SUO: RE: Re: Revised definition of Base Document
A Base Document, as stated below, carries no official weight. Just like a
Working Draft: it carries no official weight. The only implication for
Working Drafts (which include Base Documents) is that the Working Group has
agreed to work on improving the document towards developing a standard.
Then I fail to see what the point is of all the very 'official'-seeming business of having votes, worrying about the consequences of voting, etc. Why not just get on with the work and stop having these points of order?
Frankly, I don't trust anyone who insists on having a vote at this stage. If this matter on which we are being asked to vote so carefully has no official weight, it can only rationally have some other weight. I suspect that the real reason for declaring anything to have some kind of named status is essentially political (small 'p'), ; it makes it harder to later object to anything in the document, because to do so would be to risk 'undoing the hard work that had already been done', and such actions are undemocratic, party-pooperish and generally the kind of thing that one expects from someone who Isnt A Team Player. In other words, this is a social device for creating a sense of cohesion in the absence of technical agreement, a well-known management device since antiquity and one of the reasons why there are so many jokes about things made by committees.
All this voting is entirely beside the point of making actual substantive progress on getting a coherent ontology, which is a task at about the same level of complexity as creating a large commercial software application. By and large, the most successful pieces of large-scale software engineering weren't created by a process of voting.
Changes to Working Drafts (which include Base Documents) are under committee
control, i.e., by committee vote.
So we would have to vote on every proposed change to the document? Give me a break.
......
I'm suggesting we keep the original definition:
> The prior definition was:
>
> base document: Starting point for standards words (it's clear the document
> *can* be transformed into standards words).
OK, lets look at that. Take an item from the document:
Actuality "A physical entity (P) whose existence is independent (I) of any other entity. As instances, the category Actuality includes both objects and processes. The term is taken from Whitehead, who used it as a synonym for actual entity, which he considered the equivalent of Aristotle's ousia and Descartes's res vera."
Now, just as a HINT, can you give us ANY idea of how this might be transformed into "standards words"? Will the standard require the reader to be familiar with Aristotelian scholarship, and a devotee of Whitehead?
This is why I voted NO, in fact. The document as it stands is replete with language, both formal and informal, which refers to, or assumes without explicitly referring to, large areas of highly contentious philosophical discussion ranging over two thousand years of Western scholarship. To accept ANY such document as something that "*can* be transformed into standards words" is ridiculous. Once the content of the document is stated in plain English, then we can start to have a meaningful debate about what it ought to be saying. We havnt even got to that stage yet.
Pat Hayes
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