Re: Fractal communities: Was: Rich semantics and expressiveness

matthew.west@shell.com wrote:
> MW: This is a pure guess, but if we take longitude as an example I
> would be very surprised if there were not at least 100 publicly
> available ontologies that defined longitude. To reduce this, one
> of the things I think we need to do is to develop a sense of
> authoritative source. We need to ask ourselves the question: who
> "owns" this? What is *their* name/definition? This is something we
> try to do with out own reference data. So we recognise ISO country
> codes, rather than invent our own, we recognise a companies product
> name/code when we buy their product, and the companies registered
> name and number, rather than our abbreviation or version of it.

Matthew's idea of distributed authoritative ownership of definition, 
which he develops in more detail further on in his message, seems very 
important.  Are there any ongoing programs along this line?

Such a program might proceed in three phases.

1.  Develop the basic principles and methodology of distributed 
authoritative ownership of definitions.

2.  Start up a small number of area-specific naming authorities for 
areas in which the developers of 1 feel they have sufficient expertise 
to claim some degree of authority, by way of example.

3.  Encourage other areas to start up and run their own naming 
authorities following the examples in 2.

Are there other approaches to this sort of thing that might work even 
better than this?

Vaughan

Received on Thursday, 8 March 2007 07:50:47 UTC