Great policy insights: (01)
>>grayish lump that statisfies the eye of the ontology drafter. (02)
What do you get when you cross the DNA of a statistician with that of an
Ontologist? (03)
Great Gray one-eyed Statisfactions ;-} (04)
Cheers (05)
Bob (06)
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Patrick Durusau
Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2006 4:38 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] April 20 session on tagging ontolog content (07)
Bill, (08)
Bill Andersen wrote: (09)
> Folks,
>
> Hate to jump in the middle of a conversation, but this one caught my eye.
>
Likewise but your response caught mine. ;-) (010)
> dbedford@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
>> There is no one
>> final set of attributes for an entity that serves for all time, there
>> is no one set of entities that serves for all time.
>
>
> I find this statement fantastic - it seems to be either an extremely
> bold metaphysical claim or a trivial comment on the nature of language
> use. If the former, it deserves substantiation. If the latter, it
> should be noted to be a linguistic and not a metaphysical claim.
>
What do you find "fantastic" about this claim? (011)
Hardly an "extremely bold metaphysical claim" to note that different users
identify subjects with different entities. I saw it mentioned recently that
it was reported several years ago that there were at least
72 different ways to identify an insurance policy number. (012)
Before you jump and say, "yes, but there is only one "insurance policy
number" entity, let me point out that "insurance policy number" is an
imposed category to which some but perhaps not all of the constituents would
agree. (013)
That is to say it is always possible to flatten the complexity of entities
as seen by users into some grayish lump that statisfies the eye of the
ontology drafter. What is in question is whether that has any meaning to the
users whose entities have been so abused? (014)
Not to mention losing the information that user A and user B thought they
were dealing with distinct entities that you have now crushed into a single
one. May or may not be important in some cases. (015)
What requires justification is the flat lander view that a single set of
entities will be good for all time and, more importantly, that those
entities represent the views of all users. (016)
For example, do we need only one entity for "father?" And can we infer that
"father" must have a genetic relationship to any child born of a marriage to
a mother? Seems to make sense, yes? Well, except that if you in Louisiana
(state in the US) or any country other than the US/UK/Canada, the husband of
the mother is presumed (conclusively) to be the father of any children of
the marriage. Doesn't matter that it was physically impossible for the
husband to be the "actual" father. I won't bother with the civil law
tradition that lead to that rule but suffice it to say that "father" may
mean different things to different users. (017)
To summarize: Sure, one can always impose a single entity on any degree of
diversity as seen by users, but then the usefulness of the result is in
serious doubt. Why do you think there has been so little traction gained by
the various "universal" ontologies? Or as a friend of mine puts it: "it is a
good thing there are so many *different* universal ontologies to choose
from." If the claim were "fantastic" there would be only one. That more than
one exists proves the contrary to be the case. (018)
Hope you are having a great day! (019)
Patrick (020)
--
Patrick Durusau
Patrick@xxxxxxxxxxx
Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface
Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model Member, Text Encoding
Initiative Board of Directors, 2003-2005 (021)
Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work! (022)
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