Re: Ontology Wars? Concerned

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 2:23 PM, Nathan <nathan@webr3.org> wrote:

>
> I'm finding the path to entry in to the linked open data world rather
> difficult and confusing, and only for one specific reason - ontologies;
> it /feels/ like there are some kind of ontology wars going on and I can
> never get a definitive clear answer.
>
>
An ontology war is preferable to the alternative:  the "one ring" that rules
them all.

If you're trying to develop an ontology for topic X,  it's usually easy to
make one that's good but obviously not perfect:  let's say, 95% correct.

You need to cross an "uncanny valley" in the attempt to go from 95% to 100%,
 and often things get worse rather than better.  This is one of the reasons
why Cyc is perceived as a failure:  although it was trying to model the
"common sense" knowledge that we all share,  the actual structures in Cyc
that try to represent everything in a consistent way are bizzare,
 counterintuitive and certainly not representative of how people think,  no
matter how correct they may be.

People don't have a completely consistent taxonomy of the world either;
 they have models of different parts of reality that they'll mesh when they
need to mesh them.  My 94% correct version of topic X might be great for
what I'm doing w/ topic X and your 96% version is great for what you're
doing.  Trying to build one system that's perfect might result in something
that's not as good for what we're doing...  But in the long term we do need
tools that let us mesh these easily.

SPARQL + OWL can take us part of the way in that direction,  but really,  we
need something better in that direction,  largely because of the many
"almost the same as" relationships that are out there...