Re: [ontology-summit] [Quality] What means

[Pat Hayes <phayes@xxxxxxx>]

At 9:03 AM -0400 3/20/08, <phismith@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Thu Mar 20  2:34 , "John F.
> Sowa"  sent:
> >For any product, including an ontology, the best recommendations
> are
> >the reviews and reports from users that are recorded in the
> metadata.
> >As the reviews accumulate, prospective users can decide for
> themselves
> >which ontologies are best suited for their purpose(s).
>
> I think democratic ranking (the wisdom of crowds) is indeed valuable
> for
> refrigerators and other similar products. Hence the success of ranking
> systems on
> eBay and amazon.com. But it is surely of less importance in scientific
> contexts
> -- we would not decide on which interpretation of the equations of
> quantum
> physics to accept by taking a vote of users. Since the OBO Foundry
> ontologies are
> built by scientists, to support scientific research, it is not clear
> that they
> are to be treated as products.

This is where I part company with Barry, and indeed where I believe that the very idea of controlling the contents of an OOR (noting that the first O means 'open') needs to be examined very, very carefully. Of course we would not argue that majority voting should be used to choose scientific theories; but ontologies, even those used by scientists, are not themselves scientific theories. The OBO Foundry is quite clear, in its own documentation, that the basic ontological assumptions on which it is based are ultimately philosophical decisions, not scientific ones. Such assumptions most emphatically do not have the force of a scientific theory, even when the ontologies constructed according to them are being used by scientists. And any such implication of 'scientific' authority must be examined especially carefully when the, er, foundry is controlled by the philosophers themselves, and its gatekeepers are mandated to only allow ontologies which conform to the somewhat arbitrary philosophical views of its founders (for example, by requiring consistency with a single 'base' ontology). I do not mean this to be a criticism of OBO itself, but I do claim that OBO hardly qualifies as anything like an "open" ontology repository. In the contrary, in fact: it is quite firmly closed to an entire approach to ontology construction which, while successfully deployed elsewhere, happens to not conform to the philosophical views that Barry has so nobly defended in so many publications.

> While refrigerator manufacturers may
> allow
> democratic ranking to influence e.g. size and color, they would use
> other
> strategies e.g. in matters of thermodynamics.

Perhaps so: but we are here discussing matters of ontology, and in the current state of the art, this may have more in common with consumer product choice than with thermodynamics.

Pat

> BS
>
>
>
> >
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