Re: SUO: Automated or Semiautomated Ontology Development
[foreword to recipients not originally involved:
you might be interested because your ideas are at stake]
Bill Andersen a écrit :
> On 3/10/02 11:30, "John F. Sowa" <sowa@bestweb.net> wrote:
>
> > Today, I happened to read two passages that reinforce one another in a way
> > that suggests a better way of doing ontology as well as many other tasks in
> > knowledge representation. Neither of the topics is new, and I'm sure that
> > many, if not most readers of these email lists have come across them in one
> > form or another. But together, they emphasize an important point.
>
> John, Jon, et al.. A number of things to say here:
>
> 1. On the "What is" issue
>
> a) It assumes that some preoccupation with "what is" is present in this
> group. Some in this group are, to a greater or lesser extent, concerned
> with what is. This involves the belief that there is some objective
> reality to be gotten at. I personally believe this is likely to be the
> case. It also involves the epistemological issue of whether if there is
> a "what is" that we can get at it. Well, some think we can, and some
> think we can't. So what?
Yes "So what?" - Why sould anyone care about "what is" ?
Isn't the real question "what to do" whenever we must tackle practical problems?
Trying to answer "what is" is just a mean to an end, but is this really
the right approach?
Aristotle's concepts, though elegant, were quite poor at shaping up practical
techniques, "generation", "corruption", "natural locus", what a crap!
> b) Presence of bickering is no evidence against the thesis. In fact we
> could say the same thing about the program being advocated by JA & JS.
> Once we stop caring about "what is" and start caring about what people
> say about "what is" we're in no better shape than before. In fact we're
> in worse shape. Why? Imagine putting the same requirement on the
> physical sciences. Perhaps we should stop worrying about all those pesky
> particles and fields and just worry about aether and phlogiston. After
> all, those were ways entirely reasonable people talked about "what is",
> right?
Might not "Category theory", "Topoi", "Chu spaces", etc... be the aether and
phlogiston of our time?
They do work somehow, but aether and phlogiston worked just as well by the
time they were used.
And I am *not* contradicting myself from the previous paragraph.
Just read Feyerabend (who is an Aristotle fan, but nevertheless...)
> c) If you don't want to worry about "what is", then just adopt the
> "Gruber" definition of "ontology" where one simply worries about the
> expression of "conceptualizations" (I'd guess you'd accept those as being
> ways to talk about "what is"") in formal languages. But then you have a
> burden to bear - a lot of the return to metaphysical talk in the ontology
> community, as championed by Nicola Guarino, Barry Smith, Aldo Gangemi,
> and others, is a response to the manifest inadequacy of the attempt to
> simply axiomatize commonsense as an answer to the problem of providing a
> universal substrate for information exchange on the web and elsewhere.
So, neither "what is" nor "axiomatization of commonsense" is the answer!
I agree, but, what else can we try? I cannot tell.
But *this* is what we should keep looking for, how to escape from the dilemma.
> 2. On Google
>
> Google's ontology consists of two categories: node and link, hooked up to
> a boolean keyword search. For some searches it does remarkably well; for
> others, not. IMHO, they've pushed the IR paradigm about as far as it can
> be pushed. It's brilliant, but anything that goes further is going to
> have to start looking into NLP. Is this situation going to be any better
> off than the search for the metaphysical holy grail? I don't think so.
Given the current state of NLP research, sure!
> 3. On automated "ontology" construction
>
> We already have this - it's called dictionary construction and it's what
> lexicographers do for a living. In fact, WORDNET should be a paradigm
> case for what you want. Now, nice at it is, it is not being heralded as
> the solution to everyone's information exchange problem.
>
> Again, if you (meaning anyone out there who advocates the same course as
> JA and JS seem to be taking here) think that this will work, then I will
> say the same thing that was said to Chris Lofting about his ideas a while
> back:
>
> Step up to the plate and write the code, and we'll see if it works.
Fine!
How to fund that?
This is the real problem.
Because not only this one, but many other small projects would need to be funded.
And it would have to be ensured that they are *all* different in their approaches
not just many mini SUOs, which of course would not make sense.
************************************************************************
* If you consider a genetic/evolutionary perspective as examplified by *
* Jared Diamond's ideas the whole research community in KR, AI etc... *
* is headed to a grinding halt! *
************************************************************************
As he explained in his book "Guns, Germs and Steel", one of the most serious
reasons Western civilization took over Chinese civilization in spite of it's
greater advance in technology in earlier times and equal or even more
available ressources was the very overarching authority which could dictate
policy and control technological adoption over a wide area.
Contrarywise, the divided European states were "forced" to advance
technologically. If one state refused to adopt an advance, then a neighbor
was likely to adopt it instead, which gave it an advantage, placing the
first state in the position of "catch-up".
See: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/diamond_rich/rich_p1.html
for an even more "value oriented" talk about the optimum size of projects.
In the current setting everyone in the community is competing for budgets
and only "serious" projects with "grand" goals will be funded, and the
larger they pretend to be the more funding they may ask.
But "serious" according to the criterions of which sponsors?
DOD agencies!
EEC committees!
Those penpushers are not going to understand what could deserve some
exploration, they stick to the tried and true, which is of *no* yield!
Like Pat Hayes confirmed (may be unwillingly...) in his message:
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/suo/email/msg03801.html
So every project is tailored to please the emperor's eunnuchs and
bound to end up in the usual quagmire.
And when the eunnuchs try to put up a little creativity they go berzerk
and support the most out-of-whack deliriums.
The french ones are specially good at that, I can tell you.
Christopher Colombus had to reach for *six* potential sponsors before
he could find one that funded his *crazy* idea and he was lucky that
they were not all sharing the same fads!
So far, so good, many of you will make a living of that
and play with some funny projects, but please,
don't pretend youre gonna solve anything worthwhile.
There is *no need* to investigate the technical matters proper
to predict that, just looking at the process is enough.
Furthermore, as far as standard bodies like SUO are concerned,
the voting on technical decisions will just make things worse.
I do not believe in that kind of "democracy", as Chamfort put it:
"it is a safe wager that every public idea, every accepted
convention is foolish, since it suits the greatest number"
Chamfort: http://www.bartleby.com/65/ch/Chamfort.html
If you don't believe me, please see what has been done in the field of
programming languages (I am a project leader in software).
The well planned, committee driven, DOD sponsored, "standard" language
specification ended up in ADA which is an awkward horror of very limited use.
On the other hand, benevolent tinkerers designed C which, yes, is horrendous
too, but not in the same way and is of *much, much* more usefullness.
You may not even be so "lucky" as the ADA designers and end up
with something like Algol-68 (ROTFL).
Cheers.
-- Jean-Luc Delatre
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"The dinosaurs's eloquent lesson is that if some bigness is good,
an overabundance of bigness is not necessarily better." - Eric Johnston.
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