SUO: RE: Lifecycle Integration Schema
Dear Jon,
See comments below.
Matthew West
Principal Consultant
Shell Information Technology International Limited
Shell Centre, London SE1 7NA, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 20 7934 4490 Other Tel: +44 7796 336538
Email: matthew.west@shell.com
Internet: http://www.shell.com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jon Awbrey [mailto:jawbrey@att.net]
> Sent: 19 September 2003 14:36
> To: West, Matthew R SITI-ITPSIE; SUO
> Subject: 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
MW: You may recall that my initial informal entry into the fray was
mostly asking how to proceed. But my recollection was John's motion
ended up only talking about SUMO and OpenCYC, and not being clearly
open ended.
> 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.
MW: This is my reason for introducing the work early to the group
rather than when it is finished. I think an open development process
of modest chunks (size yet to be determined) is one that is needed to
achieve buy in, and it doesn't matter how good an ontology is if it
does not achieve that.
>
> 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.
MW: I think the vote is mostly about engagement. Announcing something
is (hopefully) going to happen, and soliciting participation and
support. The result, and in particular indications of being prepared
to contribute, will give an indication of whether enough energy
exists to make things happen.
>
> And that is something that I think it is worth
> the trouble to work on, one way or another.
MW: The vote doesn't change the worthwhileness of something, only its
status as being recognised (or not) as worthwhile.
>
> 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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