Re: Tech Plenary: agenda Best Practices

>i agree that we should not give instruction from on high.
>At the same time, I think it is important to have more examples of 
>how ontologies have been written in semantic web languages and used 
>in some applications that people might relate to.
>We do not need to present the work as religious doctrine  but 
>instead present it as something that we have done after considering 
>other options, optimally present some other options and say what the 
>tradeoffs were, and then give examples from which people might be 
>motivated (or even cut and paste) and build their own.
>
>The "living with classic paper"  was a very early attempt to do 
>something like this.  It provided a methodology that we used for 
>building an ontology that was used in the wine and food domain.
>
>It tried not to say this is the only way or even the best way   but 
>it did try to say, here are some tradeoffs and here is what we did 
>and it worked.

Right. To clarify my meaning, that 'living with Classic' is exactly 
the kind of thing I meant by 'severely pragmatic' . I agree this kind 
of thing is useful and the more of it we can get (or provide forums 
for people to contribute to) the better. For an example of the kind 
of thing I think isnt so likely to be useful, try reading 
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mereology/
which is a lovely article on its stated topic but really not a good 
guide to practical ontology-building.

BTW, if anyone wants to debate my opinions on mereology and relevance 
to the SW, lets do it off-line, I suggest (or maybe it could be a 
Task Force??  Nah...)

Pat

>
>
>Jim Hendler wrote:
>
>>Re: Tech Plenary: agenda Best Practices
>>At 12:37 -0600 3/4/04, Pat Hayes wrote:
>>
>>4. Finally, this is a negative suggestion, but I would oppose any 
>>attempt to tell the world how best to write ontologies; or if we 
>>cannot avoid doing that, then let the advice be severely pragmatic 
>>and free from philosophical punditry. There is a lingering 
>>(festering?) tendency among some folk to want to give instruction 
>>from on high to the great unwashed on how they should best think 
>>and express themselves. Unfortunately this advice is similar to 
>>most religious doctrine: most of the energy is spent in endless 
>>debates between rival doctrines, you can find some of it somewhere 
>>to justify almost any action you want to take anyway, and when the 
>>rubber meets the road most of it isn't really directly applicable 
>>in any case without an expert there to interpret it for you.
>>
>>
>>Hear, Hear - a big +1!  (or is it -1 in this case?)  I definitely 
>>agree w/Pat -- if for no other reason that I think as we explore 
>>the new space of the Sem Web, we discover new ways to use the old 
>>stuff, and we shouldn't over prescribe too soon
>>
>>Pat
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>>
>>
>>--
>>
>>Professor James Hendler 
>><http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler>http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler 
>>Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
>>Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
>>Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-277-3388 (Cell)
>>
>>
>
>--
>  Deborah L. McGuinness
>  Associate Director Knowledge Systems Laboratory
>  Gates Computer Science Building, 2A Room 241
>  Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-9020
>  email: <mailto:dlm@ksl.stanford.edu>dlm@ksl.stanford.edu
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>fax)  801 705 0941


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