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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Data vs. Process was Re: Vocabulary Combination
 jonathan@o... (Jonathan Borden) writes: >When I think about ontologies I hardly think about processing at all. >How exactly do ontologies intrude into your choices about processing? I see the meaning of markup as coming from the reader, whether that reader is a human or a computer process. Ontologies strike me as a deliberate effort to enforce a particular set of meanings across processing contexts, so in that sense they affect the possibilities I had open in my processing. Beyond that, expectations that processing will be flexible enough to handle changes in ontologies requires writing the processing in a very different style, requiring my code to understand the ontologies rather than just the markup. It may be declarative, but its impact reaches to the core of the code. >Admittedly, ontologies might be both constrictive and heavyweight, >they are intended to be constrictive, and the additional constraints >on what you can say, placed by the desire to enable inference engines >to be both decidable and terminating, do indeed frequently make it >cumbersome to express something which otherwise seems simple -- but I >wonder if that is somewhat a function of the fact that writing good >ontologies is an art which is fundamentally different from >programming? As such, writing ontologies today must seem similar to >that of programming in the early days of computers: akin to black >magic. Like most magic, it just looks impossible from the outside, and >becomes much easier when you understand the sleight of hand. Or of >course there is the standard answer that we can let the tools do the >hard work :-)) Thanks, but I don't need or want those burdens. It's not black magic - it's merely naive faith in the coherence of logical constructions built in a certain way of supposedly atomic facts. I don't trust the premise, and I don't want the tools. Markup's premises are a lot smaller, far easier to comprehend, and involve a lot less sleight of hand. -- Simon St.Laurent Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets Errors, errors, all fall down! http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org 
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