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)