Jenny, Pat, Azamat, and Denise, (01)
That is the question: (02)
JU> I suppose the indirect question I still have is - if one size
> doesnt fit all - how can ontology design harness the value of
> a shared interoperable core on which we have fairly stable
> agreement and the value and usability of dynamic, or purpose
> specific local infrastructures such as folksonomies. (03)
And William James answered it at the beginning of the 20th century: (04)
WJ> Can we realize for an instant what a cross-section of all existence
> at a definite point of time would be? While I talk and the flies buzz,
> a sea gull catches a fish at the mouth of the Amazon, a tree falls in
> the Adirondack wilderness, a man sneezes in Germany, a horse dies in
> Tartary, and twins are born in France. What does that mean? Does the
> contemporaneity of these events with one another, and with a million
> others as disjointed, form a rational bond between them, and unite them
> into anything that means for us a world? Yet just such a collateral
> contemporaneity, and nothing else, is the real order of the world.
> It is an order with which we have nothing to do but to get away from it
> as fast as possible. As I said, we break it: we break it into histories,
> and we break it into arts, and we break it into sciences; and then we
> begin to feel at home. We make ten thousand separate serial orders of it,
> and on any one of these we react as though the others did not exist. (05)
This quotation is from _The Will to Believe and Other Essays_.
As James said, we can have very useful, but limited approximations
to many things -- provided that we ignore everything outside the
immediate sphere of interest. (06)
PH>> Where is this universal ontology to be found? (07)
AA> In your mind it has started to develop from 10 months old:
>
> http://www.indiana.edu/~gasser/L700/newkirk_notes.html (08)
Thanks for the reference. It's an interesting discussion about a
project that many people have been working on for a long time. (09)
One good example is the work by Anna Wierzbicka, who has been doing
a cross-linguistic study of the "mental lexicon" for over 30 years.
Following is a recent article that summarizes her results: (010)
http://www.ali2006.une.edu.au/Wierzbicka_Mental_lexicon.pdf
The Theory of the Mental Lexicon (011)
It's definitely interesting, but it is far from being sufficiently
detailed that it could answer Jenny's question at the beginning of
this note. (012)
DB> Rather than a single world ontology which would presume a single
world view
> to some degree, I would rather be able to define what I mean by something and
> expect an intelligent agent to resolve the differences between what I mean and
> what you mean through iterative negotiation. To this end, more and more
> published ontologies - particularly domain ontologies - would get us to the
> semantic web faster than the endless discussions about a single world
>ontology. (013)
That's an excellent approach, and I highly recommend it. (014)
John (015)
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