BS
>>Patrick himself seems, however, to prefer the single principle of:
>>anything goes. (01)
PH
>More accurately, I see this as more like a free market, no doubt
>influenced by thinking about the semantic web. Of course there is a
>lot of dross out there, and indeed most of it is ignored by everyone
>except search engines. But I don't think there is a single 'perfect
>shopper', either. Different users communities, and sometimes
>different users, will have different demands to place upon
>ontologies. We are just at the beginning of finding out what
>ontologies might be useful for. It seems way too soon to be trying
>to create a single-product world, no matter how good the product is.
>
>I think the main differences between our attitudes is that you see
>ontologies as representing a distillation of a common insight,
>ideally amounting to something close to a universally agreed
>scientific theory; whereas I see ontologies as much more like useful
>pieces of software. There are many text editors, and they all have
>their strengths and weaknesses, adherents and detractors. No size will fit all. (02)
BS
I think this is a vitally important point. In the medical IT world,
especially, we face severe problems because some ontology-like
artifacts were developed by software- (or database-)focused people,
others by science-focused people, the two reflecting quite different
strategies (for example closed world vs. open world, product vs.
theory, etc.) and so not working well together. Sometimes this
creates venom and fights for resources. (03)
I think we are facing a parallel dichotomy of cultures on this list,
manifested inter alia in the arguments of the one side to the effect
that 'ontologies are more like products ... therefore you should not
do ontology as if it were a science, etc.' My (scientific) attitude
to this is: let the flowers on both sides bloom, and see,
empirically, which ones (including which combinations) work best. (04)
BS (05)
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