SUO: *Date 01 Apr 2002 -- Survey
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Item. Survey of Available Ontologies, Taxonomies, Thesauri, Lexicons?
BA = Bill Andersen
BA: These languages *are* logics of a sort. Worse yet is that they pack in
all kinds of implicit philosophical assumptions that, in the hundreds of
pages of detailed specifications that come with these beasts, get lost in
the noise. Nobody (probably even the language designers) know they are there.
BA: But they (the philosophical assumptions) have real impact. Necessarily
existing properties? No problem: OIL (or any DL) has 'em! No theory of
identity? No problem: different name -> different object! Relational
properties (e.g. "Italian")? No problem: they don't exist because they
cause computational problems.
BA: As a friend of mine always says, let's not confuse activity with progress.
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Bill,
Amazing!
You have just summarized, more succinctly than I myself could ever hope to match,
quite obviously, all of the problems that I see in the way that FOL and KIF are
currently used -- that they are in fact deployed more like implicit ontologies
and folk weltanschauungen than genuine logics. The only difference, I guess,
is this -- that the users of FOL and KIF do not have the same mass of specs
before their eyes to blame for their confusion. Now, I know that many will
still find this incomprehensible, but at least now it's been clearly said.
And you aren't just ipsing dixi.
April Fishes!
Jon Awbrey
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