Uniform weights and measures are great for commerce, but let's be more
real about uniform "concepts" -- shall we? For every task there is the
right tool. (01)
As I was reading the latest digest of comments from this forum, and
particularly the debate about a framework or upper ontology and
interoperability, the debate about EBCDIC or ASCII, and to a lesser
extent Baudot and other codes, as a "uniform code for information
interchange"-- came to mind. Since (I believe) John Sowa was with IBM
at that time maybe he can recall some of the arguments, rational and
forces that picked ASCII over EBCDIC and why it was necessary at all.
The underlying issues and potential consequences seem to be similar to
the works being discussed here. (02)
Another incidental picture that popped into my mind, was about how Plato
railed against the poets of his time, and urged people to "think for
themselves" and not to simply repeat the "content" and scripts (they
learned), or reenact the scenes of popular plays and stories to
represent what they mean or deliver a message. That was at the start of
western science and civilization, what is being started here? In the
spirit of "food for thought" and in the context of any specification of
any conceptualization: isn't every rendition of such an ontology really
only a sort of poem? (03)
The strategies of mass control and kind of cultism surrounding Wikipedia
encyclopedic entries (just search on 'wikipedia') also comes to mind.
Noted recently:
http://www.zpenergy.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1635 (04)
Ken Ewell (05)
ontac-forum-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: (06)
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>Today's Topics:
>
> 1. RE:Our Prayers were answered (Gary Berg-Cross)
> 2. Re: Our prayers have been answered. (John F. Sowa)
> 3. Re: Our prayers have been answered. (Charles D Turnitsa)
> 4. Re: Our prayers have been answered. (Barry Smith)
> 5. Re: Our prayers have been answered. (Arun Majumdar)
> 6. RE: Our prayers have been answered. (West, Matthew R SIPC-DFD/321)
> 7. Re: Our prayers have been answered. (John F. Sowa)
>
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Message: 1
>Date: Fri, 2 Dec 2005 15:48:27 -0500
>From: "Gary Berg-Cross" <gary.berg-cross@xxxxxxxx>
>Subject: [ontac-forum] RE:Our Prayers were answered
>To: <ontac-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Message-ID: <330E3C69AFABAE45BD91B28F80BE32C90562D0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
>
>
>Maybe it wlll take more than prayers and include a few weekends yet...
>
>These types of encyclopedic ontology efforts tha pop up suggest we need to be
>concerned about
>ontology consumer protection. Perhaps, as develop better criteria to judge
>these candidates we can
>launch an effort, say at NIST to develop some standards by which we judge
>these candidates.
>
>Gary Berg-Cross
>EM&I
>
>
>Rick wrote> guess we can take the weekend off ... (01)
>
>
>
> (07)
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