Re: [ontolog-forum] Terminology and Knowledge Engineering

[Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 9/17/13 2:58 PM, Rich Cooper wrote:

Kingsley,

 

That post is a year and a half old!  But it still is true.

Long story short, a system upgrade plus a mail sorting order error, lead to this old post being presented to me as a new mail :-)

Kingsley

 

Language is ambiguous because it is compressed, with losses, so that communication among people can be as efficient as possible in conveying the speaker’s intended content to the listener for the listener’s interpretation.  The listener is the active interpreter, not some set of rules on symbolic structure.  That interpretation is nearly always distinct from the speaker’s intent because the world we speak about is very complex and language is a snap statement about that world. 

 

The emphasis, IMHO, should be placed on the INTERPRETATION of the URI’ed file by the reader, not on the material of the writer who developed the page in the first place.  In this forum, we consistently have ignored interpretation as an active process conducted by each individual.  We seem to have preferred a one-size-fits-all interpretation dictated by the page author to meet some symbolic architecture which doesn’t exist, which we can’t agree on, and which is far from universal in its acceptance.  That hasn’t worked, and won’t. 

 

-Rich

 

Sincerely,

Rich Cooper

EnglishLogicKernel.com

Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

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From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Kingsley Idehen
Sent: Tuesday, September 17, 2013 10:47 AM
To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Terminology and Knowledge Engineering

 

On 1/24/12 2:49 PM, Rich Cooper wrote:

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.

You can describe things in a manner that's human- and/or machine-comprehensible. Of course, you can't describe a 3rd parties mind (i.e., inner thoughts) with 100% accuracy.

The buzz-phrase "Semantic Web" is all about the use of hypermedia to enhance structured data representation (i.e., making it web-like) in a manner that also includes entity type, relationship, and relation semantics.

[1] http://bit.ly/16EVFVG -- Loosely coupling Structured Data, Identifiers, and Predicate Logic (which is how you can make a Web of entity descriptions discernible to humans and machines)
[2] http://bit.ly/10Y9FL1 -- Semantic Web in original Web Design .

Kingsley

 

Regards,

 

Michael Brunnbauer

 

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