Re: What do the ontologists want

>
>Maybe the KR folk are just grumpy because they didn't think of
>grounding their terms in a global information space... [sound of me
>ducking].

Hey, come out from behind the arras. You really should try reading 
something some day.  Did it never occur to you that natural language 
IS a global information space? It did to CS Peirce, Bertrand Russel, 
and WVO Quine, to name but a few.  More recently, you could check out 
the discussions on the SUO lists to see what really happens if you 
try to make a globally coherent ontology. That is what a lot of we KR 
folk spend our time trying to do, in fact.  Using RDF would be like 
trying to fill a reservoir using teaspoons.

But more seriously, I would welcome any discussion on these lists 
(and there has been some lately) which seriously got down to what it 
is about URIs and the Web and so on that introduces genuinely new 
ideas into semantics. Im sure there will be some, and that there is 
some new work to do. But so far that all seems orthogonal to the 
issues we have been talking about.

Pat Hayes

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Received on Thursday, 17 May 2001 18:59:02 UTC