SUO: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema
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LIS. Discussion Note 23
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JA = Jon Awbrey
MW = Matthew West
Matthew,
I continue from where we left off.
As I understood the spirit of Sowa's Umbrella Motion that passed
on the last electoral cycle, it was meant to facilitate our giving
due consideration to any new ontology proposals of a serious nature,
without all the energy-&-motion-&-time-dissipating fuss of votes that
appear to be mostly a vain attempt to coerce a herd of categories into
compliance with one special interest weltanschauung or another. Nor will
all the "encouragement" in the world bring people to agree on things that
they do not come in their own ways -- albeit through interaction with each
other and, all too often not to mention, the worlds of real phenomena and
real practice that surround them and ground them in reality -- to see the
reasons for agreeing on.
Consequently, when it comes to making 'real' progress in the work before us,
of the sort that might last slightly longer than it takes the average viewer
to change channels, I can see no real alternative to working out the real
reasons why anybody ought to make the effort that it would really take to
bring themselves to any of those blessed e-states of accommodation and
assimilation that we have come of late to call "intercommunication"
and "interoperation".
If your ontology/datamodel proposal is serious and worth discussing
before the vote, then it will be serious and worth discussing after
the vote, so the real problem, with this or any other proposal,
lies not with the vote, but with character of the discussion
that goes on here. No vote and no procedural regime will
really do much about that, that is, if the people who
take the trouble of doing this work do not see the
reason for it, and then, on top of that, make the
effort to realize the promptings of that reason.
And that is something that I think it is worth
the trouble to work on, one way or another.
I will return to more specific issues next time,
and attempt to summarize from my own standpoint
the impact of the various comments and sundry
objections that were made in the interval.
Jon Awbrey
MW: I was a bit non-plussed by what happened too.
See comments below.
JA: Let's see if we can do a bit of after action analysis on what
happened to your proposal. Naturally, I can only present my
observations from the point of view of my own participation
in the action.
JA: First of all, I want it on record that I took the tasks of the
discussion period very seriously and that I was dutifully doing
my duty to analyze the document that you submitted, much in the
way that I'd go about the conceptual clarification and data-model
analysis of any other such project that I have ever consulted on.
JA: So I began in this way:
JA: http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg10712.html
....
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg10767.html
....
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg10774.html
....
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg10781.html
MW: It was laborious, but actually I recognise the
need to be laborious about these things.
JA: At that point PG breaks in with an attack
on the very mention of semio-anything:
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg10768.html
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg10776.html
JA: Then JFS comes back from holiday or something, and without
making the slightest attempt to review the grueling week of
logical bit-picking that we had devoted to the task, co-ops
the thread with what is probably the title of his next paper:
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg10783.html
JA: Fell right into PG's trap he did.
JA: Now, I have no stones to throw on any of those scores,
but when the hue and cry starts, I know who usually
gets the blame, and somehow it will always be those
darn Peirceans, with their inability to tackle the
details of anything half-way remotely brass-tacks,
nitty-gritty, or "pragmatic", ironically speaking.
JA: Then, to my way of thinking, you stepped all over your own motion
with a second or a revised motion, it wasn't really clear at first
which, then on top of that raising a whole new procedural ballyhoo.
I was totally stumped at this point.
MW: Well what I saw happen was a proposal for adoption by unanimous
consent that Pierre objected to, on grounds that meant he clearly
had a different idea of process and what a starter document was.
MW: Actually, I always knew that we needed to develop a more formal
process to make the whole thing work, so this was pushing on an
open door. I added the process bit and tidied up the rest of
the proposal. The starter material on the Process bit was
just to show how I thought starter material, and other
levels of deliverable should be seen and arrived at,
and where that part of the proposal would go.
JA: I would normally take this as a sign that a person has some
underlying ambivalence about his own motion, and that might
lead me to vote against it -- but the real question is:
What do any of our votes on these Start-Working Docs
mean at this point?
MW: In my view not a lot, because there is no clear process or level
in the process that the documents have reached, and there are
clearly very different ideas of what it means. My own view
is that the other documents were effectively recognised as
work items that had started but not finished. But that
is about it.
JA: The best that I can tell, de-facto-wise,
is that a yes vote means that a document
is worth discussing.
MW: Close enough.
JA: I have already voted with my time that the LIS proposal is
worth discussing. But whether it gets discussed and how it
gets discussed seems to depend a lot on the proposer.
MW: Well I for one am happy to continue the discussion on the
content level that we started. But I find myself rather
in the position of responding rather than initiating.
MW: I think you will find most of the meat in the subtypes
of relationship, from what has happened so far.
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