Re: [ontolog-forum] Theoretical issues and practical applications

[sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx]

I recently came across a phrase that summarizes the issues of communication and interoperability in five simple words:

     Cada cabeza es un mundo.

     Each head is a world.

This phrase was applied to the problems of educating children (see below), but exactly the same issues apply to the problems of designing intelligent computer systems.

The opposite approach, which some ontologists still hold dear, was enunciated by the schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind in Dickens novel, _Hard Times_.  His goal was "to fill the little pitchers full of facts."

Filling our computers full of facts (or ontologies) will not make them interoperate any more successfully than Gradgrind's method for teaching children.

Since I don't know anything about the following method other than the slogan above, I can't say how far it would apply to our computer systems. But one point I want to stress is that Gradgrind's method, by itself, is guaranteed to fail.

John Sowa

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