SUO: An article on the pitfalls of metadata
There was an article on the web that was discussed
in the Semantic Web list a while back. It might
be useful to stimulate some more discussion on the
ontology design issues we've been grappling with.
Its titled: "Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven
straw-men of the meta-utopia", and its posted at:
http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm
The basic idea is that ontology designers can't
forsee the human self interest that must inevitably
foil their categorization of any subject area. At
the end, he agrees that metadata is a useful thing,
but stresses that it won't come from letting people
fill in ontology forms because they will fudge the
data into their own self interest.
It seems to me this discussion could enlighten some
of these CG and SUO issues. Even a Physics ontology,
Math, Biology, Algorithms, every kind of ontology
has an unrealistic bias according to the auther.
Anybody have any thoughts on this?
Rich