RE: SUO: Re: Proposed SUO Content Outline
John Sowa wrote:
> I would like to do that. But just one point about KIF: I don't
> consider KIF an aid to communication between humans -- on the
> contrary, the "merged ontology" would be vastly easier for all
> of us to understand if it were documented in the way I have
> tried to document the underlying concepts in my paper on
> processes and causality.
>
> That doesn't mean I am against using KIF. But I want to strike
> a balance between two different goals:
>
> 1. Formulating our ideas in a form that is comparable to the
> usual mathematical textbooks, which interleave each formula
> with a great deal of discussion directed toward human
> readers rather than computers.
>
> 2. Translating the resulting formulas into a computable
> notation, such as KIF, CGs, DAML, OIL, RDF, or whatever.
>
> Of these two activities, the first is much harder, much more
> important, and much more time consuming. Once the first task
> is completed, the second is trivial in comparison. (But I also
> recognize the importance of doing both tasks in parallel and
> iteratively -- start with #1, do some of #2, test the results
> on a computer, and repeat with a refinement and extension of
> #1 and then #2 and back again.)
Can I support the wisdom of what John has written here as it seems to me to
be crucially important. I cannot begin to count the number of times when
looking at data models and other formalisms that a lack of appropriate words
has rendered the computable notation free of meaning (in the sense that no
useful connection between the model and the world is possible) or has made
its rationality deeply suspect.
Chris Angus