RE: philosophy of SWBPD (was Re: [OPEN] and/or [PORT] : a practical question)

At 14:45 -0800 3/29/04, Uschold, Michael F wrote:
I look forward to the empircal result of this WG: how much of the 
time can we identify criteria and get agreement that suggests certain 
modeling decisions do indeed have clear advantages over others. And, 
how much of the time will we agree that alternate approaches have 
pros and cons, rather than one being clearly superior.

Mike

Hmm, looking over my answers to Mike's most recent postings, I gotta 
ask -- can those be the only options :->




-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Hendler [mailto:hendler@cs.umd.edu]
Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2004 5:40 AM
To: Uschold, Michael F; Christopher Welty; Jeremy Carroll
Cc: Bernard Vatant; Ian Horrocks; SWBPD; public-swbp-wg-request@w3.org
Subject: RE: philosophy of SWBPD (was Re: [OPEN] and/or [PORT] : a 
practical question)

At 23:33 -0800 3/24/04, Uschold, Michael F wrote:
Jim makes a good point, and it is most valid in those cases when 
alternate approaches will work well. But that is not always the case, 
and there are many gray areas. When there ARE clear arguments for or 
against a given modeling choice, then I believe it IS the role of 
this group to identify commonly arising BAD ways to model things and 
recommend to avoid them, as well as to recommend GOOD ways to do 
certain kinds of things.   We should avoid taking positions UNLESS 
there are clear arguments one way or the other, and as Jim says, 
indicate the consequences of decisions, so users can choose what will 
work best in their particular circumstances.

MIke



while I don't disagree, let me be clear -- it is rarely the case that 
one thing is right and one is wrong in the capital letter sense that 
Mike uses GOOD and BAD -- I don't mind educating in the few cases 
there may be, but I'm gonna be awfully hard to convince that somehow 
the way we built closed-world, generall small ontologies in the 
traditional AI systems is going to be the noly GOOD way to build them 
on the Semantic Web -- in fact, in teaching SW to my students, I'm 
learning new lessons all the time that counter how I've been teaching 
things in my AI courses for the last 28 years
  -JH
--
Professor James 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)



-- 
Professor James 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)