ONT Re: Data Models, Ontologies, Logic
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JF = Jim Farrugia
MW = Matthew West
I will have to break this into pieces,
as I am only getting short bursts of
concentration, lucidity, and time.
JF: In response to a recent posting by Matthew (in response to Adam)
on the SUO list, I am posting this to ONT instead, but feel free
to kick it back up to SUO if you think it appropriate.
JF: Matthew says:
MW: An ontology is really overkill for this.
Though I should perhaps make clear some
distinctions I use related to terms like
ontology:
MW: Taxonomy, a dictionary of standard terms and their natural language definitions.
MW: Thesaurus, a taxonomy with subtype/supertype relations.
These are not standard uses of these words. And you can look it up.
Taxonomies in well-developed fields depart significantly from lists
of common names in ordinary language nomenclature. And that is the
first time I have ever heard that particular usage of "thesaurus".
But never mind all that. I think that it would be a really healthy
exercise for us at this time, if it's not already too late, to drop
as much as our local in-jargons as we possibly can afford, at least,
until we can fasten our dialects to some concrete examples that are
not whipped up out of thin air ad hoc, and usually just plain silly.
That is why I posted that tiny sample of a genuine research dataset
on the Ontology Sublist, so that we could each pin our notations on
the parts of its anatomy that we severally recognize, maybe thereby
to begin communicating about this very important subject, having to
do with maintaining connections between data and concepts, and with
building bridges between data-driven and concept-driven approaches.
That dataset comes from a major, massive piece of funded research,
bits of which were lent to me so that I could explore logical and
formal grammar approaches to the qualitative aspects of a large
sequential dataset. So it was very much a bridge-building job:
between the several shores of Quan/Qual, Empirical/Rational,
Data-Driven/Concept-Driven, Dynamic/Symbolic, and so on.
It would also be a good idea if we stopped every now and then to think about
why we gather data and why we make up theories in the first place. We might
just find that there are more ways to think about this than we have been led
to believe, and we might just find better ways to talk about the real issues.
Jon Awbrey
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