Re: SUO: Re: REQUEST: survey of available ontologies...
In message:
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg08217.html
"John F. Sowa" a écrit :
> Folks,
>
> In the interests of reducing the volume, I'll combine my comments to
> several of the postings into one note. Unfortunately, many of those
> postings came from different lists, so I'm doing some cross-posting.
> I promise that this is my last reply to this thread.
Still a little cross-posting in my answer because I find it usefull in
this special case. I feel this is specifically an *Ontology* discussion
and it belongs mostly to SUO, with some copy to seweb-list because of
their claim to be "Semantic"!
[large snip]
> > ... But John, you yourself know that there is a clear difference
> > between the encoding and the logic - so how can you make such a
> > ridiculous claim. Of course there must be an underlying logic -- but
> > that logic doesn't need to be expressible on the web to be useful --
> > the underlying logic below DAML+OIL, for example, can be expressed in
> > KIF (see the axiomatic semantics [1] ) or Model Theory (see the
> > semantic model [2])
>
> I know that and you know that. But as Bill pointed out, there are
> so many different notations with different underlying logical and
> ontological assumptions that no one -- not their designers, their
> users, or their reviewers -- knows how each of them is related to
> each of the others. Giving a model theoretic foundation for each
> notation can prove that each one is consistent by itself. But it
> cannot show that using several of them together will be consistent,
> meaningful, or usable for any practical application.
>
> And your own reply to Bill illustrates the problem:
>
> > ... When you write classical logic with all the usual symbols it is
> > meaningless scrawling on a piece of paper until we have the social
> > agreement about how the symbols map to mathematical concepts.
HA, HA, there we are!!!
Might it be that the *solution* to this nasty problem is something
SO BASIC that it can be used to describe the syntax and semantics
of *all* of those competing approaches thus ensuring that whenever
they meet at some interface we can make sense of the relationships
they have? Where it *make* sense, of course.
This has to be powerfull enough but abstract and small enough that
an *agreement* can be reached by all parties given that anyone
favorite flavor of "semantics" could be built upon that core.
Cheers.
-- Jean-Luc Delatre
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