Dialectical view on the goals and means of Upper Ontology
Yang <rintec@sohu.com> wrote:
...
>Whether a system or a part of it may understand itself is rather a
>philosophical problem. In dialectics, a system may understand itself >from its opposite. Anyway, what we are concerned is whether it may >affect our practices.
>Yang
I am glad that dialectics was mentioned above...
Let me start from there and change the topic of the discussion
to the "Dialectical view on the goals and means of Upper Ontology".
Tom Gruber said (http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/kst/what-is-an-ontology.html):
"In the context of knowledge sharing, I use the term ontology to mean a specification of a conceptualization. That is, an ontology is a description (like a formal specification of a program) of the concepts and relationships that can exist for an agent or a community of agents. This definition is consistent with the usage of ontology as set-of-concept-definitions, but more general.
...
What is important is what an ontology is for. My colleagues and I have been designing ontologies for the purpose of enabling knowledge sharing and reuse."
As I have mentioned before on this list (but it was mostly overlooked or ignored as non-practical) - from the dialectical prospective the Human society is not the last "creme-of-the-crop" node in the endless chain of the evolutional progression.
Therefore I have doubts (as I have expressed before) that the human "Natural Language" is appropriate and sufficient agent for the knowledge sharing, considering above mentioned "long haul prospective" dialectical point of view.
Is it "wise" to impose the means of "Natural Language" onto such global knowledge sharing ?
Are there better alternatives, which express "being" more "naturally" and "globally" than any existent human "Natural Language" (which are so many on the Earth as of now) ?
Regards,
Alex