On the paper by Veitman, or at least the summary there are
enough vagaries to inspire a debate equal to that of the John Cage silence/hole.
Taking “A semantic web in the cultural domain must enable
us
to
trace how meaning and knowledge organisation have evolved historically in
different
cultures.
“seems like an a vague requirement,
for example especially when casting aside the challenges to define meaning as
previously discussed.
Gary
Berg-Cross, Ph.D.
Spatial
Ontology Community of Practice (SOCoP)
http://www.visualknowledge.com/wiki/socop
Executive
Secretariat
Semantic
Technology
EM&I
Suite 350 455 Spring
park Place
Herndon VA
20170
703-742-0585
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Mills Davis
Sent: Wednesday, September 12,
2007 10:20 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum]
Current Semantic Web Layer pizza (was ckae)
Here
is a link to a paper by Kim Veltman:
This
paper argues that the computing community (and semantic web crowd in
particular) has been overly fixated on first order logic and has failed thus
far to produce a semantic web that is suitable for culture. The abstract reads:
Today’s semantic web deals with meaning in a very
restricted sense and offers static
solutions. This is adequate for many scientific, technical
purposes and for business
transactions requiring machine-to-machine communication, but
does not answer the
needs of culture. Science, technology and business are
concerned primarily with the latest
findings, the state of the art, i.e. the paradigm or
dominant world-view of the day. In this
context, history is considered non-essential because it
deals with things that are out of
By contrast, culture faces a much larger challenge, namely,
to re-present changes in ways
of knowing; changing meanings in different places at a given
time (synchronically) and
over time (diachronically). Culture is about both objects
and the commentaries on them;
about a cumulative body of knowledge; about collective
memory and heritage. Here,
history plays a central role and older does not mean less
important or less relevant.
Hence, a Leonardo painting that is 400 years old, or a Greek
statue that is 2500 years old,
typically have richer commentaries and are often more
valuable than their contemporary
equivalents. In this context, the science of meaning
(semantics) is necessarily much more
complex than semantic primitives. A semantic web in the
cultural domain must enable us
to trace how meaning and knowledge organisation have evolved
historically in different
This paper examines five issues to address this challenge:
1) different world-views (i.e. a
shift from substance to function and from ontology to
multiple ontologies); 2) develop-
ments in definitions and meaning; 3) distinctions between
words and concepts; 4) new
classes of relations; and 5) dynamic models of knowledge
organisation. These issues
reveal that historical dimensions of cultural diversity in
knowledge organisation are also
central to classification of biological diversity.
New ways are proposed of visualizing knowledge using a
time/space horizon to
distinguish between universals and particulars. It is
suggested that new visualization
methods make possible a history of questions as well as of
answers, thus enabling
dynamic access to cultural and historical dimensions of
knowledge. Unlike earlier media,
which were limited to recording factual dimensions of
collective memory, digital media
enable us to explore theories, ways of perceiving, ways of
knowing; to enter into other
mindsets and world-views and thus to attain novel insights
aSome practical consequences are outlined.
On Sep
9, 2007, at 9:06 AM, John F. Sowa wrote:
Might
I remind people that this thread started with a discussion
of how
the pieces of the SemWeb are related to ontology.
John
Cage's compositions are worth some discussion, but perhaps
the
amount spent so far has strayed a bit off topic.
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