ONT Re: Data Models, Ontologies, Logic
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JA = Jon Awbrey
MW = Matthew West
MW: Let me give a partial answer to your question below.
MW: Yes, schema is one of the posher ways of talking about data models.
Data model is the common term though, amongst most practitioners
of the art, so it is probably worth getting used to it if you
wish to communicate with those folk.
JA: I 'was' one of those folk -- we just used other words in my millennium.
My interest here is how to communicate with some folk beyond 'we' folk.
JA: This subject touches on issues dear to my heart,
on which I have been working for quite a while.
I'm a really slow learner, but I've put enough
time in to figure out a couple of things here.
JA: If we ever get really serious about using a "logical looking language" (L^3)
to describe or to "model" the real world, then we will start looking at the
ways of those who are currently doing the best job of it, and, sad to say,
that ain't many logicians of the current crop. So I will yield to the
ways of those who are doing almost all of the real work here, if I can.
That will take us beyond the Spheres of DBA's and La Cage Aux FOL's.
JA: Anyway, I did make an earnest plea to relax the jargon for a while.
If it's jargon you want ... don't blame me this time.
JA: Let me repeat my "insight model" here, so at least one of us doesn't forget it:
JA, appending a self-quotation:
| 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.
MW: In business at least we gather data to help us in making decisions.
In particular to establish where we are, so we can set a direction for
the future. We develop theories mostly to help us see into the future.
Sounds like a good thing to keep in mind.
JA, continuing his appendment:
| 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.
If we try some time.
Okay, just to be fair, I typically give my answer along these lines:
The most important thing about data is that it refers to a world that is real to us.
It arises in interaction with this real world, from some phenomenon that puzzles us,
or in the context of a problem that we need to solve -- real data is motivated data.
Why do we make up theories? I am guessing, initially, as a way to sum up the data.
But then we discover that that the theory allows us to extrapolate, infer, project
what else might be true, or must be true of the world, given the data that we have.
And I would probably go on from there.
Jon Awbrey
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