Ferenc and David,
I COMPLETELY agree with the idea of names
being meaningful, communicable, registered in the data dictionary, and tracked.
But demanding a single meaning for a symbol
word among a group of people is unrealistic, as JFS has long demonstrated in
this forum and others. Instead, the word should be meaningful to the
developer who construes it (with help from the technical editors) and documents
it. The definition of that word should be meaningful to the mythical
prototype reader, who truly doesn’t exist. Instead, the other
programmers and tech writers have to drag it out of him/her until the software
interfaces work “properly”. Meanwhile the requirements are
evolving.
This type of problem exists among larger
teams of programmers who experience different meanings for common words such as
buffer, packet, table, form, and many other common English words used
metaphorically in program representations. I find that Delphi’s
strong typing helps me fix my own (one person) programs very efficiently, since
I always interpret a word in the same fan of synsets, but the next programmer
may not understand my particular intuition for the typed names anyway! That’s
just not fixable, even for simple words, IMHO.
I do, however, use Hungarian notation for
all naming conventions I personally choose. I tack on a two letter, lower
case prefix for each component type which I associate with a concept. For
example, I may use “tvOutline” for a tree view component in which
my software displays an outline of a text, project, activity, or other object. I
may use “lbOutline” if the same conceptual information is presented
in a list box. Or I may use “reOutline” if the concept is
displayed in a rich edit memo that can incorporate images, links, buttons, etc.
I might use “wbOutline” to display an HTML representation in
a web browser. In all cases, the “Outline” concept is the one
I have in mind, and the one I try to convey in my writings. I try to
limit the number of root concepts in a program to manage complexity.
That means I can have many different kinds
of views of the same conceptual object – the “Outline” –
but it’s MY OWN CONCEPT, not communicable to the next reader without a
lot of labor by both documenter and reader. The idea that I have chosen a
WORD that is immutably congruent with the objective physical universe is ill
considered.
But Wierzbicka’s “primitive”
concepts are like that also. She has chosen concepts that are meaningful
to her, and has written about her successful application of those concepts to
various languages. I think this is the same basic situation as the
programmer (e.g., me, though I don’t really program much any more)
developing concepts as a metaphorical explanation of a program and its uses. Think
of Anna’s concepts as higher level SPECIFICATIONS of those few concepts
she spouses. She uses the same telescope of primitives to see many
different planets, but it’s still the same telescope (of primitive
concepts!).
The organization of WordNet, and its
success in mapping out synsets from English common usage, shows that we
communicate very inexactly, or in an “underspecified” way, as some
writers like to say. In a sense, those synsets are the Zipfian primitives
of English, used in 80-90% of the conversations. John Sowa seems to believe
that the other 10-20% of English words were created opportunistically in
language games, and handed down culturally over the generations, but language
is open ended as he points out, not closed. He makes a good case,
IMHO. But every brain fits into less than a two liter porridge bowl, so
there has to be some limit on complexity of vocabularies, conceptual universes,
and relational associations.
Considering,
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
From:
ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of FERENC KOVACS
Sent: Friday, February 05, 2010
12:22 PM
To: deddy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ontolog-forum]
Foundation Ontology primitives
Re: naming standards. Would the principle
of Hungarian notation adopted suitably be of any help?
Or the system of mixed identifiers in a
Bill of Material document?