Re: Interoperability and Vagueness
On Friday 14 January 2005 01:36, Patrick Cassidy wrote:
> Rob Freeman wrote:
> >>We will never have a one-size fits all ontology for
> >>anything having to do with computer systems. Case closed.
> >
> > Great to see such a strong statement of this taking central place in a
> > discussion on SUO. We must understand this or all the mistakes of the
> > past are wasted.
>
> Rob --
> Could you tell use what mistakes were made and how you determined that
> they were mistakes?? Lessons learned is important. Educate us.
Easily done. The lessons of the past are that "we will never have a one-size
fits all ontology for anything having to do with computer systems."
Similarly that we will never have a complete and consistent grammar for any
language.
If we learn anything from the complete (commercial) failure of NLP to date it
must be this. To a lesser extent we see it in the failure of knowledge
representation to progress beyond the dictionary.
Not everybody understands that lesson, but the lesson stands, nevertheless.
Which is not to say that NLP (or meaning representation more general than a
dictionary) is impossible, only that the system for the specification of
meaning must be understood not as one which reflects a canonical structure,
but more as a process for finding structure.
The Semantic Web is misconceived. The centralization of meaning it represents
is the opposite of what has made the Web successful, which you might
summarize as technology to make it easy to navigate decentralized
information.
By accident indexed search, with its ad-hoc collections of documents, comes
closer to a natural definition of meaning than anything else to date, and its
success bears this out.
Rather than seeking a single canonical structure with which to label the Web
we should seek ways of making the search for ad-hoc structure on the Web (and
elsewhere) more intuitive. Perhaps by modelling it more closely on the search
for ad-hoc structure which I believe to be the system and function of
language.
-Rob