Some references about ontology and analogy
I received some offline notes from people who
suggested interesting papers related to ontology,
knowledge representation, and analogy.
The first is a nicely done MS thesis with detailed
references to various approaches to ontology and
their applicability to the topic of "Ontology-Based
Image Annotation and Retrieval":
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/astyrman/gradu.pdf
Another is to a survey of medieval studies of analogy,
many of which Peirce would have been familiar with.
His writings about logic and analogy were undoubtedly
influenced by those writings, and it may be useful to
read something about the originals:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analogy-medieval/
In any discussion of ontology, I would emphasize the
issues of "knowledge soup". In my KR book, that was
the title of Chapter 6. If I were to rewrite that book
(or anythig similar), I would present those issues right
at the beginning and focus on the question of how any of
the various methods of representation could address the
"Challenge of Knowledge Soup". I mentioned that topic
in an earlier note, but I'm repeating the URL here:
http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/challenge.pdf
In the middle of these slides, I mention Project Halo,
which is the subject of a 19-page article in the latest
issue of _AI Magazine_. My slides are consistent with
the article, but my interpretation is somewhat more
negative. I don't believe that more of the same (i.e.,
what Cyc has been doing for the past 20 years or what
the Semantic Webbers plan to do) is sufficient, either
for commercially successful AI systems of for systems
that realistically simulate human intelligence.
John Sowa