- From: Semantics-ProjectParadigm <metadataportals@yahoo.com>
- Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 14:17:44 -0700 (PDT)
- To: Azamat <abdoul@cytanet.com.cy>
- Cc: 'SW-forum' <semantic-web@w3.org>, "\[ontolog-forum\]" <ontolog-forum@ontolog.cim3.net>
- Message-ID: <606623.75608.qm@web45504.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>
Azamat,
Sorry for the confusion I caused using the phrase "common standard ontologies", what I meant to say was "common standard categories of ontologies'.
What I think is valid point you made was that everybody is defending his own turf and developed tools, and you recommend catalyzing some process of unification/standardization in order to get the intended process going.
Unfortunately it is about a bit more than just ontologies.
The open source software community does not adhere to standards as a whole, or at least not in a sense that we can safely assume that most open source code is written in forms which follow similar systems for development, quality control etc.
What we do need is some catalyzing agents of change, whether this be the creation of a set of standard categories of ontologies, some standards for open source development, some quality control guidelines for digital publications as I mentioned in earlier emails, or just some individual, or company/consortium or funding agency to get some of these things going.
I applaud anyone willing to finance and/or shoulder such an undertaking.
I have proposed some bold ideas as well and lacking the resources you seem to have access to, have had to resort to bouncing off ideas to dozens of organizations, funding entities, governmental agencies at national levels (US.. Holland, etc., East Asia), regional levels (UNEP, European Union), and international levels (UNEP and FAO).
The fact that every single one of them with the noticeable exception of the Club of Rome has shown interest in discussing the ideas (ALL of them entailing ICT empowerment on a global level), shows the willingness to explore new avenues and keeping all options open.
One thing I know, is going to be very hard, which is coming up with universal information and knowledge classifications for the entire body of collective human (scientific, technological and general) knowledge.
Several fields of science have classification codes (e.g. mathematics, physics and astronomy) and in library sciences we use a set of universal information classication codes.
The catch is going to be building the first categories, of which some already are out there, for the body of scientifc/technological knowledge, as I indicated in an earlier email, when at the same time we have to come up with basic structures for those fields of knowledge which lack "structure", in terms of information classification schemes.
Milton Ponson
--- On Mon, 5/11/09, Azamat <abdoul@cytanet.com.cy> wrote:
From: Azamat <abdoul@cytanet.com.cy>
Subject: Re: Research Illusion
To: metadataportals@yahoo.com
Cc: "'SW-forum'" <semantic-web@w3.org>, "[ontolog-forum] " <ontolog-forum@ontolog.cim3.net>
Date: Monday, May 11, 2009, 7:45 PM
MP wrote: "As an academically educated professional and experienced global
activist in sustainable development and HUMAN RIGHTS, I defend freedom of speech
...And those domains of collective stupidity, leave them for what they are, they
are after all the collective expression of individuals who have the right to
have opinions and be stupid, because the exercise of free will to express
oneself is a human right most cherished and most guaranteed by almost everyone
of the 105 plus human rights treaties recognized by the UN."
I highly respect your commitment to defending the freedom of speech, and
the rights to be unintelligent, better in some accidental respects and
chance actions. Personally, i've done many follies, as many others, i
believe; for to err is human. That's why we try to create intelligent machines,
to safeguard humanity from its stupidities: wars, crises, poverty, diseases,
crimes, etc.
MP: "I do remember a thread in which Azamat proposed a Federated Ontology
System based on a monolithic super structure."
Thanks, Milton. But, actually, it is an open, dynamic but underlying
structure of all particular meanings. Most fundamental research has been
done, and our appeal to the SW and Ontolog communities for joint
cooperation were an act of politeness; for we know that everybody is
interested only in his mess of porridge. Also we know that majority of the
listings are good developers, not interesting in high methodological debates,
but looking for the high-quality ontology content for their applications.
Here we can share some good news. Before soon, thanks to our brilliant
knowledge engineer, two web sites with machine-translated content could be
launched:
http://www.standardontology.org/ (a
free standard ontology portal), now under construction;
http://www.standardontology.com/ (a commercial subscription site for doing some
meaningful search on the web), now under
construction.
We much rely on the institutional and individual members of the
communities as our first potential customers and users, who are well
cognizant of the outstanding theoretical and practical utility of ontology and
semantics for new knowledge production and building web knowledge
applications.
