Bill Andersen wrote: (01)
> I'll pose this question to the list as I've posed it before to many
> others, most of whom have failed to give a satisfactory reply – if
> ontology-building is an exercise in application-specific modeling
> among a constrained group of users, then why is it not just a variant
> on what we already do with UML which goes under the more pedestrian
> name of data modeling? Surely it cannot be the use of this or that
> formalism which delivers the desired interoperability properties. (02)
I'd like to think that ontology-building started more or less as data
modeling; however, in the context of AI where the Gruber's use of the
term 'ontology' is rooted^1, agents are supposed to be intelligent, as
opposed to dumb databases, and their data are representations of their
reality, and thus 'ontology' sounds better than mere 'data model'.
(Note, this is my pure speculation.) (03)
I have heard many times that XML schemas are not ontologies, they are
data models. Well; the data in a particular XML document are real, and
the schema that the document is valid against is an ontology -- it
represents that bit of reality where the document belongs. (Not that I
will furiously defend this terminological experiment.) (04)
--
^1 He was not the first to use it; wikipedia says, "Although not the
first to mention the word "ontology" in computer science (that
distinction belongs to John McCarthy), Hayes was one of the first to
actually do it.") (05)
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