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Re: [ontolog-forum] Axiomatic ontology

To: edbark@xxxxxxxx, "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2008 23:49:06 -0400
Message-id: <48C9E6B2.7060209@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Ed,    (01)

I completely agree your points below.  But you posted them after
one of my remarks, which made it appear as if you were disagreeing
with me.  So I wanted to say that I agree with you:    (02)

> But there is a host of difficulties with that, and the internet has made 
> them manifest.  The "data deluge" doesn't often come with clear 
> "provenance metadata" -- who collected this data, and what were the 
> circumstances and method of collection.  It is easy to draw erroneous 
> analytical conclusions, or find numerous fake exceptions to a 
> theoretical result, by considering "inappropriate" data to be relevant. 
>   The internet is replete with data that is "inappropriate" by being 
> outright false, but even with data that was validly captured and 
> reported, it is not often easy to find out the values of the context 
> variables.
> 
> The advantage of legal precedent is that you have a well-known and 
> reliable set of records that contains all of the contextual information 
> that was available to the judges at the time the decision was made.  So 
> one can argue not only for precedent, but also about the relevance of a 
> particular decision to the issue at hand, based on other elements in the 
> context of that decision.
> 
> [You have to realize that NIST is a scientific institution that prides 
> itself on scientific conservatism.  We publish a lot of data, and a lot 
> of analytical and theoretical results.  But when we generalize beyond 
> what we have observed and can prove, we call it 'hypothesis'.  Good 
> science will always survive the deluge of undocumented data. 
> Credibility is more important than visibility.]    (03)

John    (04)



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