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

>Bill--
>
>Why not interpret "higher in the diagram than" as meaning "guides the
>use of" rather than as "less basic than" or "following after"?  It seems
>to me you're sewing a vest onto an awfully small button.

Well, to be fair, that layer-cake diagram has become a kind of altar 
decoration, something to be worshipped rather than critiqued. It is 
largely meaningless, as we all know, yet I bet that it is 
incorporated into over a hundred Powerpoint presentations. Ive done 
it myself. If it really is simply BS, let us stop advertising it. If 
it means something ( which Bill and John S. had the graciousness to 
presume that it was intended to) then we might legitimately ask what 
exactly it is supposed to mean. After all, having XML and RDF in the 
base of that diagram seems to represent something very real to a lot 
of people in the W3C, although it is rarely stated very clearly, and 
it has had a very strong influence on the development of the SW 
activity, not always clearly beneficial. Our upcoming F2F agenda has 
that diagram incorporated into its agenda, and one can feel its 
baleful influence stifling discussion already (non-RDF syntax is 
VERBOTEN! Any discussion of 'rules' is OUT OF LINE!! ).

Maybe the Webont group should draw a lesson from the fact that every 
professional ontologist who looks at that diagram is either puzzled, 
amused or horrified.

Pat Hayes

>Earlier in this thread, you said
>
>>  This community had better stop playing academic one-upmanship and get busy
>>  producing something...
>
>Is further in-depth analysis of TBL's layer-cake diagram SUO's kick-off
>to this program?
>
>--Frank
>
>
>Bill Andersen wrote:
>>
>>  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".
>>
>
>--
>Frank Manola                   The MITRE Corporation
>202 Burlington Road, MS A345   Bedford, MA 01730-1420
>mailto:fmanola@mitre.org       voice: 781-271-8147   FAX: 781-271-8752


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Received on Thursday, 4 April 2002 14:16:56 UTC