nooron are knowledge, so the features
which work on Nooron's contents will just as readily work on most of
Nooron itself. Example visualizations include: Scattercharts of frames
with evaluations driving x, y and node attributes.
- World
views
- versioning
- security/authorization system (via
capabilities?)
- Access to 'legacy data' will be provided via
PyOKBC backends for: generic PostgreSQL databases, PyOKBC-specific
PostgreSQL, generic MySQL databases, remote knowledge-bases, generic
python object systems (ala clos-kb in okbc-lisp) and any other PyOKBC (or
OKBC) backends the community creates.
- There will definitely be
Nooron Apps for 'Project Management', 'Scenario Planning' and 'Bug
Tracking' because Nooron development will itself require them.
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1.4. U00210
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1.4.1. Q
Nooron is still very alpha, though, isn't it?
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1.4.2. A
Oh, so alpha!
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1.5. U00211
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1.5.1. Q
What are some immediate next steps?
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1.5.2. A
The things which will be done to Nooron ASAP are: - slot
constraints
- a web-based knowledge editing interface, initially
with just a primitive security model of some sort, ultimately with
capability-based security (or is this a pipe-dream!).
- KBs to be
surfable from
/know/kb_name/ and downloadable from
/know/kb_name.pykb - Rejigger Nooron Apps so that
everything which constitutes the core of an App (ontology, wardrobe and
garments) will exist in one directory on disk.
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1.6. U00300
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1.6.1. Q
What are the 'available garments' listed over at the right?
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1.6.2. A
Garments are the different appearances, disguises, what-have-you that the
currently displayed frame can 'wear'. What you see at the left is a tree
containing links to the different views (garments) which are available for
the object (frame) being viewed. They are organized, first
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1.7. U00310
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1.7.1. Q
How are the 'available garments' implemented?
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1.7.2. A
Each of these garments is implemented as a NooronPageTemplate or NPT. They
are an adaptation of Zope Page Templates. Each different thing in Nooron
(KBs, classes, individuals, slots or facets) has a different set of NPTs
(or garments) available to it. Usually these are inherited from classes
and superclasses up to :THING (the root of the OKBC class hierarchy). As
shipped, all the attaching of NPTs to classes is going on in knowledge
bases which are themselves instances of the nooron_app_wardrobe class.
Individuals can also have 'garments' associated directly with them (by
making the name of the garment one of the values on the own_slot
'npt_for_self' on the individual in question.)
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1.8. U00400
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1.8.1. Q
Why call them 'garments' instead of 'skins'?
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1.8.2. A
Well, because in Nooron there might also end up being skins. The term
'skin' is usually used to talk about a large-scale cosmetic choice that
governs details such as the colors, positions and sizes of onscreen
elements. There is room for Nooron to have skins too, but nothing has been
done to implement that yet. The template standard_master can be thought of as
the only skin currently available for Nooron. It is responsible for
placing and formatting all the html screens you see when surfing a stock
Nooron instance. A future direction is for programmatic selection of
standard_master or some alternative skin to occur at the top of each skin.
Probably the thing to do would be to rejigger standard_master so it takes
responsibility for implementing the selection of a skin. Nothing stands in
the way of current Nooron site operators modifying standard_master in any
way they choose, including getting it to swap skins based on knowledge or
cookies or something.
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1.9. U00500
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1.9.1. Q
When I surf around under/know why do some links go to a page
over at the Stanford Research Institute?
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1.9.2. A
These are 'deep' links into the beautifully constructed OKBC Spec
2.03 at SRI. Since PyOKBC aims to be a faithful implementation of the
OKBC Spec, the spec serves as documentation for it.
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1.10. U00600
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1.10.1. Q
What is a frame?
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1.10.2. A
The term 'frame' comes from the Knowledge Representation tradition in the
AI community. The term was coined by Minsky and means a data structure,
capable of representing nearly anything, which has slots on it and which
exists inside a knowledgebase. If you are going to use Nooron at this
stage in its development you will need to understand the OKBC
Knowledge Model.
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1.11. U00700
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1.11.1. Q
What is an ontology?
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1.11.2. A
An ontology is a set of formal definitions of concepts and things in some
domain. These machine-understandable artifacts can range in scope
from narrow to universal. The Yahoo and Open Directory project's
hierarchies are often mentioned as examples of ontologies, but are more
properly called taxonomies because they are mostly just hierarchic
classifications rather than having enough structural sophistication to
provide a basis for inferences about their contents. There are several
efforts to create universal ontologies, e.g. http://suo.ieee.org/http://www.opencyc.org/
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1.12. U00900
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1.12.1. Q
What are .pykb files?
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1.12.2. A
Hopefully, soon to be replaced. They are the only file format supported by
PyOKBC 0.1.1 (the release which was bundled with Nooron 0.2.0). As a
shortcut (to avoid having to write a parser) .pykb files are simply files
full of python calls to the PyOKBC API. This business about executing
.pykb files full of python code has a number of consequences which means
that they should soon be replaced by a more conventional file format.
Remember, this is Alpha code! A more lasting solution will be to support
the reading and writing of files filled with OKBC 'sentences'. This ought
to suffice as a basic file format for some time and provide an acceptable
format for knowledge 'syndication'.
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1.13. U01000
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1.13.1. Q
Will a command line version of Nooron be available?
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1.13.2. A
A command line interface to Nooron might prove handy, but for most
purposes simply fetching an appropriately constructed url from a running
Nooron instance will be equivalent to most anything one might want a
command line for. This is thanks to the interaction of the two patterns REST and URLsHaveMeaning
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1.14. U01100
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1.14.1. Q
How do I make my own pattern_language_app?
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1.14.2. A
Put a file called SOMENAME_pattern_language.pykb in /know
with contents like: put_direct_parents(['pattern_language_wardrobe',
'SOMENAME_pattern_language_data'])
put_instance_types(current_kb(),['pattern_language_app'])
put_frame_pretty_name(current_kb(),"SOMENAME Pattern Language")
Put
your data in another file called
SOMENAME_pattern_language_data.pykb with contents like:
put_direct_parents(['pattern_language_ontology'])
put_instance_types(current_kb(),['nooron_app_data'])
followed by
create_individual calls that look like those in
/know/nooron_pattern_language_data.pykb
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1.15. U01200
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1.15.1. Q
How do I render '.dot' files myself?
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1.15.2. A
For the moment glean what you can from http://www.pinkjuice.com/howto/dot.txt
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1.16. U01300
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1.16.1. Q
Is it safe to run Nooron? What with all the python in the templates?
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1.16.2. A
Umm. Yes. (but no warranty!) Notice that when Nooron starts up there is
the line: Relax: NPT SAFETY is ON. If you see Warning:
NPT SAFETY is OFF and your Nooron instance is exposed to the wilds
of the internet, then you should set SAFETY = 1 up near the top of
code/NooronPageTemplate.py. The SAFETY setting controls
whether a restricted execution environment is used to execute the code
within NooronPageTemplates (NPTs). There probably exist a few holes in the
Nooron application of the ZPT restrictions. Please report them if you find
any.
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1.17. U01400
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1.17.1. Q
Where is some documentation for Zope Page Templates (the basis of Nooron
Page Templates)?
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1.17.2. A
FrontPage
of ZPT ZPT
Error Handling Strategies ZPT Examples (and
DTML equivalents)
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1.18. U01500
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1.18.1. Q
Is there more documentation?
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1.18.2. A
Not yet, this is it...