[ontolog-forum] memory loss

[Paola Di Maio <paola.dimaio@xxxxxxxxx>]

John
let me pick on one more important thing you say

My major complaint is that the people who developed the SemWeb
ignored the 50 years of R & D on that and many other subjects.

From what I observe, this is also a widespread phenomenon in many fields
amd its the result of how the 'scientific community'  has evolved (reference to the article posted earlier on research cartels)

In modern knowledge management, we refer to a pathology called ' organisational amnesia', indicating the knowledge that escapes when
experts move on 

In modern sciences, such as technological sciences, there are chunks of reality which are
systematically left out from the BOK, for various reasons. Sometimes is due to the need to simplify  , sometimes is convenience, other time is ignorance, or pure strategy 

After travelling quite a lot, I look back at the  books that I was brough up with as a child, and I see very clearly so many false statements we were indoctrinated with as kids. It results from forcing 'real world' into schemas, to fix reality into defined points of space and time, when actually they are both relative to each other.

 Happens in science, but also history, geography. *remeber the definition of 'river' discussion?

We have seem from various examples how what is attributed to  Aristotele and the Greeks by modern literature, is actually faar more ancient
and geographically dislocated thant 'classical Greece', there is a political reason why we get 

But this also happens between disciplines: any rigorous disciplinary approach, in order to stay valid must disregard axioms  knowl/accepted to other disciplines
(luckily that's changing a bit, but the transition to interdisciplinarity its slow  painful and full of dead bodies)

Of course we cannot expect every research programme to take into account 'all the knowledge' in all fields to date (would not be feasible)
Of course we are all likely to make errors and omissions cause also as humans we have cognitive limitations (actually, apparently there is no known limit of the human brain to momorise facts, which is fascinating, but we cannot remember everything that we know all at the same time, and when we 
do, it cannot come across coherently) So even when we know things, we can easily lapse on them, dont you love human nature :-)

The power of collective intelligence  that I hope for the web  is not simply on the ability of supporting technologies to churn vasts amount of real time data, bless it, but also to extend  MEMORY to support not only reasoning power and also as ability to store, retrieve , cross reference much larger sets of facts from different sources/accounts, and query 'historical data'  and their respective contexts - necessary to achieve  Knowledge

A massively expandable parallel  external drive. then we would really have less excuses to justify ignorance, and the many wars that are caused over it


PDM





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