Sam Hunting <shunting@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said: (01)
> And I'm not trolling when I was the question --
>
> The phrase "incomplete ontological effort" intrigues me.
What is the
> operational definition of a "complete ontological
effort" -- surely this
> is entirely a function of level of effort? (02)
Perhaps I did use the term loosely, and I was certainly
not trying to produce an operational definition. In their
own minds, the UBL team might consider themselves "done"
when they have "reconceptualized" most of the major
document sets in use in electronic collaboration. (03)
What I meant however was an ontology in the sense of the
classic Gruber definition -- a specification of a
conceptualization. In other words, what is the shared
conceptualization of two trading partners as they plan
their trading activities, identify each other in a market,
negotiate their terms of trade, actualize their
their economic exchanges, and deal with their post
actualization exceptions (I am using the ISO Open-edi
phases here) ? In my mind, an ontologically-oriented team
would feel incomplete if they had to walk away knowing
that a significant component of this knowledge was left
unspecified in their efforts (for example, "where
approximately are we in this deal?"). Much of it was
certainly embedded in the paper documents of years past,
but simply stopping there would be (again in my mind) an
incomplete effort no matter how exhaustive their levels of
effort were at unearthing document-bound knowledge. (04)
Not an operational defintion perhaps, but explained
better I hope. (05)
Bill McCarthy (06)
--
William E. McCarthy
Michigan State University (07)
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