The division between Neats and Scruffies goes back in AI to at least the late 1970s-early 1980s and probably before. I remember fighting those nomenclature/scientific
stance wars in the mid-1980s. We tried to at one point to clarify this as a distinction between rationalists and empiricists, and made some traction. However, most of us working in ontologies these days are both, with a predilection to one of those poles.
I myself am a scruffy neat. Oh wait …
Thanks,
Leo
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Paul Courtney
Sent: Tuesday, October 25, 2011 5:52 PM
To: edbark@xxxxxxxx; [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] [Fwd: War of the Ontological World - short article by Andrey Rzhetsky]
I attended the SemTech conference this last June in San Francisco. This conference is oriented toward business uses rather than academic ones and so was mostly concerned about how to make ontologies work and not
who had the "best" ontology. This may have affected their division of the world into "scruffies" and "neats" (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neats_vs._scruffies) with the "neats" being those who seek a more rigorous ontology that incorporates provability and the "scruffies" being those who want to link data
and not worry about how best to represent reality in an ontology. In my reading of the article, the Computer Code and Esperanto groups would be like the scruffies and the Mathematicians would have an orientation like the neats. This gets away from any focus
on any one discipline as being allied with one or another framework.
On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 4:42 PM, Ed Barkmeyer <edbark@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Denise Warzel sent this to an ISO group that has some passing relationship to ontology work, and is struggling to understand the concept. I thought the Ontolog Forum might find it 'interesting'. I certainly think
there is validity in the characterizations of the viewpoints, although I rather resent the choices of group designations, being a mathematician who mostly supports the 'computer code' viewpoint.
-Ed
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-------- Original Message --------
Subject: SC32WG2-INTEREST: War of the Ontological World - short article by Andrey Rzhetsky
Date: Tue, 25 Oct 2011 08:38:24 -0400
From: Warzel, Denise (NIH/NCI) [E] <warzeld@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To:
sc32wg2-interest@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <sc32wg2-interest@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To:
sc32wg2-interest@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <sc32wg2-interest@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
a paper that does a good job on identifying the different perspectives of what is an Ontology and how should it be used...
Denise Warzel
JTC 1/SC 32/WG 2 Convenor (Data Management and Interchange, Metadata)
warzeld@xxxxxxxxxxxx
303.722.9446 (Office)
303.777.1419 (Fax)
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