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Re: [ontolog-forum] Ontologiesassocialmediators(was:Ontologydevelopment

To: "[ontolog-forum] " <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "FERENC KOVACS" <f.kovacs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 2009 15:25:30 -0000
Message-id: <2A030997345742ACB2714EBC6BF27E6B@Swindon>
time for convergence...    (01)

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427370.500-how-our-brains-build-social-worlds.html    (02)

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Christopher Spottiswoode" <cms@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "[ontolog-forum] " <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2009 1:40 PM
Subject: Re: 
[ontolog-forum]Ontologiesassocialmediators(was:Ontologydevelopment method)    (03)


Rich, you're such an incorrible generalizer that I'll gratefully
respond in kind:    (04)

Sure, it is a wielding of institutional or at least rhetorical
power to bring down the gavel on further debate.  (And even the
effective wielding of rhetoric takes place in a way which tends to
be institutionally guaranteed these days.)  As Bill Burkett
commented earlier in this thread, Rousseau's concept of social
contract comes to mind.  That further reminds us moderns of such
words as consensus, operationalism, and EDI Agreements.  All
clichés from present mainstreams, of course.    (05)

And they remind me of that classically reassuring but too often
frustrating Charybdian figtree syndrome as I introduced it most
recently in this paragraph:
http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/2009-10/msg00269.html#nid013 .    (06)

My first web page on this whole subject,
http://jeffsutherland.com/oopsla96/spottisw.html (which I am
continually recalling to this list), had this paragraph on it:    (07)

> In the domain of Business Objects here are some interpretations
> of those who are stuck on the Charybdian figtree:  suppliers of
> working but monolithic packages, guardians of legacy
> applications, enforcers of unduly elaborate standards. (Pin the
> label on the one you love to hate!)    (08)

And that is a lead-in to my insistence, notwithstanding your
dismissal of the term, that architecture has a clear role to play
when it comes to designing application system components and
composing products reusing them.    (09)

Certainly, I do insist that the whole WWW does have an
architecture, and for all the spectacular success it has had, as
an application architecture its replacement is long overdue.  But
how might that be done?    (010)

Maybe together, we will put a market bootstrap product out there.
(That, by the way, is the "tightly circumscribed project"
introduced at the outset of http://TheMainstream.info.)  Then,
surely together, because this is what the architecture was
designed for, the market will start booting itself up, in due
course to universal coverage, thanks to the philosophically
(ontologically, epistemologically, ...) sound and general
conceptual base.  Both boot and bootstrapping will be 100%
according to "The Mainstream Architecture for Common Knowledge" as
the market will progressively evolve it from its simple boot
nature.    (011)

That seems incredibly glib.   In that 1996 web page I've cited
above I put it this way (which, even though it then most
explicitly targetted the OMG's OMA or Object Management
Architecture, now applies equally to that more truly mythical or
at least shambolically concocted Web application architecture):    (012)

> Difficult indeed! And reminded once more by Medawar's Dictum
> (Theories are not displaced by facts, they are replaced by
> better theories) I do not expect you to be convinced of the
> technology until you can really see the alternative in action.
> But maybe, somewhere, based on the broader picture presented
> here, there will be some *readiness to take what at this stage
> must seem to a newcomer like a gamble* [bold in the original],
> together, we - and especially our users of all kinds - would get
> safely to port sooner, in conclusion of this commonly-agreed
> knowledge-modelling standards Odyssey.    (013)

I will leave for another time the many further parallels between
the Homeric allegory, with its particular content and structure,
and the "Ride The Mainstream!" project's strategy.  I'll just note
here that it's somewhat to be expected that a strategy claiming to
be based on "The Mainstream" should have had an antecedent into
which was distilled the pre-Philosophy wisdom of nearly three
millenia ago, the late Bronze Age.    (014)

But could Homer really have had in mind such an apparently modern
idea as an institutionally-structured society?  In support of that
bold notion let me introduce a 2005 book, The Rise of Bronze Age
Society, by Kristiansen and Larssen, two of the world authorities
on the subject.  The book is built around the thesis that Bronze
Age society cannot be understood except from an institutional
point of view.  (It is interesting also to note that their heading
on p.1 is "Prologue:  between Scylla and Charybdis", referring to
the formation of their decision to pursue that thesis!  In its
first paragraph the authors relate that they "insisted stubbornly
upon trying out an interdisciplinary, interpretive journey based
on the identification of social institutions in the archeological
record, and their transmission and transformation to different
cultural and social environments.  More precisely:  in the Bronze
Age.")    (015)

So, Rich, there I've generalized between some phenomena from the
Bronze Age and your "homeostatically weighted vectors"!    (016)

Thanks for the stimulus...    (017)

Christopher    (018)


----- Original Message ----- 
From: Rich Cooper
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2009 11:24 AM
Subject: Re:
[ontolog-forum]Ontologiesassocialmediators(was:Ontologydevelopment
method)    (019)


Hi Christopher,    (020)

My comments are interspersed below,
-Rich    (021)

Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com    (022)



From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Christopher Spottiswoode
Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2009 12:57 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re:
[ontolog-forum]Ontologiesassocialmediators(was:Ontologydevelopment
method)    (023)

