Re: Role of the Ontology and Expressivity - to discuss on telcon

I really wish some of the responses of the last 16 hours 
could have come sooner.

I cannot write the cogent responses I wish to, in the time 
remaining before the concall, and I fear oral arguments will
continue to be less coherent than written.

I sense a great deal of conflation happening in people's minds 
and in their arguments.

I see conflation between "database", the engine, and "database", 
the schema + data contained therein.

I see conflation of schema-to-ontology mapping and instance data 
transformation/replication.

I see conflation of instance data transformation/replication and
reasoning/inference over that instance data.

I see conflation of schema-to-ontology mapping and reasoning/
inference over the schema and/or ontology/ies.

I also see responses to particular points of my previous post,
which don't take the context of those points into account, and
so while the responses seem reasonable out of context, they 
really don't address the points I was trying to make.


What I am arguing for, more than anything else, is flexibility
for the end user of the tools which will implement the standard(s)
we are working on.

What I am arguing for is breaking all of the above conflations
into their component parts -- because that break-up leads to 
the flexibility which I believe is necessary to long-term
success of this effort -- and codifying the conflations has
a strong likelihood to radically lower the utility of RDB data 
exposed as RDF, which effect is in no-one's interest.

Not that anyone will see this in the next five minutes, but I'll
send this anyway....

Ted

Received on Tuesday, 4 May 2010 15:56:19 UTC