Re: [semanticweb] how to explain to humans the term ontology

''But precisely, the challenge was to speak to people who have
absolutely no insights into this and who could care less about
philosophical or technical waxing.''

Pierre,
Popularize, teach the general public some good things what you learnt, but 
avoid vulgarizing . And never simplify the scope, range and complexity of 
this great science. This approach ruined some very prospective projects on 
standard ontology.

Best wishes,
Azamat

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Pierre Grenon" <pierregrenon@gmail.com>
To: "Azamat" <abdoul@cytanet.com.cy>
Cc: <semanticweb@yahoogroups.com>; <>
Sent: Thursday, January 12, 2006 2:39 PM
Subject: Re: [semanticweb] how to explain to humans the term ontology




> Always stick to reality and do the reality check in your thinking and
> research. Otherwise you will find youself completely lost in a cacophony 
> of
> 'definitions', like below:
> 'an explicit specification of conceptualization', 'a theory of content', 
> 'a
> theory (a system) of concepts/vocabulary used as building blocks of
> information processing systems', 'a set of agreements about a set of
> concepts', or 'the representation of the semantics of terms and their
> relationships'. Alternatively, it is interpreted as 'the class hierarchy 
> in
> object-oriented paradigm', 'a complete schema of the domain concepts', 'an
> entity-relationship schema with subsumption relations between concepts',
> 'conceptual patterns', 'concept heterarchies or hierarchies', 'a body of
> conceptualizations', 'schemata', or 'metadata scheme', 'a common set of
> terms', 'a controlled vocabulary of terms', 'a representation vocabulary',
> or 'a body of knowledge', etc.
>
> If real ontology confuses you, read carefully good papers, as i 
> mentioned,'
> The Semantic Web', T. Berners-Lee et. al., if we are on this forum. Here 
> is
> its gist: ''The challenge of the Semantic Web is to provide a language 
> that
> expresses both data and rules for reasoning about the data...''.

I'll stick with writting bad emails. What I said about ontology being
occupied with providing tools and methods for structuring data is
completely compatible with such claim (a claim which presents a
technical challenge but does not constitute a definition of ontology,
btw).

> Translate, [the semantic web is aimed to provide one ontological language
> that expresses the information (data) about the world and inference rules
> (mechanisms) about the data].

The semantic web is not the alpha and omega of ontology, nor is
ontology the whole of knowledge representation. Of course, it's good
to see the semantic web come to terms with rules. But again, there'd
be a lot of qualification to make here, all laborious and irrelevant
to communicate the rough essence of CS ontology in three sentences.

> Very easy, if you have some insight into the matter.

But precisely, the challenge was to speak to people who have
absolutely no insights into this and who could care less about
philosophical or technical waxing.

Cheers,
Pierre

> Cheers,
> Azamat Abdoullaev
> http://www.eis.com.cy
>

Received on Thursday, 12 January 2006 16:10:55 UTC