Re: meaningful message subjects (and other practical proposals)
On Mon, Jul 24, 2000 at 01:41:55PM -0700, Michael Uschold wrote:
>
> I agree with Nicola's comments.
>
> Also, I have found that teh discussions often go off into topics that
> no longer seem to bel clearly and obivously making a contribution to
> the goal at hand. Someone to moderate teh discusiions might help keep
> a more focussed effort which would make better progress.
>
> Just my opinion, of course - I htink it is good to hvae a lot of
> breadth initially, but that soon it will be better to hvae more focus.
Geez, Mike, you are *such* a party pooper! ;-)
Seriously, though, while I am sympathetic to your concerns, I am highly
dubious of the use of a moderator, as a moderator would have to make
judgments of relevance that I'm not sure anyone at this stage is able to
make. Recent discussions are perhaps a case in point. The scope of the
SUO project, according to the proposed IEEE statement includes the
specification of "the syntax and semantics of a general-purpose
upper level ontology." This involves not only issues of content but
also of form (both syntactic and semantic), and, as Pat suggested (at
least I think he did!), errors of form are much harder to undo than
errors of content, so better, perhaps, to go a bit overboard getting
clear about foundational issues than to hastily adopt a flawed
framework. At any rate, there is certainly a case for relevance here,
and I'd be concerned if such discussion were stifled because of one
moderator's judgment call. (And who'd be nutty enough to want the job,
anyway?!)
However, might your concerns (and those of others, I'm sure) be
addressed by splitting the list in two, one for formal issues (KIF,
modality, higher-order logic, etc) and one for content? (I know that is
a fuzzy distinction, but I don't think the gray area is all that wide.)
Cheers,
-chris
--
Christopher Menzel # web: philebus.tamu.edu/~cmenzel
Philosophy, Texas A&M University # net: chris.menzel@tamu.edu
College Station, TX 77843-4237 # vox: (979) 845-8764