Dear John, (01)
I could not agree more strongly with you. (02)
> JFS: Different parts of an ontology may be relevant for people with
> different levels of expertise (example: physician, specialist,
> nurse, administrator, patient, and IT department). But the
> part that any person is exposed to must be compatible with the
> terminology that person knows (either from specialized training
> or general background knowledge). (03)
In our MEASUR methods we use only the words of the users. All invented
vaguely word-like strings one finds in OWL, for example, are not
permitted. (04)
'Listening in' to the ontolog discussions I sense a widespread belief
that logic
and formal methods will solve the problems of ontology development.
That
makes me uneasy about the direction of some of the technically
oriented work. (05)
I am all for formal precision once we are sure we have fully grasped
what we
need to be formal and precise about. I thought that the age of
logicism had
closed by mid-20th century. (06)
That includes the overlooked, extraordinary degree of agreement that
ordinary folk have long established about their perceived world. This
agreement
largely transcends languages. (07)
When they use a word to refer to something, they agree, in fact, about
what other
things must be in place for their something to exist. Our method of
ontological
analysis serves to uncover and make explicit these assumptions. (08)
The schemas constructed this way are remarkably stable across languages
and cultures as well as across the registers of various trades,
professions and
specialisms. Each concept labelled by the words in the schema has
boundaries
that fix the precise, local, specialised meaning. They must be taken
into account
when moving between groups but the guts of the semantics remain the
same and
serve as a basis for more precise understanding. (09)
The generic-specific hierarchies that play such an important role in
OWL 'ontologies'
play only a minor role in our schemas because the are forms of
cognitive norms without
ontological importance. We use them to make some schemas rather more
succinct. (010)
I have placed two papers on a very amateurish website: www.rstamper.co.uk
. (011)
Regards to all - I shall continue to listen in. (012)
Ronald Stamper (013)
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