An intuition pump

I'm going to use QNames to abbreviate URIs. Assume each prefix 
univocally expands to a distinct namespace URI.

Sally the ontologist defines some terms, including sally:Person which 
is, in her ontology, exclusively the unionOf wordnet:woman and 
wordnet:man. And suppose further, sally:RightsHolder is a subClassOf 
sally:Person.

Now, it's not even exactly clear that Sally is using the two wordnet 
terms correctly, but grant that she is. People use Sally's term all 
over the place. It's adopted by that powerful vocabulary juggernaut, 
FOAF, and thus becomes the *de facto* standard for talking about 
persons.

Now Molly comes along and notes the extreme chauvinism of Sally's 
definition, excluding as it does (arguably) eunuchs, hermaphrodites, 
intelligent programs, chimps, augmented chimps, Martians and the like. 
Molly proposes an alternative ontology for sally:Person.

Now, if I understand the view as raised by tim in his issuing, Molly 
and the Foafsters are pretty much stuck. sally:Person just *means* 
whatever Sally wants it to mean.

More interestingly, suppose Sally had just been a bit careless and 
really was aiming at a more expansive notion of Person, just blew it. 
However, before Molly detected the problem, Sally sold her now very 
popular domain to People for a Very Narrow Sense of People in Foaf 
Documents (PVNSPFD). They refuse to change sally:Person.

Now, what concept does sally:Person identify? When? Does it matter?

Is there anything Wrong with Molly (or *Sally*) putting out an 
alternative ontology, and the Foaf x.x ontology switch its owl:imports 
statement to point to the alt-ontology instead of the (now owned by) 
PVNSPFD one.

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.

Received on Saturday, 20 September 2003 23:21:56 UTC