20 - 030 Digital Human Reflection

So let us reflect on the Digital Human blog produced through 2020. When I made my first blog on this subject on 19^th January 2020 little did I know at the same time the coronavirus epidemic was starting to take hold in Wuhan, China. It would be my blog (20-011) dated the 29^th April 2020 titled “Digital Invaders” where I first discussed coronavirus as a result of me going down with similar symptoms from 23^rd February 2020. I clearly remember saying to my wife, Jenny, what I am experiencing is far from the normal flu. I felt very different. My thought processes were unable to access fully what was going on other than I felt something had taken over my body. Below is my Personal Diary entries for this period:-

Sunday 23/02/20	Start of cold like symptoms at a family christening in Coventry.
Thursday 27/02/20	Getting worse. Doctor’s appointment. Prescribed Amoxicillin.
Wednesday 4/03/20	Now very unwell. No taste or appetite. Low energy levels.
Sunday 8/03/20	Did not get washed or dressed. Too exhausted.
Monday 9/03/20	Very unwell. Doctor’s appointment. Chest X-ray requested.
Tuesday 10/03/20	Took to my bed. Not well enough to sit up. Had to lie down.
Friday 13/03/20	Chest X-ray clear. Water sample and Bloods OK.
Saturday 14/03/20	Family to Moat House for a meal for Emma’s 16th Birthday
Sunday 15/03/20	Felt very unwell as I woke up.
Monday 16/03/20	Not normal yet but feeling a bit better. Had a piece of toast.
Tuesday 17/03/20	Got up at 6.30 am and made Jenny a cup of tea. First Time.
Tuesday 17/03/20	Lock Down imposed for UK by Boris Johnson. Prime Minister.
Saturday 21/03/20	Still suffering a congested chest.

 

Inevitably my blog now steered to the subject of this coronavirus. As the media focussed upon this subject I was able to access a great deal of very current and relevant information. But having experienced what I have come to assume was coronavirus the whole subject took on a new relevance. This was further accentuated when my business partner, George Szubinski, was hospitalised with coronavirus and died on the Tuesday 14^th April 2020. George had his first test for coronavirus on Friday 20/03/20 and it was negative. He was hospitalised on the Friday 27/03/20 with a positive test and discharged on the Sunday 5/04/20 with a negative test to only be re-hospitalised on Friday 10/04/20 to die on the Tuesday 14/04/20. His wife Janis was in the same hospital with coronavirus at the time of his death. George had no major underlying health concerns but his body reacted very differently to coronavirus. Was it the anti-body attack escalating out of control after defeating the coronavirus that finally caused his death? The medical profession has now come to appreciate the importance of the use of anti-inflammatory drugs in the management of coronavirus. Management of the anti-bodies is now a critical part of the recovery process.

Now upon reflection this Digital Human blog has got hijacked by coronavirus. Now this does not matter. I had never set out to produce a true “blog” with the need to post to a regular timeline. It was always intended to be a structured way of note taking in support of the book I am writing called the Digital Human. The blog had no followers or readership and this was never its intention anyway. But unfortunately it was now not meeting the needs of my note taking. It had started to become a bibliography or more specifically a web link repository linking to the digitised resources I was researching. It was also moving away from any logical structure that I would need in my final book. So a rethink was required for 2021. It also occurred to me that if I could automate the blog into the production of an eBook and Paperback this could be a paid for or free resource which could trigger the marketing of the final Digital Human book. There was also a realisation that the final book could never be a completed piece of work. It was under dynamic and continual change. So it had to adopt a more Wikipedia constantly updated approach so the facts communicated were the latest. But at the same time Wikipedia lacks the “story” element and just the facts so it is not a very good learning or educational tool. The Digital Human has to be a learning and educational book. It’s a book not a website since I want it to have some permanence about it. It can be an eBook but it must have a parallel Paperback copy to give it real physical permanence.

