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John:
Regarding your general observations:
1. Are you implying that the "one-size-fits-all ontology" of the contemporary physicist looking for the "theory of everything" (TOE) is a "disaster"? Do they know that?
2. You say, "committees, juries, legislatures, advisory boards, etc. are the only means for making good evaluations." No doubt. But shouldn't (couldn't) their collective wisdom inform the designer?
3. A "lattice" of theories is the current (me thinks rightly) scientific paradigm. (The word "lattice" connotes, however, an overly rigid structure that is not amenable to most "ontologists." Isn't it more a "mesh"?)
4. Indeed. Time marches on. But a computer program, in some sense, is necessarily (internaly) consistent (at each point in time)--else it would "crash."
5. I'd submit that every highly-specialized "field" of "scientific" (medical or otherwise) endeavor has an inplicit, but coherent (more or less) (i.e., self-consistent) "ontology" that serves that community very well. Being able to "expose" that ontology in a formal language requires a logician.
Best to all,
Dale
-----Original Message-----
From: John F. Sowa [mailto:sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wed 12/28/2005 11:37 PM
To: Lichtblau, Dale; ONTAC-WG General Discussion; Lichtblau, Dale
Subject: RE: [ontac-forum] Future directions for ontologies and terminologies
Chris, Pat, Dale, Nicolas, and Barry,
I'll respond to the detailed points later, but I'd just like
to make a few general observations:
1. All the responses confirm my point that the kinds of
axioms, the level of detail, and the granularity required
are problem dependent, and any attempt to enforce a
one-size-fits-all ontology would be a disaster.
2. Chris talked about distributed reasoning systems in which
different agents use different axioms. We have them today.
They're called committees, juries, legislatures, advisory
boards, etc. They're often good for making evaluations,
but no so good for designs (cf. the proverbial camel).
3. I agree with Pat that a single ontology would promote
interoperability among the systems that adopt it. But
nobody has addressed the problem of legacy systems and
future systems. Pat does not want to talk about "fixed
and frozen" systems and wants to let the ontologies evolve.
So do I. But I maintain that the fundamental design
must accommodate evolution from the beginning. That's
the point of the lattice of theories.
4. Dale's quotation from Steiner is very apt. I would just
add two lines to the following:
"No two historical epochs, no two social classes, no two
localities use words and syntax to signify exactly the
same things, to send identical signals of valuation and
inference. Neither do two human beings."
My addition:
Neither do any two large computer programs nor even any
two releases of what is called the "same" program.
5. Barry mentioned the "biomedical field", but that field,
like most, breaks down into an enormous number of subfields
and specializations. Some of which (such as patient records)
are well served by terminologies with very few axioms, and
others (such as research and diagnostics) require much more
detail that is *extremely* problem dependent.
John Sowa
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