- From: <sauerkrautragout.13358628@bloglines.com>
- Date: 16 Dec 2005 17:02:08 -0000
- To: love26@gorge.net
- CC: semantic-web@w3.org
--- 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