How Do You Know What You Know: Epistemology in Software Engineering

Abstract

Ubiquitous computing emphasizes the notion of automation in the daily human experience. With the ease, comes the responsibility of knowing, the knowledge of the intrinsic nature of the machine and the evolution of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). The quest for knowledge is inevitable and exists even in the mundane experience. This innate search is the soul of the act of questioning. “How?” “What? “Why?” dominate our communal vocabulary and model the endlessness of our natural inquisitiveness. For example, an interaction of software systems in the case of a user who withdraws money from the ATM and automatically gets a text message and an e-mail containing notification of the transaction, engenders questions about how it all works; i.e. , the nature of the special science that enables wireless communications. The focus is establishing foundational Truths for the modern human-software co-existence. The discussion that follows involves a delineation between the function that an intelligent software system performs and the knowledge it implicitly encapsulates. The paper expounds the role of ontology in formalizing knowledge in software systems and its contribution to the unveiling of the mystical black box that intelligent software systems often present to their human counterpart.