Chris,
You must have me confused with some other good looking young guy. A
lot of the attributions to "Rich" below weren't actually from me. However,
in the spirit of debate, I'll try to select the ones that were, and prune this
humongous list of messages down to something fungible.
HTH,
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Christopher
Spottiswoode
Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2009 5:40 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum]Ontologiesassocialmediators(was:Ontologydevelopment
method)
Rich, you're such an incorrible generalizer that I'll
gratefully
respond in kind:
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.
And they remind me of that classically reassuring but
too often
frustrating Charbydian fig tree syndrome as I
introduced it most
recently in this paragraph:
http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/2009-10/msg00269.html#nid013
.
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:
> In the domain of
Business Objects here are some interpretations
> of those who are stuck
on the Charbydian 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!)
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.
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?
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.
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):
> 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.
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.
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.")
So, Rich, there I've generalized between some
phenomena from the
Bronze Age and your "homeostatically weighted
vectors"!
Thanks for the stimulus...
Christopher
----- Original Message -----
From: Rich Cooper
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2009 11:24 AM
Subject: Re:
[ontolog-forum]Ontologiesassocialmediators(was:Ontologydevelopment
method)
Hi Christopher,
My comments are interspersed below,
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
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.
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.
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.
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.
Christopher
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.
Cool,
-Rich
----- Original Message -----
From: Rich Cooper
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2009 10:17 AM
Subject: Re:
[ontolog-forum]Ontologiesassocialmediators(was:Ontologydevelopment
method)
Christopher Spottiswoode wrote:
I might add that I have always valued appropriateness
of
concept over any kind of merely statistical
connection.
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)?
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com