SUO: RE: Re: An article on the pitfalls of metadata
John:
re:
That is my primary objection to Cyc, Sumo, and Dolce.
They have been developed by wannabe legislators who
claim that they are qualified to tell everybody else
how they should organize their ways of thinking.
What I have been emphasizing all along is that the
top levels (and every level beneath them) should be
discovered rather than legislated.
If there was one real ontology, out there, our several efforts at discovery
might converge on it. But since there is not (or, if there is, we have no
way of getting in touch with it), discovery is not likely to converge on
anything. So a community of kindred spirits, operating without any
legislative coercion, is likely to be a community in which a lot of
wonderful discussions take place, but not one which delivers a functioning
product to the rest of the world.
Dictionaries are a good example of how I think legislation properly works.
Dictionaries prescribe the meanings of words because they describe the
linguistic behavior of paradigm language users. Most people think of
dictionaries as prescriptive. What does "X" mean? Look it up in the
dictionary. But every generation or two, dictionaries are revised. These
revisions not only add new entries, they change old ones. These changes
reflect changing patterns of linguistic behavior, patterns discovered by
asking acknowledged experts in the language as a whole, or a particular area
of the language, what they think "X" means, i.e. how they now use the term
"X". In this way, dictionaries gain their prescriptive force by periodically
improving their descriptive accuracy.
If dictionaries could not be consulted to learn the "legislated" meaning of
a word, or to resolve a disagreement about what a word means, we could
hardly communicate at all.
So what about CYC, SUMO and Dolce? My first question would be: which one has
successfully incorporated the largest and most diverse set of lowest level
(i.e. working database level) ontologies? Which ones can most completely
rely on the data model itself to fully express the semantics up and down the
entire ontology, without "patching things up" with ad hoc program code.
(Sorry, I don't know how to translate this point, expressed in my preferred
language, into the language of axiomatized formal systems.)
Whichever one it is, that's the one we should go with. Let's work to add
more lowest level ontologies to it. In the process, we may sometimes make a
good case for revisions a couple of levels higher up. We may on rare
occasions make a good case for revisions much higher up. Some of those
revisions will not force structural changes elsewhere in the web of this
ontology, e.g. adding a creation-date-timestamp to the top-level
entry/table/class. Other revisions will force structural changes, and such
changes can be painfully expensive. But the further up we go, the less
frequent the revisions will be. Once again, this is just Quine's sphere of
language, his (or Peirce's?) holism.
Tom
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-standard-upper-ontology@majordomo.ieee.org
[mailto:owner-standard-upper-ontology@majordomo.ieee.org]On Behalf Of
John F. Sowa
Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2003 10:21 AM
To: West, Matthew R SITI-ITPSIE
Cc: Richard Cooper; SUO; cg@cs.uah.edu
Subject: SUO: Re: An article on the pitfalls of metadata
Dear Matthew,
My major point is that the work on ontology is or
should be one of discovery:
> I think my take on what you are saying here is the question of
> invention vs discovery. I have certainly always thought we were
> engaged in an exercise of discovery.
The contrast is not between invention and discovery
(since invention is itself a kind of discovery).
The greatest threat to discovery is *legislation*,
in which some authority or wannabe authority legislates
something that everybody else is forced to swallow.
That is my primary objection to Cyc, Sumo, and Dolce.
They have been developed by wannabe legislators who
claim that they are qualified to tell everybody else
how they should organize their ways of thinking.
What I have been emphasizing all along is that the
top levels (and every level beneath them) should be
discovered rather than legislated.
John Sowa