Re: Ontology and Physics
Danny,
To start with your second question:
> Dunno, maybe you can help me through - consider
> the programmer building the Pet Shop Web Site,
> how much logic /should/ they know?
Short answer in three parts:
1. They should not need to know any formal logic,
in any notation -- RDF, OWL, CLIF, CGIF, etc.
2. But they probably know a lot of common sense
logic expressed in their native language,
and the tools should take advantage of that.
3. And many of them already know first-order logic
as expressed in SQL, and the tools should also
take advantage of that, if they know it.
> I'm absolutely unsure I agree with your position John
> (not helped by my minimal Physics, need to read more/think
> on...),
Another way to make the point:
The equations of physics (or any other science) by themselves
are always used in conjunction with some model of the domain.
And as the professor of engineering and statistics, George Box,
has very wisely said:
"All models are wrong. Some models are useful."
In other words, there is no such thing as a universal model
of everything.
John