Re: Intranet ontology?

Hi Tim,

Thanks for your reply, and I appreciate the sentiment and the
pointers. I've been doing SemWeb stuff for almost 15 years, and have
written a couple of inference engines on top of resolvers to create
complex mixed models, so all of that is fine, and I understand and
accept that no other model is going to work on the scale of the web
(I'm a die-hard RESTafarian).

But epistemology is my game, and IMHO the authorship of a single
ontology has a tendency to give a more precise shorter answer over
large sets of data than a host of several small, especially
considering the issue of ontology impedance which still isn't anywhere
near being solved in a generic way, even though W3C tries very hard to
consolidate. (I tried for many years to involve the library sector in
this debate) I recently had to clean up someone else's mess because
people treated dc:title as foaf:title. :)

> If this sounds like a mess, it is in fact the pattern which
> actually is optimal

Hmm, I wouldn't call it optimal, but certainly my best option. When
you accept REST, you are making compromises to your ideal solution for
What Works [TM], and I'm all down with that.

> I have written this up  in http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Fractal.html
> and specifically http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Fractal.html#TCO

I can't shake the feeling that there's a big assumption here that
other people are creating models that a) are correct and b) agrees
with you and c) semantically fits my data (or vice versa)? I
understand what you're saying, and I think in an ideal world you're
probably right (and it's a great principle to follow, and I've often
taught this point, especially to enterprise environments), I just
don't think I can agree that this is actually how it happens
(depending on the need for precision). Shared and mixed ontologies
will always be tied to the quality of modelling within them - even the
tiniest little thing! - and the semantic impedance between them,
rather than it being done at all. (And the difficulty of getting these
things wrong might in itself provide an answer to why I can't seem to
find many Intranet ontologies out there) I can also make a case that a
mixed model might be the very thing that guarantees you a future
failure given certain contexts, but I take your point.

> I hope that helps you hit a happy balance between build and buy,
> and adjust it with time as necessary.

I'll probably mix and edit a few good ontologies, and define a fork of
them as its own ontology, although the Gist ontology looks like a good
upper / mid-ontology for it which I can extend. I just thought there'd
be more in that space. :)


Kind regards,

Alex
-- 
 Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
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Received on Tuesday, 21 February 2012 04:03:17 UTC