RE: SUO: RE: SUO Comment #2
David Whitten expressed doubt that a few thousand concepts would
suffice to define all other concepts of interest:
> I would expect a quarter of a million terms (250,000) to make up a
> middle ontology. I would appreciate any feedback which shows
> false assumptions or fuzzy thinking on my part.
The question at hand isn't what number of terms people use to label
concepts,
but what number of concepts will suffice, used in a combinatorial fashion,
to
define those terms. It isn't clear to me whether this distinction is
included
in David's calculation.
As a simplistic analogy, there are millions of organic chemical compounds
known which are composed of no more than 6 natural elements. It is
uncertain
whether the specialized concepts of everyday life can be defined using only
a few thousand basic concepts, but I think it is likely, and the best way
to find out is to make a serious effort to do that. It is mathematically
certain that we could *create* many billions of concepts from a basic
few thousand, but we don't know for sure whether the concepts of importance
for human activity can be defined with that few -- or fewer.
It may well be likely that, left to their own predilections, and given a
basic vocabulary of 2,000 terms and no guidance, different people
may define what they feel is the same complex concept in different ways.
But the experiment that urgently needs trying is to create as best we can
an inventory of basic concepts, and then work to define the more complex
concepts in those terms, putting our definitions of complex concepts in
a common repository for use by all. Only then will we be able to learn
whether those hundred thousand-plus complex concepts will be
definable as combinations of the basic concepts. And I suspect also
that two users of that SUO, who might have independently defined some
concept differently, will often discover that they can in fact use the same
concept definition, because the differences in definitions that they
might create independently are not essential to their purposes.
We won't know until we have a common repository of well-defined
concepts for programmers to try to use.
It's not apparent to me how this issue can be resolved
without an actual project to try to do it.
Pat
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