All, (01)
I must admit to having considerable problems with attempts to gain
some kind of preemptive secure access rights to terms that are
in the process of becoming established usage, especially
terms that have a compositional semantics. Case in
point: "open ontology". Even worse are attempts that
then may make certain transparently compositional
expressions unusable without invoking risk of
complaint. 'Open ontology' has been a buzzword going
round for at least a couple of years as far as I can
recall, probably earlier. I am involved in a European
Union project whose explicit aim is to create an
(open) platform for developing and distributing
(open) ontologies (as Paola knows I believe).
Recently it has been necessary to put the adjective
'open' in front of almost everything in order to
increase chances of public funding! (02)
And I am in need of some help wrt the following
from Paola's ontolog webpage: (03)
> With the term 'open ontology' we refer to a given set of agreed
> terms, both in terms of conceptualization and semantic formalization,
> that has been developed based on public consultation, that embodies
> and represents and synthesizes all available, valid knowledge that is
> deemed to pertain to a given domain, (04)
given that there will guaranteedly be no such entities (what
kind of organisation is going to claim that it represents "*all*
available, valid knowledge"!), this would seem to be a way
of making 'open ontology' a legally protected label for an
empty set.... or at least one that is excluded for most domains that
are interesting enough to have a body of knowledge
worth ontologising! (05)
Several other of the requirements of open ontologies
on the page in question are also extremely problematic:
e.g., (06)
> • It should support queries via natural language as well as machine
> language, (T13) (07)
how on Earth (or anywhere else) can it be a requirement of
an ontology that it supports queries involving anything, let alone
highly problematic and well beyond the state of the art
functionality in natural language processing. (I think this
has been commented on in other contexts on Ontolog
already). (08)
Several of the others have a similarly rough status. (09)
So, given the page as such describes a state of affairs that
is in no way final or usable, but is a preliminary (and useful
I thought) bringing together of some points for discussion,
just *what* is being suggested as subject to infringed IPR
and is it worth it? (010)
John B. (011)
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