Re: SUO: RE: A proposed SUO content outline
Ian,
I'm glad that you recognize all these problems and limitations:
>I agree with you that one of the biggest challenges in constructing
>an overarching ontology is that many of the various chunks that have to be
>merged to create the ontology will be, to a lesser or greater extent,
>incompatible. In some cases, the incompatibilities can be smoothed over by
>tweaking the formalizations; in other cases, wholesale theoretical revision
>may be required.
And I don't disagree with your proposed approach. In fact,
I voted for it because I agree that it is better to work on
some concrete proposals in order to search out where the
real problems may lie.
>Although we agree that this is a major challenge for our
>project, I guess we disagree about how it should be tackled. From what you
>say below, it sounds like you are recommending that we put a halt to the
>actual ontology construction, take a step back, and get straight about the
>philosophical foundations before we go any further.
I think that we should do both in parallel, in an iterative
process, but always with the recognition that anything that
has been done so far might end up "on the cutting room floor."
>In any case, I would argue for a "reflective equilibrium" approach
>to ontology design. Let's start with a set of high-level categories and
>then successively incorporate new content into the ontology. As we discover
>incompatibilities between new content and existing content, we can resolve
>them on a case-by-case basis. If we find that some high-level categories
>are not needed to support lower-level nodes, then we can excise them from
>the conceptual structure. If we find that a lower-level structure can be
>simplified by locating part of its semantic endowment in a new higher-level
>node (from which the lower-level structure can inherit this content), we can
>add that node to the ontology. It seems to me that this sort of approach
>has the advantage of making the various incompatibilities between formal
>theories as concrete as possible (as Wittgenstein once pointed out, many
>philosophical muddles can be traced to a dearth of real examples).
>Furthermore, it has the benefit of incrementally building up an engineering
>artifact that could potentially be very useful for integrating information
>systems, even if we have to neglect some philosophical niceties.
I can live with that. It's worth doing.
John