Re: D1. Separate computer science ontology from philosophical ontology
Avril,
It corresponds to the relationship between science and engineering.
AS> D1. Separate computer science ontology from philosophical ontology
>
> How can philosophical ontology PO help to understand or benefit in
> any way computer science ontology CO, and vice versa? Can and should
> PO and CP be somehow separated, and how are they connected?
I suggest that we replace the word "separate" by asking how they
are related. The short answer is that PO is the science, and CO is
the engineering. But there are many more issues involved.
As an example, suppose you asked two different people to build a radio:
1. A twelve-year-old child who got a radio kit for Christmas.
2. A scientist with a PhD in electromagnetic theory.
The first would take some parts out of the kit, snap them together,
and give you a working radio in 15 minutes. The scientist would write
a grant proposal for a three-year project to design and construct
a portable electromagnetic radiation to acoustic signal converter.
That little story makes the scientist look ridiculous, but the radio
kit is itself the product of several centuries of science, a lot of
hard engineering to design various kinds of radios, and some clever
packaging of the results into a kit that a child could use.
When the SUO project was started, a lot of people wanted an ontology
kit. But what they got was seven years of long-winded philosophy
discussions, some proposals, various resources written in unreadable
notations, and a bunch of tools that do various things. Those tools
remind me of a poignant plea by a programmer who was trying to use
the software development tools of about 20 years ago:
Any one of those tools by itself is a tremendous aid to productivity.
But any two of them together will kill you.
In ontology development, we are still in the stage were radios were
in the 1920s. There are some products, but the science is still under
development, the engineering has not produced industrial-strength
systems, and the human factors needed for an ontology kit that a child
could use are nonexistent.
John