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Some Interpretations from Three KR’s
John H. Durnin

After reading Ohlsson and Mitrovic (2007), Paquette (2007) and Scandura (2007a), I felt that I needed an SME to develop an ITS that will give me the ability to understand and remember the meanings of KR, SQL, MOT, SLT, ACT, OWL, AST, KERMIT, IMS-LD, UCM, BPMN, HLD, etc. This era of technology is rapidly changing the human way of communicating. It seems that we are increasingly speaking in terms of abbreviations and acronyms, and for many of us, without fully understanding the underlying meanings of those terms. This love of abbreviations reminds me of Bacon’s (1605/2000) quote about words in his treatise against the pursuit of science from a speculative approach. “It seems to me that Pygmalions’s frenzy is a good emblem of portraiture of this vanity: for words are but the images of matter; and … to fall in love with them, is all one, as to fall in love with a picture”(p. 23). If one substitutes abbreviations for “words,” words for “matter” and stick figure for “picture”, understanding is taken to an even more esoteric level. So, many of the details of the proposed representations are for me lost in the abbreviations, and my understanding is restricted. Nonetheless, this commentary is not meant to be a total surrender to incomprehensibility…

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