Re: SUO: Re: Proposed SUO Content Outline
Pat --
Some specific responses to specific points in your note:
You say:
> Ah, OK. What you are talking about here is what one might call a
> meta-ontology: a theory of ontologies, with information about their
> strengths and weaknesses, what they are good for, how they relate to
> one another, etc.. That is a noble ambition, but I don't think it is
> what the SUO is trying to be. The SUO proposes to be a *single*
> upper-level ontological framework which reconciles all these various
> points of view into *one* classification heirarchy into which all
> other ontologies can be fitted. Which is one reason why many of us
> are very doubtful that it can be done.
Let's see -- You dismiss your understanding of my suggestion
as not what the SUO is about. At the same time, what you think it is
about, you don't think is possible to do. Which begs the question of why
you spend time on work that has no hope of success?
In response to my statement that:
>I believe the world is ready for a huge new emphasis
>on the *meaning* within software-based information systems. We're only
>recently in this position, with the critical mass of computing power and
>interoperation among enterprises of all types now in place.
you say:
> Sorry if Im one of the old cynical guys, but Ive been doing this
> stuff for about 30 years now, as have many other people in AI, and it
> doesnt seem that anything dramatic has changed. Moores law has been
> going on for a while now, but that kind of advance doesnt make the
> representational issues any easier. Ian is still talking about the
> situation calculus (reference McCarthy 1961, or thereabouts), and
> others are still getting hyped about modal logics (references from
> mid-60s), so where are the new ideas coming from?
This reveals an assumption that breakthrough new representation paradigms
or
mechanisms are needed. My perspective is that we have plenty of
mechanisms,
but that what is needed is a lot of hard work to organize the universe of
content,
and more hard work to organize the work of doing that organization.
I happen to be one of the old optimistic guys. I claim to have been doing
knowledge management (a recent buzzword in the industry) for almost 35
years.
In one of your earlier postings you disparaged a comparison between
libraries and ontology, but I have several times drawn just that comparison
in this discussion. The national libraries, such as the Library of
Congress,
I maintain, have been doing ontology for centuries. Interlocking
classification
systems are used as locating devices and networks of semantic pointers to
organize arbitrarily large and diverse corpora of information. This has
been
done with very old (paper) technology, and more recently with electronic
technologies.
The work I see to do is the organization of classification structures, not
breakthrough algorithms or knowledge representation schemes. You ask
where we should start? I think we have started, with Ian Niles's work. I
think we
could do well to survey all known existing ontologies to determine what it
would take to support navigation among them. I would like us to take a
look
at library classification schemes in the same way. I posted a provocative
list of classifications for the concept of "system". I look around and see
a
wealth of starting places.
Then, again, if you are right, this is not what the SUO is about. Rather,
it is about some Quixotic mission that is, in your opinion, impossible.
Doug McDavid
Certified Executive Consultant
Voice of the Practitioner Initiatives
Professional Development - BIS, Americas
Member of IBM Academy of Technology
mcdavid@us.ibm.com -- 916-549-4600