Re: What do the ontologists want

>Pat Hayes:
> > The key difference is that global hypertext was a genuinely new
> > phenomenon in 1991.  Nothing about RDF is new, it's just old ideas
> > done badly.
>
>What's the best work you've seen in the field of massively distributed
>anarchic information processing systems (like the Semantic Web is
>supposed to be)?

"anarchic information processing" is not the name of a field, or even 
a topic. My own view is that if the semantic web expects to be 
anarchic, and that this is some new kind of information processing 
that has not been seen before, then I will just tiptoe away from 
those who are trying to create this anarchy and get on with something 
more useful.  I grew up in a world that was full of people with vague 
ideas about how anarchic love-ins were going to change society, and 
most of those people are now stone cold dead. I prefer to live in the 
real world.

But this idea of 'anarchic  information processing' is not what I 
hear from Tim B-L (who expects the semantic web to support reliable 
B2B transactions involving lots of $$ changing electronic hands) or 
Jim Hendler (who expects it to be able to enable software agents to 
keep track of things like parts recalls on refrigerator condenser 
coils), or people like Matthew West (of Shell, who wants it to 
support coherent industrial process ontologies created by 
international standards organizations) to name just a few. If all you 
want is anarchy, why not just have people use RSTP (random string 
transfer protocol)?

> What lessons have such systems taken from AI?  What
>lessons should they have taken?

There are no such systems, so how can I answer you? If the 
people/machines in them want to understand one another well enough to 
draw conclusions from what one another are saying, then they could 
learn a lot. But that might not be anarchic enough, maybe?

Pat Hayes

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Received on Thursday, 17 May 2001 20:56:55 UTC