Azamat Abdoullaev
----- Original Message -----
From:
metadataportals@yahoo.com
To: 'SW-forum' ; Azamat
Cc: Sören Auer ; Mustafa
Jarrar ; Pieter De Leenheer ; jeremy@topquadrant.com
Sent: Saturday, May 09, 2009 11:18
PM
Subject: Re: Research Illusion
As an academically educated professional and
experienced global activist in sustainable development and HUMAN RIGHTS,
I defend freedom of speech even if it borders on the verge of biting
cynicism and being offensive.
I do however object to the way my
words and those of others are interpreted.
I do remember a thread
in which Azamat proposed a Federated Ontology System based on a
monolithic super structure.
Every reply to Azamat's email has
made some valuable point.
We may all have our doubts on the
current state of the academia and the scientific publications and how
these in their digital formats can be integrated in the semantic web, or
linked data clouds.
I do not believe in a perfect world. but I do
believe in striving for the best possible world.
In such a world
human rights must prevail, which implies that freedom of choice, and
freedom of speech are almost absolute.
The academia, however
flawed it may be, has the moral obligation to lead and inspire in making
the world of knowledge available to each and every one of us.
We
have the right to question the academia and to criticize it.
I do
however NOT share Azamat's bleak outlook and find his last email to be
an unfair representation of the replies to his first email.
I
propose we consider the flaws and imperfections and concentrate on
coming up with viable solutions.
The obstacles Azamat pointed out
are mostly of a human nature and deal with human flaws, these are
however not the subject of these lists per se.
For implementing
quality control in a wide range of human endeavors the international
standards organization ISO has created quality control systems.
>From the criticism voiced by Azamat I would conclude that it
would not be such a bad idea to come up with some generalized system for
defining quality control, at least for digital publications, which of
course would have to be on a voluntary basis.
This in combination
with compliance to technical standards enabling integration in linked
data clouds or semantic web would ensure the quality of material in the
linked data domains, at least when concerning scientific
publications.
Otherwise the internet may soon be swamped by open
access repositories and open access journals of lesser quality, which
would make the effort of adding these to linked data clouds or the
semantic web a waste of scarce resources.
As I said before in
earlier threads, a monolithic semantic web is not possible, their will
be domains more perfect than others, or speaking in terms of information
quality some better than others, instead of trying to make all of them
perfect, let's focus on making those for which quality is deemed
important as perfect as is humanly and technically possible.
And
those domains of collective stupidity, leave them for what they are,
they are after all the collective expression of individuals who have the
right to have opinions and be stupid, because the exercise of free will
to express oneself is a human right most cherished and most guaranteed
by almost everyone of the 105 plus human rights treaties recognized by
the UN.
Milton Ponson
GSM: +297 747 8280
Rainbow Warriors Core Foundation
PO
Box 1154, Oranjestad
Aruba, Dutch
Caribbean
www.rainbowwarriors.net
Project Paradigm: A structured approach
to bringing the tools for sustainable development to all stakeholders
worldwide
www.projectparadigm.info
NGO-Opensource: Creating ICT tools for
NGOs worldwide for Project Paradigm
www.ngo-opensource.org
MetaPortal: providing online access to
web sites and repositories of data and information for sustainable
development
www.metaportal.info
SemanticWebSoftware, part of
NGO-Opensource to enable SW technologies in the Metaportal
project
www.semanticwebsoftware.info
--- On Sat,
5/9/09, Azamat <abdoul@cytanet.com.cy> wrote:
From:
Azamat <abdoul@cytanet.com.cy>
Subject: Re: Research
Illusion
To: "'SW-forum'" <semantic-web@w3.org>,
"[ontolog-forum] " <ontolog-forum@ontolog.cim3.net>
Cc:
"Sören Auer" <auer@informatik.uni-leipzig.de>, "Mustafa Jarrar"
<mjarrar@cs.ucy.ac.cy>, "Pieter De Leenheer"
<pdeleenh@vub.ac..be>, jeremy@topquadrant.com
Date: Saturday,
May 9, 2009, 7:04 PM
SA: "I have the vision that research communities'
crowd intelligence could be employed in the Web 2.0 style for deciding
about research funding".
MB: "...we see people can vote
resources....Allowing people to add ontology-based annotations is just
similar and would be another step forward."
JC: "Google scholar
provides citation counts, which while still a fairly rough measure,
does include an idea of the importance of any piece of
work."