So this started me thinking about what was the Digital Human book in terms of its scope. It was not an encyclopaedia which is just facts. It needed to have a story element but I am not an enthusiast of authors that paint emotional pictures before launching into the subject matter. But I do like authors that set out in a story like way the historical context. Even looking to generate reader emotion within this historical context is acceptable. I must admit I like the author Kevin Kelly’s approach to technology and biology where he often uses stories relating to his life in California which gives you the reader some memorable links to the facts he is communicating. This is especially the case when you live in a cold and wet England.

Whilst I am not keen on the use of what I term invented academic vocabulary. These invented fashionable “words” often created to support the directions taken by the academic community now forced into being as business like as any of the other communities. They need complex and new course names to attract the new students to show they are, as educational institutions, aligned with the real world outside of academia. I preferred it when it was pure academia avoiding trying to be a business.

Research from academia through to commercial organisations and the new alliances generate new words to act as the “coat hangers” for the researchers allowing for a short hand approach to ever more complex and detailed subjects. The world of the research community. Then to the vocabulary of the media and publishing industries. The commentators on everything else. New words to adorn new “Smart Thinking” book covers to entrap the reader to buy. New words for newspaper and magazine and now website and social media headlines and banners. Anything in a bigger font. Anything to attract the reader’s eye.

Then finally my own profession of the digital (computer) industry where the commercial segregation of new paid for marketplace is often defined by new technological terminology. The paid for consultancy of the non-technological organisations into these mysterious subjects that are never mysterious just being digital bits structured differently by the enlightened ones (ie experts or consultants) who have only named them differently. The digital industries now generate their own vocabulary by the hour along with the biological industries. A subset of the digital industry is the information industry and within this it is no surprise to see bioinformatics becoming the commonly used word to describe the application of computational technology to handle the rapidly growing repository of information related to molecular biology. The word fits perfectly with what the Digital Human book is looking to achieve. But I want to be a bit more pure in terms of what is Digital Human is looking to achieve. It’s going be a possibly going to be a folksonomy or taxonomy. But the word that really fits for me is it is an ontology.

The Digital Human book is going to be an ontology. For me this combines information science and philosophy to represent entities, ideas and events with their interdependent properties and relations according to a system of categories. Sounds complex and it is complex. But most importantly those working on artificial intelligence (AI) acknowledge the importance of building knowledge engineering upon which to build the AI. Importantly deciding it is an ontology gives me a framework on which to build the Digital Human book.

Now there are so called “Frame Languages” to support creating an ontology. They are similar to hierarchies in object orientated languages fortunately an area I am familiar with in terms of business computing systems. Now in the world of knowledge representation (KR) and artificial intelligence (AI) the use of a modern Web Ontology Language (OWL) is the recommended technique. Now I am not going to use these languages. But in writing my Digital Human book I am going to bring the structure and text in line with these frameworks. This is important since it lends some peer based credibility to the book. The book may then lend itself to giving direction and content to the use of OWL. But most importantly I want the Digital Human book to meet the needs of a general readership and not one specifically biological nor informational.

The difficult area for me is I have not defined in my mind the overall structure of this Digital Human book yet. As I write these words (04/01/21) I am still formulating a structure for the book. Current thoughts are a zoom down through the human passing systems, organs, cells to atoms. A top to bottom as a hierarchical structure but ending up with the DNA code. Then a similar top down view on the natural decay, faults and invaders looking to shorten the life of the Digital Human. Finally a developmental “life cycle” view going from conception through cell multiplication through to a normal living stasis then through to aging and decline to death. Medication, life style and diet were to be plugged into this “life cycle” as possible pathway changers or improvers. The mechanical parts, whose you can handle however small, need to be separately defined but where these parts are the more complex like the brain, nervous and hormone systems they need another deeper type of entity type. Consciousness within the brain is going to be a subject in its own right. Then something that I have called the “wireless” entity needs defining with this remaining a very uncharted and to some people, in fact most people, this is considered a non-existent element in terms of analysing life. Currently not sure how all these will be structured into the Digital Human book. The best policy is to make a start and evolve the approach as I develop the content through 2021.