RE: SUO: Re: SUO Ballot with 2 Questions
Dear Matthew,
I snipped a lot, hope the comments still cover most of your questions.
Pierre
> > > Am I missing something?
> >
> > Yes, so it seems to me. The environment for managing the
> > content should be
> > informed by the content.
>
> MW: What do you mean here by "informed by the content"?
A structure used to manage the content emerges from the content, it is tailored
a posteriori.
> > We have to extract content (eventually from structured
> > sources and we could use
> > SUMO and OpneCyc browsers if that is an environment in your
> > sense, but this is
> > more or less anecdotal since proposers of canfidate standards
> > are asked to
> > produce flat files which to date are hardly structured).
>
> MW: Quite. Getting away from flat files as the medium in which
> the ontologies are managed is one of the things I think a Registry
> is about.
This format has been requested by this group (Adam in any event requested that
John D endure the same kind of dump-your-data-into-a-file exercise he had to go
over himself). If you are not happy with this, then you change the behavior of
this group and ask proposers to parse their files into the variety of topics
which constitute the fundamental elements of a UO and this is more than enough.
But then make the list first. That's partly what I'm asking for.
But in any event this would seem sort of strange to me. I'm leery about
comparing modules which have been abstracted from the rest of the theory they
are integral parts of.
> > The content we will care for will have to be structured in an
> > environment
> > eventually.
>
> MW: Why only when we have some content we decide we like? Why not
> use structured methods to help us sort the alternatives and compare
> them?
Motion two proposes to turn possible means to reach the goal of this group
(based on methods supported by a portion of this group) into its new goal.
> Does that have to be made harder than is necessary?
This is a question I asked in the first place. Why would we have to spend
months if not longer dissecting and re-gluing two legacy ontologies before we
start wondering about their merits? How will that make the job easier?
> MW: The difference between us seems to be the start point. I would
> argue for a start point that includes assessing and comparing the
> source material (or authoring it for that matter). You seem to want
> to restrict things to that which is "blessed".
First sentence might be part of the truth. Second sentence express something we
have in common. Forget about third, unless by blessing you mean voting (why are
we voting otherwise?).
In my understanding, our divergence comes from the fact that I consider the
sources as supports and raw material candidates for re-use. The main starting
point in my opinion is philosophical analysis.
It seems to me that the order of importance is reversed in your approach. You
(and John Sowa) seem to say: we start from legacy ontologies and we will surely
be able to come up with something better but which benefits from the years of
experience of these bright people who have created these things.
OpenCyc might have started in the heroic way John Sowa describes in another
email. To me anything which attempts to make me believe that OpenCyc is better
than anything else based on whatever heroic history it has is marketing and
bullshit. Cyc has been more shaped by idiomatic intuitions and implementation
constraints than anything else. Maybe this didn't prevent it from being
successful, not sure it is a good piece of UO. SUMO is the refined product of a
garbage collection and frenetic merging. Maybe the recycling process was
efficient, I don't know for sure.
I don't like the prospect of refining refined product which have been polutted
over the years by the contingency of the moment. And you don't need to take a
look at OpenCyc and SUMO to know that there is a potential conflict between 3d
and 4d. It is interesting to look at OpenCyc and SUMO to see how these
conflicts can be resolved and if they were. You may get valuable information
from Cyc on how we could get both things living together assuming a modular
structure for instance, but even this is a stretch. The truth is that legacy
ontologies will give you few more than dipshit insight in what you need for a
UO and mostly negatively (through their inconsistencies). If you add to that
that you will need to add to your registry any this or that ontology in order
to imporve the diversity and the breadth of your horizon, you end up with an
endless toying in the mud.
teil1