----- Original Message -----
From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> (01)
> Pat,
>
> That is a hypothesis that many people have asserted, but without
> a single shred of evidence:
>
> PC> No, one single foundation ontology is **absolutely essential**
> > in order to support *accurate* semantic interoperability. Without
> > a common standard of meaning, ambiguity and misinterpretation are
> > inevitable.
>
> I agree with the second sentence, but not the first. There is no
> implication relation of the first to the second or vice versa.
>
> On the contrary, there is overwhelming evidence that people manage
> to collaborate very well without anything remotely resembling a
> universal upper ontology. Interoperability is *always* task related,
> and the standards that support successful interoperability are
> always at the domain level, not the upper levels.
>
> Not only have people been interoperating for millennia without any
> common upper ontology, but computer systems have been interoperating
> very well since the first networks of the late 1960s and early '70s.
>
> Furthermore, whenever people start with an upper level, they eventually
> discard it, ignore it, or relegate it to a rarely used guideline, not
> as something central. The evidence is overwhelming:
>
> John
> (02)
The agreement at lower levels may be an illusion, because the
upper levels are determined by the epistemology of the language.
For example, the upper level of mKR -- tabula rasa --
is composed of concepts, while the upper level of RDF
is composed of Classes, which are the extension sets
of concepts. (03)
Any interoperability between concepts and Classes is definitely an illusion.
To achieve interoperability between mKR and RDF, one must first
define a "Class view" in mKR, and then map that Class view to/from RDF. (04)
Dick McCullough
http://mkrmke.org (05)
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