At 01:50 AM 11/25/2002, Kurt wrote:
>For the few people still haven't provided an introductory statement, this
>is an ideal time to do so.... (01)
Okay Kurt, you smoked me out. My statement, such as it is: (02)
Although mindful, in general, of the pivotal importance of work on
ontologies, and interested, in principle, in its progress, I have hesitated
to post to this list out of a lack of confidence in my experience and
authority in this area. I come from a rather different background from many
of you (though possibly not all): originally I was trained in Classical
Philology and Poetics, and turned from that to get a Ph.D. in English
(literature and critical theory), which I received in 1991. Since 1994 or
so I have been working with markup technologies (SGML, XML, XSLT),
especially in their applications to publishing and to other uses
particularly of interest to humanists (such as textual analysis and
hypermedia). Since 1998 I have been at Mulberry Technologies, a small but
active firm in the markup languages industry. Our work for clients includes
both design and design-related services, and "softer" work helping to plan
and make transitions, including providing training, independent design
reviews, vendor-neutral advice on implementation, and so forth. (03)
So although this has given me (so far) little exposure to formal ontologies
as such, the work I have done may be as near to them as might be without
being actually among them. I confess this may make me something of a
skeptic, since I tend to be fairly demanding in my assessment both of the
practical aspects (the hands-on problems) and of the philosophical
assumptions built into any technological approach to a problem.
Nevertheless I hope to be an open-minded and forward-looking skeptic:
without feeling able to say more, I can certainly assert that ontologies
address one of the core problems in information processing, and that many
of the visionary ideas now circulating will be impossible without robust
and well-managed ontological frameworks. (04)
Readers of this list may be interested in a couple of papers I've written
on some of the theoretical problems facing markup language designers:
please see
http://www.piez.org/wendell/critique.htm or
http://www.idealliance.org/papers/extreme02/authors.html (under "Piez",
naturally). (05)
Best regards,
Wendell (06)
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Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635
Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285
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Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML
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