On 12/17/2011 10:05 AM, John Bottoms wrote:
> I started thinking about this problem (how to deal with legacy ontology
> structures) and came back to prior thoughts. The first is to preserve
> the legacy system as much as possible. (01)
That is indeed important. The estimated amount of legacy software
in the world is a half trillion lines of code. (02)
Typical programmer productivity with current tools: (03)
● 10 to 15 lines of fully debugged code per person per day.
● Cost per line of code: $18 to $45. (04)
At that rate, the legacy code will be with us for a long, long time. (05)
We certainly need better tools, and we hope that the productivity
will be improved. But interoperability of the new software with the
old software is essential. (That was the fatal flaw in the SemWeb:
ignoring everything that went before -- including the fact that
every commercial web site was built around a relational DB.) (06)
> I also remembered that I have a leaning toward an ontology pre-processor.
> This is because there are so many potential requirements that we are
> not ready to develop an ontology that covers all aspects of all realities. (07)
By a pre-processor, I assume that you mean tools for developing and
managing ontologies and integrating them with other software. That
is certainly necessary. (08)
But I would modify the last line: "We will *never* be ready to
develop an ontology that covers all aspects of all realities." (09)
> What I finally settled on is a single control word for validating tags.
> Each bit represents a type of validation. (010)
I have some doubts about a "single" control word, but I certainly agree
with the goal of using a single bit in a control word to represent the
most common tags. That is a widely used practice in high-performance
tools of many kinds. (011)
But it runs contrary to the practice (actually blue-sky theory, since
very few people adopted the idea) of having 50-character URIs for each
tag and linking them to the tagged data by a very bloated notation. (012)
> I find it interesting that we have so little discussion about ontology
> structures for a base architecture that came from Minisky's very brief
> paper (MIT Lab Memo 306) without more extensive discussion or consensus. (013)
For the record, Memo 306 is Minsky's famous paper about frames, and I
strongly urge everybody to read it (or re-read it): (014)
http://courses.media.mit.edu/2004spring/mas966/Minsky%201974%20Framework%20for%20knowledge.pdf (015)
Note that the paper was written in 1974, but it is still on the reading
list for an MIT course in 2004. What people today call a "frame" is
so grossly watered down that it can be implemented in OWL. But not
a single frame in Minsky's paper could be represented in OWL. (016)
> For example Lakoff points out the importance of the 4
> categories, "women, fire and dangerous [& misc] things. (017)
Actually, the point that Lakoff was trying to make is that there is
no limit on the variability in the defining conditions of categories.
He noted that there were some languages that used a single tag
(which could be encoded in one bit) to distinguish a category that
included women, fire, and dangerous things. (018)
Lakoff used that example to emphasize the difficulty of having
a universal ontology that could cover all semantic categories.
But using that example as the title of his book did more than
anything else to sell it. (019)
John Sowa (020)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J (021)
|