Hi Pat -
On your slide, number 7, reference versus access is an interesting point. The word Paris is more ambigious than the geographic location Paris. If you STARTED seeking cafes in Paris with Google maps rather than typing in, the location versus the term automatically eliminates Paris Hilton the movie star, cafes in New York City and so on.
When referencing versus accessing, too bad a search can't start in an area too. As John said previously having multiple definitions in multiple nodes of more and less clarity depending on where you are. So if a researcher could do an initial layout....see where general areas are, pick one, and retrieve only from there regardless of what the number of definitions a single concept may have. In physics land, the definition of energy is different than yoga land. To start seeking information within one general area with all outside results eliminated, could be useful.
Debbie
On 3/12/07, Pat Hayes <phayes@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>Debbie,
>
>Ambiguity is inevitable.
Absolutely. Fortunately, it is also extremely
useful. Without ambiguity, human communication
would be impractical. BTW, writing long, detailed
ontologies makes names MORE ambiguous, not less
:-)
IRIs are ambiguous *as names*, i.e. they *refer*
ambiguously. They are also however *identifiers*,
and in that role they are, and indeed must be,
unambiguous: the identification mapping is
incarnated by the Web itself, so that http can
work. Unfortunately, discussions of what UIRs
"mean" often gets reference and identification
confused, leading to all kinds of misguided
attempts to eliminate "bad" ambiguity..
For more on this point, see the following, which
I presented at a workshop on Web architecture
last year.
http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes/DefenseAmbiguity.htm
Pat
>It sometimes causes trouble. For certain special cases,
>it is possible to create artificial languages that
>eliminate ambiguity -- but *only* for those special cases.
>
>It is not possible to eliminate ambiguity, because that
>would also freeze science, engineering, business, art, and
>*life* in a static, unalterable toy universe that endlessly
>repeats its preset moves -- like a computer program.
>
>See the following abstract and paper.
>
>John
>________________________________________________
>
>Source: http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/dynonto.htm
>
>A Dynamic Theory of Ontology
>
>John F. Sowa
>
>Abstract. Natural languages are easy to learn by infants, they can
>express any thought that any adult might ever conceive, and they
>accommodate the limitations of human breathing rates and short-term
>memory. The first property implies a finite vocabulary, the second
>implies infinite extensibility, and the third implies a small upper
>bound on the length of phrases. Together, they imply that most words in
>a natural language will have an open-ended number of senses ‹ ambiguity
>is inevitable. Peirce and Wittgenstein are two philosophers who
>understood that vagueness and ambiguity are not defects in language, but
>essential properties that enable it to accommodate anything and
>everything that people need to say. In analyzing the ambiguities,
>Wittgenstein developed his theory of language games, which allow words
>to have different senses in different contexts, applications, or modes
>of use. Recent developments in lexical semantics, which are remarkably
>compatible with the views of Peirce and Wittgenstein, are based on the
>recognition that words have an open-ended number of dynamically changing
>and context-dependent microsenses. The resulting flexibility enables
>natural languages to adapt to any possible subject from any perspective
>for any humanly conceivable purpose. To achieve a comparable level of
>flexibility with formal ontologies, this paper proposes an organization
>with a dynamically evolving collection of formal theories, systematic
>mappings to formal concept types and informal lexicons of natural
>language terms, and a modularity that allows independent distributed
>development and extension of all resources, formal and informal.
>
>
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