RE: "In Defense of Ambiguity"

> On Jul 10, 2008, at 7:09 PM, Martin Hepp wrote:
>
>       Current ontology infrastructure requires that we reach
> consensus first. Human communication on the contrary allows
> us to postpone dispute and clarification to a later point in
> time in which the disagreement becomes relevant, if it ever
> gets relevant.

This sounds overly pessimistic to me.  Yes, some things in the semantic web *do* need to be agreed in advance, such as the general rules for determining the meaning of a statement.  But individual ontologies do not -- they can be developed independently and only adopted as needed -- and there is nothing to stop an application from taking a lazy evaluation approach to semantic web data just as humans do.  An application could postpone determining the meaning of a particular RDF statement (which involves determining the meaning of its constituent URIs) until it is needed, sort of like a backward chaining reasoning style: start with the goal, and then figure out what information is needed to reach that goal.  And if a particular statement never ends up being needed, so be it.



David Booth, Ph.D.
HP Software
+1 617 629 8881 office  |  dbooth@hp.com
http://www.hp.com/go/software

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