- From: Jim McCusker <james.mccusker@yale.edu>
- Date: Thu, 7 Apr 2011 00:56:30 -0400
- To: Simon Spero <ses@unc.edu>
- Cc: public-esw-thes@w3.org
On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 12:23 AM, Simon Spero <ses@unc.edu> wrote: > I'm not sure if this is likely to be a simple affair - welding the > nominalist or conceptualist metaphysics of KOSs into the realism of > Barry's Favourite Ontology may lead to confusion > For some of the possible problems, see the recent debate between Gary > Merrill and Barry Smith & Werner Ceusters in "Applied Ontology" - ( Merrill > 2010a. Smith and Ceusters 2010; Merill 2010b). > (all articles are open access) I'm familiar with many of these arguments, and my goal isn't to provide some sort of mapping between mass-the-concept and mass-the-quality. They are two different things. Related, sure, but occupying different parts of the hierarchy. My point is simply that concepts have a place in realist ontologies. If a person does not subscribe to that sort of ontology, they are free to ignore that placement. Nevertheless, concepts, in addition to how they are treated in KOSs, are also particulars that exist in the real world (albeit particulars that are dependent on some sort of substrate), and as such, any given concept can have an assigned class from a realist ontology. SKOS views concepts as individuals, which is right and proper in my mind, and happens to align with the idea that the class of things skos:Concept, being a thing in the real world (an idea) has a place in a realist ontology. Thanks, Jim -- Jim McCusker Programmer Analyst Krauthammer Lab, Pathology Informatics Yale School of Medicine james.mccusker@yale.edu | (203) 785-6330 http://krauthammerlab.med.yale.edu PhD Student Tetherless World Constellation Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute mccusj@cs.rpi.edu http://tw.rpi.edu
Received on Thursday, 7 April 2011 04:57:18 UTC