Re: What do the ontologists want

> You CAN start at the bottom, I guess, but why bother to,
> when people have already done some of your building for
> you?

Well, I agree.. but that's not what I meant - I meant that sometimes
you have to start at the bottom, even if there is no existing work,
but a good definition of terms in some "natural language information
space".

I guess I'm also thinking a little of the "we're creating a language
here, not investigating a natural phenomenon" thing of TimBL's. KR
pointing out that some bits of logic are the same in any system
(through whatever painful process) is like trying to learn a language
from scratch by looking through a dictionary - once you get too many
relationships it becomes too much of a mess to sort out.

But there are loads of axioms expressed in KIF that are useful, and of
course I have no objection of using them. If it works, use it. I'm
just saying that it's going to be difficult to interchange data if we
can't agree to the terms that we're using - that's what URIs do.

> > But at the end of the day, there are advantages to be
> > grounded in the Web - it's here, and it's now.
>
> I have no idea what you are talking about. (Prolog is here, and
> now. KIF is here, and now. So?).

So you're saying that I can reuse terms that you scribbled on the back
of an envelope somewhere in KIF - or rather, infer what they mean in a
similar system? Only if they're grounded in the Web.

> Thats not what the professionals that I know seem to want. They
> actually have reservoirs of information already on the web, [...]

Yep, which is why we've had a lot of this awful screen-scraping junk
going on. I suppose I'm biased, because most of the RDF vocabularies
and data models that I'm working on are starting from scratch, as it
were.

--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> .
:Sean :hasHomepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .

Received on Thursday, 17 May 2001 22:21:03 UTC