SV: ontology & careers?

Ramon Lull's career was as a Franciscan monk and philosopher in the twelve
hundreds.  The tree-like "Ontology" is a representation of one of the
machines he built to mechanically demonstrate the virtues of Christ for
Muslims, whom he believed had a cognitive defect.

So this "Ontology" would have been the attributes of God; Bonitas (B),
Magnitudo (C) Eternas (D) etc.

The great idea implicit in Lull's work according to Glymour, Ford & Hayes in
"The Prehistory of Android Epistemology", is that nonmathematical reasoning
can be done, or at least assisted by a mechanical process and that reasoning
does not proceed by syllogism, but by combinatorics.

(A point I have expanded upon in some discussion on this list.)

I am sure that a suitable Easter project for the non-Muslim members of the
RDF Community would be to continue Lull's pioneering work and create an
ontology of God's attributes in Protégé 2000.

As for cognitive defective Muslims, perhaps the 99 names of God would be a
suitable counter exercise:-)

Happy something or other

Greg

Suggested reading for those that have time off:  Erving Goffman - Frame
Analysis.  (a little reminder of some problems in store for the Semantic
Web.)



> -----Ursprungligt meddelande-----
> Från: www-rdf-interest-request@w3.org
> [mailto:www-rdf-interest-request@w3.org]För Simon Cox
> Skickat: den 20 april 2000 02:58
> Till: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
> Ämne: Re: ontology & careers?
>
>
> William Grosso wrote:
> >
> > The idea of using taxonomic representations (e.g.,
> > ontologies) to classify knowledge has been an active
> > research area for the past 30 or so years (look under
> > knowledge representation, for more explicitly
> > ontological work, look under "Frame based languages").
>
> Make that at least 100 years, or maybe 2500.
> There is a fast-paced but thorough overview of Ontology as
> chapter 2 in John Sowa's recent book "Knowledge Representation".
> He traces it though 20th century philosophers such as
> Whitehead, all the way back to the classical Greeks.
> The picture on the dust-cover is a famous tree-like ontology
> by Ramon Lull, medieval (?) logician.
>
> --
> Best		Simon Cox

Received on Thursday, 20 April 2000 05:43:58 UTC