SUO: Plain old negotiation
This is for John Sowa (and interested others)...
John, a question has been bothering me about your characterization of the
"negotiation" vs "legislation" approach to IS integration. From what I've
been able to gather from the discussion and your writings you've referenced
in the posts, the idea is that only "small adjustments" need to be made to
some kinds of naïve inter-system mappings when they prove inadaquate, the
claim here being that this is somehow a different task (I mean formally
here) than the one of mapping each system to a subsuming ontology.
Considering the problem abstractly, the task is to make the semantics of the
two (n) systems compatible over some relevant subset of functionality. For
me, this means that the relevant terms (logical database structure, function
names, etc) "mean" the "same" thing from the perspectives of the member
systems. The real action here is to arrive at some reasonable meaning for
the words "mean" and "same" in the above (thus the scare quotes), even prior
to a discussion on how one might procedurally compute meaning and sameness.
It seems also inescapable that the meanings of "mean" and "same" will have
to do exclusively with formal properties of axioms (stated or not)
constraining the interpretation of the terms manifest by the participating
systems.
So, the question is: How is it that a process of negotiation arrives at the
relevant computation over these formal properties, where a mapping to a
third, well understood standard ontology cannot arrive at the relevant
computation over these properties? I'm sensing some of the buzzwordology
present when talking about "agents" here in the talk about "negotiation".
.bill
--
Bill Andersen
Chief Scientist, Ontology Works
1132 Annapolis Road, Suite 104
Odenton, Maryland, 21113
Mobile: 443-858-6444
Office: 410-674-7600
Web: http://www.ontologyworks.com