OPBPSPPCDD: A probably fine research direction
"Strengthen the eye of perception; weaken the eye of mere sight." Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings, Water Scroll, “On the Gaze.”
It has become evident that we are on a viable path towards an elegant way to ship machine safety reasoning.
PSPP lets agents quickly traverse safety artifacts to produce rationales. Constraints bound failure modes, including Byzantine cases, rather than removing them.
Foundations in good company
We acknowledge all the prior work leading to ISO/IEC 21838-1:2021, which defines requirements for domain-neutral top-level ontologies. In our implementation, OPB gives us words for the physics, and PSPP lets an agent follow the links. A curious thing about this work is how quickly a practical question about a machine can turn into an abstract one about what its parts and properties are. That leaves us with a practical research question of our own. What can agents do with OPBPSPPCDD in safety engineering? Should one let a machine reason about safety? In real time, even?
It is pleasing, on coming upon a difficult question, to find how many people have been thinking about it. BFO gives different sciences a common way to distinguish a thing that persists from a process that unfolds. DOLCE takes seriously the distinctions people already make in ordinary language and gives them a precise form. TUpper gives separately developed ontologies a basis for working together, so that a reasoner can draw on more than one account of the same world. UFO helps a modeler distinguish what a thing is from the role it happens to play, and gives events and commitments a place in the model too.
What actually led to the formulation of OPBPSPPCDD is called the Hazard Network Taxonomy of Jarosław Brodny, Magdalena Tutak, and Piotr Kalbron. Given a place in the graph, what does each hazard do to its neighbors? One hazard may set others in motion. Another may make their effects worse. A hazard that seems quite ordinary on its own can be worth a second look once one has followed the links. In a sense, OPBPSPPCDD is HNT that doesn't overwhelm an AI agent.