Re: "In Defense of Ambiguity"

Eric,

But not all URI's are bound (formally) to a particular ontology, or it may
be that the URI is bound to multiple ontologies (e.g. a person (foaf
ontology) who is a manager (northwind ontology) who needs a plumber (tiwan
ontology)).

-sherman

On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 3:08 PM, Eric Hoffer <erichoffer@yahoo.com> wrote:

> What I meant was simply that by specifying particular namespaces and
> ontologies (unless we're talking upper-), aren't you thereby indicating the
> intended context and/or perspective?
>
> --- On *Fri, 7/18/08, Richard H. McCullough <rhm@pioneerca.com>* wrote:
>
> From: Richard H. McCullough <rhm@pioneerca.com>
> Subject: Re: "In Defense of Ambiguity"
> To: erichoffer@yahoo.com, 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: Friday, July 18, 2008, 3:41 PM
>
>
> Eric
>
> I hardly know where to start, since I don't understand
> "applicability of rule/relationship sets".
> Could you please explain what that means?
>
> It is easy to explain what I mean by "context",
> as implemented in the mKR language.
> I will ignore space,time subcontext for now.
>
> A "proposition" in mKR takes the form
>
>     at view = v { sentence };
>
> "v" names the context of the sentence.
> The context is a list of propositions;
> it includes definitions of all terms used in "sentence".
> "sentence" is an English-like statement, question or command.
>
> 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:* Eric Hoffer <erichoffer@yahoo.com>
> *To:* martin.hepp@uibk.ac.at ; Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>; Richard
> H. McCullough <rhm@pioneerca.com>
> *Cc:* Booth, David (HP Software - Boston) <dbooth@hp.com> ; Ian Emmons<iemmons@bbn.com>;
> semantic-web@w3c.org
> *Sent:* Friday, July 18, 2008 9:11 AM
> *Subject:* 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
>
>
>
>


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