PDeL: "I agree with the value of the wisdom of the crowd
effect in many cases, however it should be controlled somehow to
prevent the emergence of "foolishness of the crowd".
MP: "We
second the idea of common standard ontologies for the semantic web
use.."
These points are all the significant sides and
aspects of one problem, (Academic) Research Illusion: "deluding by
creating illusory ideas", "considered scientific (magical) by laymen
(naive observers)", " something what is false", "erroneous mental
representation".
I incline to think that the "crowd
intelligence" or "foolishness of the crowd" may explain the nature of
the "phenomenon", and a canonic world model encoded as a
machine-understandable common ontology standards of meanings may allow
to head off it at all.
To my knowledge, there are no semantic
applications on Intelligence and Collective Intelligence or Stupidity
and Crowd Stupidity, what must be a big miss. Some public ventilation
of these really critical issues could be of use, theoretical and
practical.
Interestingly, while googling "Intelligence" (the
power to perceive, learn, image, remember, understand, reason and
think, will, or communicate), one gets 130 m hits, while looking for
"Stupidity" (lack of intelligence, mentally limited, dumbness,
ignorance, an absence of ideas), just 12,2 m hits. There was an
economic historian Carlo Cipolla, who tried to formulate the
fundamental laws of stupidity. One of them: A person is stupid if he
causes damage to another person or group of people without
experiencing personal gain, or even worse causing damage to themselves
in the process. Accordingly, he distinguished four groups of
people:
1.. Intelligent people (bringing benefits to themselves
and others, generating news values and assets);
2.. Naive or
Helpless people (bringing benefits to others and losses to themselves,
enriching the few);
3.. Criminals or Bandits (just redistributing
the assets);
4.. Stupid people (causing losses to themselves and
society at large, destroying the assets).
Its is plain that of all
sorts of stupidity, the most dangerous is the one coming from learned
professionals, so there to put the academic research head gamers is an
open question.
Community-based knowledge forums as Wikipedia
are increasingly represented as collective intelligence (WikiMind
symbiotic intelligence) projects. Apropos, other legacy examples of
collective intelligence (or stupidity?) are political parties (for
nation-wide political stupidity or global political dullness are
sitting here).
The Group Intelligence (group mind, collective
intelligence, crowd wisdom) implies collectively solving complex
problems by means of networked ICT (as the Internet and Web) resulting
in enhancing individual minds and self-identity. Or, technically, it
is about a global virtual collaboration of individual minds guided by
standard ontological world models and semantic technologies as well as
by peering, sharing, objectivity and professional knowledge.
By
contrast, Group Stupidity suggests all sort of costly academic
research illusions at the cost of degrading individual minds and
losing self-identity, technically aggravated by numerous separate
ontologies and views and disjoint applications.
Azamat
Abdoullaev
http://www.eis.com.cy
PS: As a side
note, propose to establish ASA, Academic Stupidity Awards (with
categories in each knowledge domain, the stupidest idea, the stupidest
article, the stupidest research project, the stupidest academician;
for political correctness to use "unintelligent" instead of "stupid").
And please don't mix it with Ig Noble prizes, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Noble, having some
sense. The existent World Stupidity Awards will then become just a
funny joke.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Sören Auer"
<auer@informatik.uni-leipzig.de>
To:
"Jeremy Carroll" <jeremy@topquadrant.com>
Cc: "'Azamat'" <abdoul@cytanet.com.cy>; "'[ontolog-forum] '"
<ontolog-forum@ontolog.cim3.net>;
"'SW-forum'" <semantic-web@w3..org>; <mjarrar@cs.ucy.ac.cy>
Sent: Friday, May 08,
2009 11:04 PM
Subject: Re: Research Illusion
Jeremy
Carroll wrote:
> Google scholar provides citation counts, which
while still a
> fairly rough measure, does include an idea of
the importance
> of any piece of work.
I agree that
citation counts are a pretty good estimate of a works impact.
A
more severe problem from my point of view is the distribution
of
research funds.
Existing paradigms seem to be either
biased towards large established
organizations or well-connected,
long established individuals. For
innovative ideas and younger
researchers it is much harder.
I have the vision that research
communities' crowd intelligence could be
employed in the Web 2.0
style for deciding about research funding
[1].
--Sören
[1] http://wiki.cofundos.org/
Received on Monday, 11 May 2009 21:18:26 UTC