John,
Concerning your point:
>
> The best designs are developed by small groups. After they have
> proved their value on at least one important application, a committee
> can evaluate them, note missing or inadequate features, and polish up
> the details.
>
This may well be true of foundation ontologies, though a foundation
ontology is different enough from other artifacts to give one doubts about
any analogies. Even if it is true, it is not inconsistent with development
by a large group (50-100 participants), since each part of the ontology
beyond the top level or two is likely to be the focus of a small subgroup,
and the group as a whole would serve the function of the "committee" to be
sure that the work of the subgroups integrates with everything else and can
handle the applications of interest to the whole group. (01)
Pat (02)
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA, Inc.
908-561-3416
cell: 908-565-4053
cassidy@xxxxxxxxx (03)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-
> bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
> Sent: Monday, August 18, 2008 2:20 AM
> To: [ontolog-forum]
> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Semantic Web shortcomings [was Re: ANN:
> GoodRelations - The Web Ontology for E-Commerce]
>
> Ron,
>
> Just a comment about standards:
>
> > My understanding is that most of the "best" standards have come
> > about through a consensus between the major commercial players
> > with the active (frequently funded) participation of the academic
> > community.
>
> The important caveat is that committees are terrible at design,
> but they're very good at evaluation. There are many proverbs and
> anecdotes about that point:
>
> - Too many cooks spoil the broth.
>
> - A camel is a horse designed by committee. (This is a slur on
> camels, which are very well designed for their environment.)
>
> - Fred Brooks' _Mythical Man Month_, in which he observes that
> OS/360 would have been far better designed by a group of
> about a dozen designers instead of 150.
>
> The best designs are developed by small groups. After they have
> proved their value on at least one important application, a committee
> can evaluate them, note missing or inadequate features, and polish up
> the details.
>
> A prime example is FORTRAN, which was designed by a group of
> "academics"
> who happened to be employed by IBM (at a time when IBM had a sufficient
> monopoly to throw money at researchers who weren't making a measurable
> contribution to the bottom line).
>
> There were a few programming languages implemented before FORTRAN,
> but they were all very inefficient (at a time when computers were
> a few thousand times slower than today's cell phones). The FORTRAN
> group (of about half a dozen people led by John Backus) set out to
> design a language and compiler that would produce code that was close
> to the efficiency of code produced by a decent assembly-language
> programmer. And they succeeded.
>
> After a couple of iterations by IBM, FORTRAN IV became a very good,
> very usable, and very efficient language for numeric computation.
> The ANSI and later ISO standards bodies took over. Over fifty years
> later, they are still producing new revisions that preserve much
> of the original core language. Today, FORTRAN is still the most
> efficient and most widely used language for high-speed numeric
> computation.
>
> For some related thoughts, see the "Law of Standards," which I
> formulated in 1991:
>
> http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/standard.htm
>
> And by the way, the original WWW was designed by a small group,
> but the Semantic Web was designed by a very large committee.
>
> John Sowa
>
>
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