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Re: [ontolog-forum] on a new list of categories

To: rick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "[ontolog-forum] " <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Pat Hayes <phayes@xxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2007 10:55:05 -0500
Message-id: <84528A75-D69B-45EA-8DF0-339C351BDC73@xxxxxxx>

On Jul 14, 2007, at 12:02 PM, richard murphy wrote:    (01)

>
>> Many thanks for your comments John. You'll be pleased to know, a few
>> weeks ago in a W3C workshop when Tim BL positioned RDF/OWL as THE  
>> WAY, I
>> gave him more than an earful. He was very gracious about it. When we
>> talked later, he was a bit defensive, but I recognized his sincere
>> interest in the discussion.
>
> To be fair to TIm, he is thinking of RDF/OWL as the way to get the  
> semantic web up and running, and his ambition for the SWeb are both  
> more and less than Pierce's vision. Less ontologically universal,  
> and more globally (in the geographical sense) and socially  
> ambitious. To get something actually used for practical purposes by  
> a reasonable percentage of the literate population of the planet  
> requires that that the overall framework be kept as simple as  
> possible, and that a lot of low-level nitty details be simply  
> decided one way or the other. Getting the optimal or even the best  
> choice is often less important (and considerably less practical)  
> than getting a large group of people to simply agree on ONE choice.  
> All that deciding has now happened, and we have RDF and OWL and  
> XML. If you don't like them, don't come into the kitchen. It is  
> counterproductive to assume that these decisions are still open to  
> interminable debate. The way to get the SWeb started is to use them  
> as hard as one can, noting the places where they are completely  
> unworkable for future work, and in the meantime making something  
> that does something useful using the tools we have.
>
> I agree that OWL is nowhere nearly expressive enough to handle such  
> depths as this in full detail. It wasn't meant to be able to do  
> that. IF you want a much more expressive notation, try CLIF or IKL;  
> but you will have to get used to a different style of ontology  
> composition.
>
> Pat
>    (02)


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