Re: "In Defense of Ambiguity"

Apologies in advance - twofold
- first for picking a mid-thread post to respond to, and
- for my lay-person's perspective/level, but...

But isn't the applicability of rule/relationship sets exactly what constitutes "context"?
And isn't that what namespaces are delineating?

(and what then is being suggested differently here?)


--- On Wed, 7/16/08, Richard H. McCullough <rhm@pioneerca.com> wrote:
From: Richard H. McCullough <rhm@pioneerca.com>
Subject: Re: "In Defense of Ambiguity"
To: martin.hepp@uibk.ac.at, "Alan Ruttenberg" <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>
Cc: "Booth, David (HP Software - Boston)" <dbooth@hp.com>, "Ian Emmons" <iemmons@bbn.com>, semantic-web@w3c.org
Date: Wednesday, July 16, 2008, 4:58 AM

Let's be explicit.
Any thoughts of "negotiating" or "refining" the meaning of
a term --
we're talking about the "context" in which the term is defined.

RDF/OWL people have little experience with "context" -- to them
it's basically a namespace.  RDF/OWL really doesn't have
"context"
in its vocabulary.

OpenCyc explicitly addresses "context", which is referred to as
a "microtheory" (forgetting space,time for the moment).
OpenCyc, in its attempt to capture common-sense knowledge,
has defined  thousands of microtheories.  They are facing the
"context"
issue head on, and are making some progress.

Until RDF/OWL introduces the concept of "context",
in a form similar to CycL's "microtheory', or mKR's
"view",
you won't make any progress in this area. .

Dick McCullough
http://mKRmKE.org/
Ayn Rand do speak od mKR done;
knowledge := man do identify od existent done;
knowledge haspart proposition list;
mKE do enhance od Real Intelligence done;

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Martin Hepp" <martin.hepp@uibk.ac.at>
To: "Alan Ruttenberg" <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>
Cc: "Booth, David (HP Software - Boston)" <dbooth@hp.com>;
"Ian Emmons" 
<iemmons@bbn.com>; <semantic-web@w3c.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2008 11:53 PM
Subject: Re: "In Defense of Ambiguity"


Hi Alan:
Basically all I wanted to say is that in human communication, we clarify
and refine the meaning associated to words in the course of
communication, while the current SW infrastructure requires us to define
the meaning of a conceptual element identified by a URI beforehand.
Quite clearly, there can be multiple similar elements with different
URIs. But we cannot currently negotiate the meaning of this very URI.

My main concern is that reducing query answering to querying a static
representation may be too simple an approach, same as matchmaking for
needed products is not a simple query, but often a complex communication
process. For example, we learn of the option space by seeing the results
to our initial queries and then typically refine our usage of the
vocabulary.

"..Language is a living organism that adapts to the development and the
trends of society as a whole."[1]

Best


Martin


[1] Umberto Eco in his nice preface "The Meaning of The Meaning of
Meaning" to Ogden/Richards „The Meaning of Meaning“

Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
>
> On Jul 11, 2008, at 6:09 PM, Booth, David (HP Software - Boston) wrote:
>
>>> On Jul 10, 2008, at 7:09 PM, Martin Hepp wrote:
>>>
>>> Current ontology infrastructure requires that we reach
>>> consensus first. Human communication on the contrary allows
>>> us to postpone dispute and clarification to a later point in
>>> time in which the disagreement becomes relevant, if it ever
>>> gets relevant.
>>
>> This sounds overly pessimistic to me. Yes, some things in the
>> semantic web *do* need to be agreed in advance, such as the general
>> rules for determining the meaning of a statement. But individual
>> ontologies do not -- they can be developed independently and only
>> adopted as needed -- and there is nothing to stop an application from
>> taking a lazy evaluation approach to semantic web data just as humans
>> do. An application could postpone determining the meaning of a
>> particular RDF statement (which involves determining the meaning of
>> its constituent URIs) until it is needed
>
> Huh? Figuring out exactly what someone meant when they said something
> after the fact is a huge problem. In a previous job it was routine to
> go around to the various people who documented their experiments in
> lab books because the lab books in isolation were too difficult to
> understand. Understanding them after the people who wrote them left
> the company was often impossible.
>
> If people can't do it, why would you expect some application would?
>
>> , sort of like a backward chaining reasoning style: start with the
>> goal, and then figure out what information is needed to reach that
goal.
>
> The problem is that the information is encoded in the language used in
> the statement. If you don't understand the terms you can't even
get at
> the information.
>
>> And if a particular statement never ends up being needed, so be it.
>
> Sure. But if a statement *is* needed you're out of luck.
>
> -Alan
>
>

-- 

-----------------------------------
martin hepp, http://www.heppnetz.de
mhepp@computer.org, skype mfhepp