Re: "In Defense of Ambiguity"

On Jul 11, 2008, at 6:09 PM, Booth, David (HP Software - Boston) wrote:

>> 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

Huh? Figuring out exactly what someone meant when they said something  
after the fact is a huge problem. In a previous job it was routine to  
go around to the various people who documented their experiments in  
lab books because the lab books in isolation were too difficult to  
understand. Understanding them after the people who wrote them left  
the company was often impossible.

If people can't do it, why would you expect some application would?

> , sort of like a backward chaining reasoning style: start with the  
> goal, and then figure out what information is needed to reach that  
> goal.

The problem is that the information is encoded in the language used  
in the statement. If you don't understand the terms you can't even  
get at the information.

>   And if a particular statement never ends up being needed, so be it.

Sure. But if a statement *is* needed you're out of luck.

-Alan

Received on Friday, 11 July 2008 23:36:03 UTC