On 07/19/2015 07:33 AM, John F Sowa wrote:
> In *every* branch of science, engineering, medicine, law, etc., the
> work by professionals in that field is the *gold standard*. (01)
At the risk of generating more heat than light, I wish to point out that
in every branch of information technology, there is vacuum where there
should be something resembling the accounting industry's "Generally
Accepted Accounting Practices" and certifications, or the many
non-proprietary certifications for practitioners in the healthcare
field, or the licensure processes required by many states to practice
medicine, law, and engineering. (02)
In the context of all this public-interest vacuum, it is not hard to
explain the parlous state of the security of critical IT infrastructure,
or the general engineering uproar we call the "World Wide Web", or the
absurdity of consequential government webservers that won't accept any
"secure" protocol other than one known to be insecure (TLS 1.0), not to
mention the other craziness that all of us know, and that each of us may
know. (03)
In cases perhaps dearer to the hearts of readers of this mailing list,
the lack of accountability for IT "professionals" can also explain the
lack of economic and technical infrastructure whereby experts in
multiple universes of discourse can work as tour guides and
bridge-builders among them. (04)
Turning now to my favorite hobby horse: It is not enough to know how to
build bridges between universes of discourse, or how to anchor the
endpoints of such bridges on solid ontological foundations. It is also
necessary to build many, many instances of bridges, and to maintain them
(when possible) across the ontological equivalent of hurricanes,
earthquakes, and all other kinds of change. That would entail creating
the economic foundations of bridge-building, bridge-maintaining, and
bridge-anchoring enterprises. Such a knowledge-ecosystem would reward
those whose opinions about what's what are measurably and publicly the
most reliable for the most cases. (05)
Individual multi-domain experts would, in fact, be playing fiduciary
roles. Such a scenario requires that a definition of malpractice be
defined and maintained, so that the finger of blame can be pointed
consequentially, whenever things go awry in some consequential fashion.
It is up to ontologists to figure out how to make that meaningfully
possible. Nobody else has a prayer of doing it, and it's hard for me to
imagine a more worthwhile endeavor. It's also, obviously, a major
project with major risks, and one that would be disruptive whether or
not it succeeded. Not for the faint of heart! (06)
Steve Newcomb (07)
_________________________________________________________________
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 (08)
|