Re: An intuition pump

Le samedi, 20 sep 2003, à 23:25 America/Montreal, Bijan Parsia a écrit :
> Now, it's not even exactly clear that Sally is using the two wordnet 
> terms correctly, but grant that she is. People use Sally's term all 
> over the place. It's adopted by that powerful vocabulary juggernaut, 
> FOAF, and thus becomes the *de facto* standard for talking about 
> persons.

And it's not even clear that the people looking at the Wordnet terms 
understand the same thing than Sally. If I look at Wordnet for man
http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn1.7.1?stage=1&word=man

	I have 11 definitions of what's a man.

Let's simplify and says that Sally has chosen the number 1.
(1.  man, adult male -- (an adult male person (as opposed to a woman); 
"there were two women and six men on the bus")

I'm the user of Sally's Ontology
Hmmm with this definition it seems that a child is not a person. We 
have reached our first problem. The second problem, I'm french or 
japanese and I do not read at all english. How do I know what Sally 
meant in her ontology?

> before Molly detected the problem, Sally sold her now very popular 
> domain to People for a Very Narrow Sense of People in Foaf Documents 
> (PVNSPFD). They refuse to change sally:Person.

The problem is even bigger than that and it's the whole problem of 
social organization of the internet.
	- a domain name can cost a lot for a poor person in third word country
	- a domain name can be bought or stolen by a third parties, destroying 
the ontologies references or worse changing the meaning of it (If there 
was something to deference)
	- the new owner of the domain name doesn't want that its domain name 
is used for this stupid ontologies thing, because he's using some of 
the same URI to sell sofa with flowers print.

> Now, what concept does sally:Person identify? When? Does it matter?
>
> Is there anything Wrong with Molly (or *Sally*) putting out an 
> alternative ontology, and the Foaf x.x ontology switch its owl:imports 
> statement to point to the alt-ontology instead of the (now owned by) 
> PVNSPFD one.

I'm not sure if there's something wrong. But for sure we haven't solved 
the previous problems, just pushed them.


--
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager
*** Be Strict To Be Cool ***

Received on Tuesday, 23 September 2003 16:21:23 UTC