Mike, (01)
I think we agree on a lot of the issues. But I admit that I'll
have to make my points clearer. (02)
JFS
> In a positive sense: The primary purpose of an ontology is to make
> the structure of the subject matter clear. (03)
MFU
> ... clarity is the means to the end for building an ontology. (04)
I agree. I wanted to shift the emphasis from "eliminating ambiguity"
to the more positive goal of promoting clarity. (05)
JFS
> You can be clear in ordinary English. (06)
MFU
> Often yes, not always. I found I was going in circles trying
> to think of a good way to be clear and precise, even in my own head
> - regarding the ontology application framework. Putting it in
> a highly structured notation helped a lot. I have never seen
> ordinary English do that particularly well. (07)
I completely agree. Structure is extremely important, and diagrams
and notations of various kinds can be enormously helpful. (08)
But the point I make is that *after* you have a clear structure
in any form, you can describe the structure just as precisely
in English as any other notation. (09)
MFU
> I wrote the Enterprise Ontology paper years ago. It was in English,
> and it was a definitive specification for the formal ontology
> (in Ontolingua). There were a whole lot of decisions I had to
> make due to the (IHMO) inherent ambiguity of English on common usage. (010)
My only objection is to the phrase "inherent ambiguity of English". (011)
As examples, consider the special languages for bridge, chess, or
any branch of math. After you learn a special language for those
structures, you can talk over the telephone on that topic as precisely
in English as you can with the specialized notation. (Of course,
you do mix words for the special symbols with English, but you can
put them into sentences as though they were English words.) (012)
John (013)
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