Dear Michael,
The second reference, which is a tad long, states,
among other things:
Access is dependent on
architecture. It is precisely by providing a space of names for access that Web
architecture is useful. In order to be useful, access should
be unambiguous.
In contrast, reference to natural entities is inherently ambiguous. In this manner,
reference on the Web is the same as reference off the Web. This is simply
obvious. The Web is a transport mechanism for (what are in the REST sense)
representations such as web pages. What a representation represents, and how
the names in it refer, has nothing particularly to do with how the
representations are transported. In the words of Korzybsky, “the map is
not the territory” (1931). Web architecture does not determine what any
names, including URIs, refer to. It only determines what they access.
I think that description succinctly captures the
utopian vision of “meaning” that is so often misrepresented as in
the SW descriptions. URIs can only hold one file, and that file is, as he
says, “inherently ambiguous” because the web is all about language,
and language is inherently unambiguous.
The SemWeb, much of the ontology work, and most of
what passes for semantics technology, is actually Peirce’s “sign”,
containing no meaning at all. Meaning is in the mind of the interpreter who
reads the material and assigns only her personal meaning. There is no
objective “meaning” by definition. What you mean by a sign is
very, very personal.
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Michael Brunnbauer
Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2012 11:31 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Terminology
and Knowledge Engineering
Hello Rich,
On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 11:03:20AM -0800, Rich Cooper
wrote:
> When a URI references a "definition" of
a term,
> there is still a huge gap between whatever is
> stored as the "definition" and what the
average
> person of skill in the art under discussion
thinks
> of as "meaning" so I think David's
point about the
> huge variability in interpretations is still
> completely valid.
I never implied that the semantic web defines exact
meaning. This
is impossible and not necessary. See:
http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/HayesSlides.pdf
http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin/homepage/publications/indefenseofambiguity.html
I agree with John that 'the overwhelming number of OWL
"ontologies" published
on the WWW just take the informal info from a
terminology, put angle brackets
around it, and call it an ontology' but I do not agree
with him that you do
not get extra value out of this. The extra value lies
in introducing the
informal term into a formalism where the context of
every term is clear which
is not true of natural languages where one word can
have several completely
different meanings depending on context.
Regards,
Michael Brunnbauer
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