John,
The choice isn't between a bag of terms and a full-blown ontology (in the sense
that I think you mean). Defined terms are a starting point but the most
important next step, IMO, is the relationships between those terms,
understanding how one term is related to another. Those two taken together form
the basis of any decent ontology, however informally modeled.
This is also how the simplistic use of triples (rdf, owl, even - implicitly -
xml schema) as the principal construct of much ontology modeling breaks down:
where nearly every term's relationship with the rest of the world is n-ary,
such reductionism is the source of frequent poor and simplistic modeling. (01)
Regards,
Peter (02)
Sent from my Phone - Apologies for brevity and typos: it's hard writing on a
moving planet (03)
-----Original Message-----
From: John F. Sowa
Sent: Saturday, 25 December, 2010 17:32
To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Fwd: [New post] The Newest from SOA: The SOA
Ontology Technical Standard (04)
> Folks,
>
> Many cogent comments have been made in this thread. Instead
> of commenting on each one, I'd like to make one general
> observation that has two basic implications:
>
> Observation:
>
> For many applications, a good terminology is far more valuable
> than a half-baked (or even a totally baked) ontology.
>
> Implications:
>
> Many of the disagreements on this list can be resolved by the
> observation that the useful resources not based on a formal logic
> should be called terminologies or lexical resources (e.g., WordNet).
>
> In fact, a large number of things implemented in so-called ontology
> languages should really be called terminologies, since they use few or
> none of the logical operators and reasoning methods of those languages.
>
> John
>
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