Re: What do the ontologists want

> 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.

I guess I hit a personal button with the word "anarchic."  I'm sorry.
I mean it in the sense of "without government or formal authority"
(sense 1a in my dictionary) not "the absense of order" (sense 2b).  I
mean it in the same way that the Web is by design different from most
previous hypertext systems: it is free of any central authority or
bottleneck (beyond those few in the Internet).

It's a lot harder to make system without that central bottleneck, and
sometimes you have to give up features (like link consistency).  But I
think the Semantic Web is supposed to share this kind of anarchic
quality with the existing web.  (And I think Tim B-L and probably Jim
Hendler would agree with this goal.  I'm not familiar with Matthew
West.)

> > 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? 

Well, that was the retorical part of my question.  You said RDF was
doing old stuff and doing it badly.   I'm saying RDF is trying to
borrow from old stuff to do something new, which isn't as "old hat" as
you seemed to be claiming.

      -- sandro

Received on Thursday, 17 May 2001 21:15:25 UTC