Re: "what is an ontology?" stuff in requirements abstract/intro

At 4:10 PM -0500 2/18/02, Dan Brickley wrote:
>On Mon, 18 Feb 2002, Pat Hayes wrote:
>
>>  >>    The term ontology may be unfamiliar to many readers of
>>  >>    this document.
>>  >>
>>  >>  That seems superfluous. I suggest striking it.
>>  >>
>>  >>    This notion of ontologies comes from Artificial Intelligence,
>>  >>    where ontologies are used to allow heterogeneous systems to
>>  >>    exchange and reason with information.
>>  >>
>>  >>  I'd suggest either citing specific work in this area
>>  >>  or striking the reference to Artificial Intelligence.
>>
>>  I agree. In any case, you could equally well cite data modelling
>>  languages, say; and the basic ideas go back way before AI if you want
>>  to get historical, at least to the 1940s and maybe the 1880s.
>
>On the prior art front, it wouldn't do any harm to chuck in a nod to
>http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/categories.html
>
>...though wouldn't want to overstretch the historical parallel or we'll
>find ourselves listing everyone who has every thought about cateogies,
>taxonomies and formal models.
>
>Dan
>

I'd like to suggest we have no specific references (and thus strike 
the AI one), I'm open to some sort of on-line repository for 
citations where we point the reader in this document, but I think we 
want to make it clear that there is a long history to this, and if we 
start trying to cite all relevant work we will never finish.  A note 
that there is much work we are not citing, and a pointer to web space 
where that list is/grows is fine.   Most W3C documents don't have 
much in the way of citations, and this document seems to me a 
particularly inappropriate place to start.
  -JH


-- 
Professor James Hendler				  hendler@cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
AV Williams Building, Univ of Maryland		  College Park, MD 20742
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler

Received on Monday, 18 February 2002 16:26:47 UTC