Re: SUO: Re: REQUEST: survey of available ontologies, taxonomies, thesauri, lexicons?

On 4/1/02 13:33, "Frank van Harmelen" <Frank.van.Harmelen@cs.vu.nl> wrote:

> I would be happy if this clarification removes "your major complaint about
> much of the work on the semantic web".

Frank,

This is a fine diagram, but notice that "Logic" is a little block on top of
RDF-schema, for example.  This tells me that things like RDF-schema are seen
as prior to logic by at least Berners-Lee and perhaps others.

John's point was precisely the opposite.  He would not disagree with you
about the choice of establishing the lexicon first, which has been done by
virtue of the fact that Unicode and URIs are at the bottom.  However, I
think he would vehemently disagree, as do I, that "Logic" is somehow less
basic that "RDF-schema" or "XML-schema".

As I pointed out in my previous post, these languages are often poorly
specified by the standards of mathematical logic (although Pat Hayes has
been kind enough to fix that for RDF).  This is another example of the
hijacking of a perfectly respectable term like "Logic", which is being used
here as a coverterm for "Rules" or "Constraints".  But RDF-schema and
XML-schema already have the power to represent some classes of constraints.
Are these constraints somehow independent of "Logic"?

Likewise the use of the term "Ontology Vocabulary" indicates confusion.  The
logic needs to be nailed down before one can specify an "Ontology
Vocabulary" in that logic.  This is another example of Orwellian revisionism
on the part of the Web ontology community.  I would urge them, for the sake
or clear and rational discourse, to stick to the common interpretations of
these terms.

 .bill

-- 
Bill Andersen
Chief Scientist, Ontology Works
1132 Annapolis Road, Suite 104
Odenton, Maryland, 21113
Mobile: 443-858-6444
Office: 410-674-7600
Web: http://www.ontologyworks.com

Received on Monday, 1 April 2002 14:56:51 UTC