Rich, good point, but I'd prefer to take the users' word for it,
at least provisionally, rather than that of compilers of thesauri.
However "sophisticated" (scare quotes intended) thesauri have
become, they remain of merely heuristic value.
Of Course.  Compilers and thesauri are figments of some group's
collective imagination based on their perceptions of the terminal
concepts.  But everyone votes who can concept now.  Those shared
concepts are terminal nodes.  Everything else is conjecture and
refutation a la Popper.  Only the election winners are the
selected ones for this transaction, however complex.    (024)

Either way, architecture must involve systematic recognition of
the openness of such questions, and offer a maximally informed and
democratic approach to discover, negotiate and resolve any such
context-dependent issues.    (025)

Actually, "architecture" is a mythological beast (like the
unicorn) which balances the homeostatically weighted vector of
health (good) against the perceived homeostatic correction vector
of the unique interests of the maximally defensive controllers of
the architecture (bad).  With none (all are bad), the balance is
0.  With all (all are good), the balance is 1.    (026)

Sure, that fine ideal is less applicable to more batch-mode
requirements such as MT or other NL corpus analyses.  But I think
we are talking in this thread rather of the design of ontologies,
and cultivating commitment to them.    (027)

Christopher    (028)

Personally, I consider any commitments to be temporary and
mereological in time and sequence from the context in which they
are expressed.  So casting conception types to this list (or any
other destination) is mereological if legitimate in its
subdivision methods.    (029)

Cool,
-Rich    (030)


----- Original Message ----- 
From: Rich Cooper
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2009 10:17 AM
Subject: Re:
[ontolog-forum]Ontologiesassocialmediators(was:Ontologydevelopment
method)    (031)

Christopher Spottiswoode wrote:
I might add that I have always valued appropriateness of
concept over any kind of merely statistical connection.    (032)

If even concepts (per se) are unique (like synsets) then isn't the
statistical spectrum of conceptional distribution (like WordNet
synsets) also ordered and unique in terms of some conceptional
identifier over a vocabulary (of said conceptions and synsets)?    (033)

-Rich    (034)

Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com    (035)

-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Christopher Spottiswoode
Sent: Wednesday, December 02, 2009 12:26 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re:
[ontolog-forum]Ontologiesassocialmediators(was:Ontologydevelopment
method)    (036)

Hmmm, Ferenc, maybe some words of warning for now:    (037)

In my last paragraph below I noted the further potential for data
mining, but that is only a very minor part of what I mean by
top-down/bottom-up processes.  Worse, perhaps, from your point of
view, it is not where the main qualitative impact will be from the
spread of MACK.  At risk of causing further confusion at this
stage, I might add that I have always valued appropriateness of
concept over any kind of merely statistical connection.    (038)

But I still eagerly look forward to the outcome your synchronizing
processes!    (039)

Christopher    (040)

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "FERENC KOVACS" <f.kovacs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "[ontolog-forum] " <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, December 02, 2009 9:15 PM
Subject: Re:
[ontolog-forum]Ontologiesassocialmediators(was:Ontologydevelopment
method)    (041)


Chris, I think I should try to synchronize with you as many of
ideas
presented I share but call a different name.
Will elaborate on that soon.
Thanks a lot
Ferenc
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Christopher Spottiswoode" <cms@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "[ontolog-forum] " <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, December 02, 2009 5:59 PM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum]
Ontologiesassocialmediators(was:Ontologydevelopment method)    (042)


> Ferenc, thanks for all the further good comment.
>
>> I believe the big issue is how to connect common knowledge of
>> whatever representation since we seem to have a narrow
>> bandwidth
>> of keeping track of long sequences of information.
>
> Levels of abstraction are the basis of MACK's systematic
> approach
> to that problem, particularly how they fit in with the "join"
> concept as I introduced it from this point
> http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/2008-03/msg00249.html#nid039
> in the 3rd instalment of my "MACK basics" series.  "Composition"
> is another name often used for it, but I prefer the graphic or
> ERD
> word with its RDB meaning and associations.
>
> A more immediately relevant aspect is in this paragraph from a
> slightly later post by me:
> http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/2008-03/msg00254.html#nid019.
> (But don't follow up now on the unfulfilled promise in its last
> sentence!)
>
> Another major approach to your problem, so central as the
> problem
> is, concerns what I hesitantly call its UDDI- or WSDL-like
> functionality, as part of the whole market scene.  I say
> "hesitantly" because (1) those specific facilities/languages are
> far from being great advertisements for any concept, (2) their
> notion of component architecture needs throwing out, lock, stock
> and barrel, and, more centrally, (3) their conception of the
> nature of the market is not pitched right from epistemological
> or
> ontological points of view.  (Sorry not to go into more detail
> on
> that now!)
>
> To generalize, though, it is the integration of the market and
> component aspects of MACK as a philosophically-founded
> architecture which will bring about the foreseeable quantum leap
> of intuitive and agile functionality over those of traditional
> Web
> Search and Web Services.
>
>> It is not by chance for example that a forum on cognitive
>> linguisics cals for papers on the relations between cognitive
>> systems, their modular nature and interfaces. Therefore
>> products
>> that help connect various modalities of knowledge
>> representations, even befote they are structured at an
>> elementary level seem to be a winner: http://prezi.com/
>
> Google |metaset artificial creativity| to be pointed to my
> reluctant but still chosen use of a controversial phrase in the
> past.  (Follow my 2 links above to see how I also refer to it as
> "Koestler creativity".)
>
> But Ferenc, you seem to have a background in data mining, so you
> will surely love this forthcoming platform, and how it will help
> expedite the whole top-down/bottom-up process of creative
> discovery and invention!
>
> Christopher
>
>
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