The Knowledge Engineering Review is to publish an exciting special issue on visualization, visual representation, and reasoning with visual knowledge. With Artificial Intelligence understood as "the methodology for thinking about ways of knowing" (in the 1988 words of Seymour Papert), computer scientists and knowledge engineers are increasingly interested in alternatives to text as forms of knowledge and as means for its representation. Visual representations and diagrams, sonifications (knowledge represented as sound), even haptic (touch-based) and pheromone (chemical-based) representations have become topics of research within AI and Computer Science in recent years. This interest is perhaps motivated partly by the growth of animated computer games and partly by the adoption within computing of ideas from biology, as well as by the profound recognition that no form of knowledge representation is best for every application domain. As a consequence, we may be witness to a decline in the centuries-long hegemony of text within the culture of the modern western world.
Along with different types of knowledge representation different modes of reasoning and decision-making using this knowledge may also potentially arise. For this special issue these questions are explored for visualization in nine fascinating papers by a multi-disciplinary group of authors: philosophers of mathematics and science, computer scientists, cognitive scientists, and industrial design engineers.
The papers for this special issue were solicited, anonymously refereed, and selected by a team of three leading philosophers of the visual, the invited special issue co-editors: Melanie Frappier (History of Science and Technology Programme at the University of King's College, in Halifax, Novia Scotia), Letitia Meynell (Department of Philosophy at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Novia Scotia), and James Robert Brown (Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, Ontario). The journal editors thank the three co-editors for their expert and dedicated work in pulling together this special issue. The papers accepted for the special issue are listed below, with links to pre-print versions of each paper.
Note that these pre-prints have not yet been formatted to the journal style, and that copyright for each paper remains for the moment with the respective authors of the paper. The issue will appear in due course in the printed version of the journal.
The painting shown is Ngurrara II, which was accepted as formal evidence by an Australian court, the National Native Title Tribunal, for a legal claim to land rights by the Ngurrara people for land in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia, in lieu of textual or oral argument. The painting is a representation of the dreamtime history of the geographic region for which title was claimed, and could only have been painted by those possessing this ancient dreamtime knowledge. (Australian National Native Title Tribunal [2002]: Native Title Determination Summary - Marty and Ngurrara. 27 September 2002. The canvas was painted by Ngurrara artists and claimants, coordinated by Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency, May 1997. 10 metres x 8 metres. Photo: Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency.)
Written by Peter McBurney, uploaded 2010-07-01.
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