Re: Comment on "Meaning and the Semantic Web"

><from an offlist email:>
>Pat, I've never personalized any of this, but you have toward me, 
>publicly, loudly, and quite viciously.

Sorry, it wasn't meant to be vicious.  I apologize for giving 
unintended offense: I was using a rhetorical style which may not be 
well suited to email.

The point I was intending to make was that the worries (about 
allowing others to have hostage over your thoughts when writing an 
ontology) which you and Peter expressed, seem to me to embody an 
attitude towards the entire business of communicating on the Web 
which, if translated directly into an attitude towards social 
communication more generally, would appear as a form of paranoia 
concerning any kind of communication: and someone who acted by those 
maxims would finish up quite rapidly being completely cut off from 
social intercourse of any kind involving language, and would probably 
be happier as a Trappist monk under a vow of silence.  As I say, this 
is what your concerns (vividly expressed in terms of totalitarianism 
and control) seem to lead to; and, perhaps more personally, though it 
was not intended to be ad hominem, the arguments and justifications 
you, Bijan, give in response to objections seem to betray a similar 
attitude, one that to me seems quite inconsistent with normal social 
assumptions. You have said for example that in your view, when you 
use a term introduced by someone else in an ontology you write, that 
the meaning of the term should be entirely under your control, and 
entirely determined by your ontology, with no reference whatever to 
anything said by the 'owner' of the term. I find this an 
extraordinary claim, and  intended to make this sense of unreality 
vivid by drawing from it what seems to me to be the obvious 
conclusion: that such an attitude, applied to the entire social 
fabric of a Web, implies that writers of ontologies are only 
concerned with being right, and not with communication at all. For 
presumably you allow others the same leeway that you claim: so if 
they use these same URIs in their ontologies then their meanings need 
have no relation to your meanings; so we are left with a picture in 
which all ontologies are entirely private worlds, whose use of common 
URIs is merely a syntactic accident. And this is good, presumably, on 
this view, because any kind of presumed relationship between 
ontologies would render everyone's meanings hostage to others' 
misinterpretations: a danger - if you wish to think of it as a danger 
- to which of course ANY form of communication is prone; so if 
avoiding this danger is your primary motivating concern, then it 
seems to follow that you are advocating that communication of content 
is not the primary aim or goal of the Semantic Web. So my riposte, 
which gave you offense for which, to repeat, I apologize, was 
intended to be along the lines of a standard response one can make to 
someone who advocates solipsism: if you are right, then I don't 
exist, so please stop talking to me about it.

No doubt I have this conclusion wrong, or it is not what you 
intended. However, as I say, to me it seems the only conclusion that 
is consistent with the position you advocate and the reasons you give 
for advocating it. I would be delighted to have the error in my 
reasoning explained.

>And then you do so again in this message...hardly a good sign. (The 
>tone in the later part of the message is more reasonable.)  I'd 
>*like* to work with you on this issue, but not at the price of this 
>level of abuse.
>
>Since you don't deign to apologize *privately* (much less publicly, 
>as is appropriate), I can only assume that you meant what you said, 
>or you don't care about the effects of what you said. Neither seems 
>conducive to productive work.

Well, I wasn't aware that we were working together, but I hope that 
this explanation and public apology may make future collaboration at 
least possible.

Pat


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Received on Friday, 4 June 2004 11:38:51 UTC