SUO: 10 May 2002 -- Procedural Questions
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Procedural Questions
First off, I want to say that I agree with
everything that J-L and L-T just said here:
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg08438.html
"Grate Minds" --- pardon my French ...
I think that it's beginning to occur to a few people that
the field of "Artificial Ontology" (Alpha-Omega) may just
turn out to be a "hard subject", just as hard as logic or
mathematics or physics or semiotics or whatever you might
choose to name. I believe this is a healthy development.
It means that we will begin to regard the work that we are doing
or trying to do here as a "research area", not a one-off project,
much like the past, present, and ever prospective research areas
of artificial intelligence, languages, and life (AI, ALa, ALi).
The best way for an ongoing research area to remain a going concern,
to thrive on its own turf, and to serve the needs of larger society
is to face up to the problems that are thrust before it and to work
at tackling the ones it can, in whatever order addresses those ends.
There will always be the sort of people who want to declare the war
over before the host of problems has even been met. That is simply
human nature, and must not prevent the real work from being done by
those who are willing to the homework, and to follow things through.
There will always be the sort of people who try to use the magic of
the up-&-coming buzzword -- "AI", "Ontology", "Semantic", and so on --
as some brand of charmed formula to wipe the slate clean of all the
knowledge that has gone before, in a vain effort to start over from
what they know, which is scratch.
But genuine progress, even if apparently retrograde at intervals,
does not come from those directions. In their hearts, everybody
already knows how it goes, really they do, if they stop to think.
And so it goes ...
Jon Awbrey
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