SUO: evil genie methodology
Folks,
In a discussion with Fritz Lehmann he offered a very simple and elegant
methodology for constructing ontologies. I've reframed the analogy a bit
from his original but let's see what people think.
Imagine you are an ontologist who has an all powerful but mischievous
genie at your disposal. Your job is to create the world. The genie can
create the world however he sees fit as long as it is consistent with your
axioms. You get a lot of wishes since this is a hard job.
For your first ontology maybe you specify that events have timepoints
specifying their start and end. The genie then cackles gleefully and
creates a world in which events run backwards and end before they start
because you don't have an axiom that specifies that ending timepoints must
be later in time than beginning ones for the same event.
In fact, we're already doing this in a fashion. Anyone who proposes a
solution on this list is playing the role of our protagonist in the story,
and the masses are the collective evil (but ultimately benevolent) genie
trying to find flaws in the proposal.
Adam
Adam Pease
Teknowledge
(650) 424-0500 x571