SUO: RE: Re: An article on the pitfalls of metadata
Tom Johnston wrote:
<snip/>
>My first question would
> be: which one has
> successfully incorporated the largest and most diverse set of
> lowest level
> (i.e. working database level) ontologies? Which ones can most
> completely
> rely on the data model itself to fully express the semantics
> up and down the
> entire ontology, without "patching things up" with ad hoc
> program code.
> (Sorry, I don't know how to translate this point, expressed
> in my preferred
> language, into the language of axiomatized formal systems.)
>
> Whichever one it is, that's the one we should go with. Let's
> work to add
> more lowest level ontologies to it. In the process, we may
> sometimes make a
> good case for revisions a couple of levels higher up. We may on rare
> occasions make a good case for revisions much higher up. Some of those
> revisions will not force structural changes elsewhere in the
> web of this
> ontology, e.g. adding a creation-date-timestamp to the top-level
> entry/table/class. Other revisions will force structural
> changes, and such
> changes can be painfully expensive. But the further up we go, the less
> frequent the revisions will be. Once again, this is just
> Quine's sphere of
> language, his (or Peirce's?) holism.
>
> Tom
<snip/>
Tom, why not use the process you described above as the initial
statement of an algorithm to automate the merger of lower level
data models?
Observations about the actual databases stored with two data
models might be analyzed to come up with a higher level model
that incorporates both. Since the top level model is empty,
when two data models merge to no common elements, the two are
clearly independent nodes on the lattice. Some of the data
mining techniques can be applied to this approach.
I don't think its necessary, or even useful, to develop the
lattice manually since it will be necessarily a dynamic lattice
that changes with time. So its not the initial lattice that
we should spend effort on, its the method (algorithm, process)
for building the lattice and refining it through observations.
JMHO,
Rich