>>Barry, you caricature Tom Gruber by saying he wants to build
>>ontologies of concepts while you're building ontologies of the
>>world. That ain't so. (01)
Tom has a very clear and sophisticated understanding of what he is
trying to do. The problem is not with Tom, it is with the many people
who, in a variety of different ways, misunderstand Tom's definition,
both because they misunderstand 'specification' (thinking that an
ontology is a representation of concepts) and because they
misunderstand 'concept' (thinking that it means, alternately: idea in
the head of an expert, unit of knowledge, property or attibute,
description of a property or attribute, type, set, meaning of a term,
or term; and often scrambling several of these meanings in a single sentence). (02)
I continue to believe that the only solution to this morass is to
encourage people to abandon the use of the weasel words 'concept' and
'conceptualization'. The biomedical ontology developer groups I have
been mainly working with will tell you that taking this step has led
to much greater clarity in communication.
BS (03)
>>Anyone who builds an ontology is specifying a conceptualization. A
>>good ontologist specifies conceptualizations that are as true to
>>the structure of the world. But an ontology IS a specification of a
>>conceptualization. It is NOT a specification of the reality. Only
>>God can specify reality. We can describe reality and act in it,
>>but we can't specify it. We describe reality by specifying our
>>conceptualizations of it, arguing over them, refining them, and
>>hammering out consensus agreements on them.
>>
>>If we bite the bullet and admit that ontologies specify
>>conceptualizations [of a domain], then it's easy to argue that
>>conceptualizations should be allowed to have probabilities when we
>>don't have enough information for a complete specification. This
>>argument makes sense even if we don't think the probabilities
>>themselves are ontological.
>>
>>Kathy
>>
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>>
>
>
>--
>Ingvar Johansson
>IFOMIS, Saarland University
> home site: http://ifomis.org/
> personal home site:
> http://hem.passagen.se/ijohansson/index.html
>
>
> (04)
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