SUO: Re: Focus and Volume
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| They didn't want 'em good --
| They wanted 'em Tuesday ...
|
| R^2, 'Apologia Pro Cinema Sua'
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Frederick N. Chase wrote:
>
> Jon Awbrey wrote:
> >
JA: 3. Square One is that everybody who makes a contribution to the
> > main list probably does so because they honestly believe that
> > it has a bearing on what a State of the Art Third Millennium
> > Ontology System ought to look like, even if that makes some
> > State of the Art 1979 folks uncomfortable with the amount of
> > work and the number of different expertises that would really
> > be required to avoid cranking out yet another standard that
> > all innovative people will have to work against from Day One.
>
> There's a spectrum of views on the extent to which the SUO
> should be pushing the state of the art as opposed to more
> simply reflecting current accepted/best practice.
>
> In my opinion, a shared statement on where we are along this spectrum
> would give us a metric which would identify a good fraction of all
> previously posted paragraphs as not relevant (to the group per se).
>
JA: So perceptions about what is "relevant" and what is not, what
> > is "general" and what is "specific", are what they always are,
> > personal opinions ...
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Fred,
My remark was, of course, partly an example of the
very "progressive fallacy" that I so often condemn --
it is the sort of thing that I hope I say only when
provoked, and if it extends the rhetorical provocation
one step further it has pretty much exhausted its entire
useful function in the service of any logical discussion.
But your remark raises a host of issues, ones that I thought
were settled, but now see have only been lurking beneath the
surface all this time. I guess that I had been reading the
word "standard" to have the connotation of an "ideal model",
a "standard of comparison", or a "touchstone", in effect,
an existing exemplar that approaches to what is the best
that can be achieved, given the current state of an art.
Now, it makes no sense to me to simply write out a "wish list"
of capacities and features that we would all like to realize,
nor does it make sense to demand of others what nobody could
actualize with the means available, much less the prescribers.
And I guess that my sense of the current scene in Ontology Systems
is that we have not even come close to what could be achieved if
we would just set to work with the tools that are laying around
waiting to be used like we meant it.
So I guess that I have always taken it for granted that the "work"
of this "working group" would be a lot more like "work on what is"
rather than the simple acceptance and accreditation of one or the
other established order, or yet another battle between corporate
interests to have their status quo granted world-wide domination,
without, of course, their having to do any unnecessary "work".
But maybe I go that wrong from the start.
Jon Awbrey
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