Alex II

Note : Alex II is a previous version of the current Alex.

The Model

History

Alex I was developped between November 2009 and February 2010. It was based on various thoughts and questions slowly raising bewteen ~ 1990 and 2009.

Alex I was developped without any evaluation of other similar studies or research in the scientific world.

It showed some promising perspectives, but also some significant limits:

• the fusion beween words and concepts, which results in weaknesses, incoherences, conflicts, and unreachable areas
• the lack of a correct implication of numeric cognition and processing
• a too rigid description of the conscience

In Februray 2010, the Alex II project started on various fronts:

• first contacts with Iridia (H. Bersini) and Cental (C. Fairon)
• various writings in French, thoughts and explorations rather than solutions and choices
• a model overview in English (anchored here), a full description of the selected solution
• the development of java classes forming a new Alex server side.

Alex II and Alex I, as java programs, share numerous developped components:

• tools
• Janimava graphic front-end
• data structures and persistence
• client server architecture
• teaching sources
• part of node & link

New in Alex II are (limited to the major points):

• focus objects
• tripolar links
• concept versus word layering

Alex II may be followed by Alex III - see at the end of this doc.

Overview

The following paragraphs and the linked pages describe the Alex II model.

Globally Alex II is organized in 2 levels:

• the jelly level, autonomous, passive, the raw material
• the conscience level, transient, dynamic, active, interacting, built on top of the jelly

Slowly dynamic part : the base jelly

The jelly includes nodes and links.

Basically, a node is a content holder. But in most case, this content is impossible to name and very difficult to describe!

Basically, a link is a connection between 2 or 3 nodes.

Links and nodes

Four levels of perceptions are defined: concepts words, variants and inputs. Concepts, words and variants  are reflected in nodes.

Link classification

Concepts classification

Building the jelly

Highly dynamic part : conscience and focus

A conscience is a tree of focuses.

The root focus is the only one to persist. Others are transitional.

A focus may be described as a thread (in java language understanding).

Focus object may be either target oriented or input-driven.

Resources

• doc DELA files (en & fr), accessible with java classes included in Alex II
• wordnet files, accessible with wordnet related libraries(http://lyle.smu.edu/~tspell/jaws/index.html)
• OWL files, accessible with the protégé packages (http://protégé.stanford.edu)

Limits of Alex II and preview of Alex III

For more efficience, more universality, more power, it is suggested that Alex III would take advantage of some features of the java language, and specifically the on-the-fly compilation of new classes.

Alex II creates concepts and links (and more). Alex III would instead create (and dynamically compile) small classes describing the concepts and links in an efficient and versatile way.

But this is really another kind of project !!!

Probably MUCH analysis to conceive and realize this...