Re: How will the semantic web emerge

--- love26@gorge.net wrote:

[...]

> One problem with ontologies is that
they foster hierarchical attitudes 

> towards how things get classified.
To many of us, they ALWAYS have 

> "cracks" in them through which fall the
"tags" we find more suitable as 

> index/annotation bases.

[...]



Even
though they have their limitations: hierarchical classification schemas have
historical served humankind very well - just think of the partonomy of the
human body or the classification of animals in biology. 

Reseach in these
fields (and many others) would not have advanced as far as it did without
these kinds of authorative classifications (that get challenged and augmented
all the time). 



And imo OWL and other formalisms fosters hierarchical attitudes
not because computer scientist have authoritarian personalities, but because
over centuries this has proven to be a good approach to structure domain knowledge.




While I'm sympathetic to Tags and Folksonomies (for lightweight annotations
and ontology creation) - don't overestimate them. For example: ontolgies may
push you in the direction of hierarchies - tags don't allow you to specify
one. I consider the second a much graver problem. 





yours



valentin



http://vzach.blogspot.com

Received on Friday, 16 December 2005 17:02:15 UTC