John, (01)
>Christopher,
>
>That is a very good question:
>
>> ... is Ontology not the field on which all proper progress
>> towards more security-appropriate technologies should best
>> be founded?
>
>Ontology is a proposed solution, but any question about
>foundations should go back to the original problem and ask
>how that proposed solution is related to the actual problem. (02)
Yes, certainly, you are quite right, and my forthcoming 3rd instalment
does exactly that. Some of my earlier posts have already briefly hinted
at or even stated what the problem and the solution are. We shall
trigger the market's seeing in detail that general-purpose programming
on networked computers is the nub of our present security problem. That
will happen once we have made it evident how an appropriately (i.e
semantics-based and Ontology-founded) programmer-restrictive
architecture need not be unduly user-restrictive, and on the contrary
will open up easier and faster avenues towards the indefinite further
creation of more user-congenial opportunities. (03)
I am fully with you in all this (as in at least almost everything you
write (where I leave a glimmer of an opening for possibly refining
argument...)): (04)
>Following are some intervening steps:
>
> 1. Communication standards have usually addressed low-level
> issues of syntax, formats, and protocols.
>
> 2. But people respond to the meaning of a message.
>
> 3. Designers have felt that computer communications would
> be enhanced if the computer systems could also recognize
> and respond in terms of the meaning of each message.
>
> 4. Semantics is supposed to be the field that addresses meaning,
> and ontology is an important part of semantics.
>
> 5. But there is more to semantics than ontology. Logic, for
> example, is a prerequisite for representing ontology. Also
> important are the reasoning methods used with the logic and
> the model theory that relates the logic to the domain.
>
> 6. And there is more to meaning than semantics. Pragmatics, for
> example, is at least as important as semantics, if not more so. (05)
On the last point, yes, but I tend to mean 'semantics' in the more
inclusive and also colloquial sense which rather includes pragmatics, as
in "semantics-in-context". That sense is, in my mind, already implicit
in your points 2 through 4. If there appears to be a difference in our
conceptions it could be mostly because my focus is more on people-driven
IS than on formal-logic-based AI. (06)
>I think that much of the "lurching" that Jamie Clark discussed
>results from people grasping at parts of a solution, such as
>ontology -- or even worse, a specific notation for ontology --
>without considering how all aspects are related to the meaning
>and how the meaning is related to what is actually required. (07)
100%! (08)
>At the end of this note are two slides from a recent talk in which
>I discussed some of these relationships. (09)
That is a very impressive suite of slide-shows, and I see VAE and its NL
capabilities as very nicely complementary to my present work. Thank you
for them too! (010)
>
>John Sowa (011)
Christopher (012)
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