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Re: Beyond Ontologies

• To: "Roger L. Costello" <costello@m...>,<xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Beyond Ontologies
• From: "Jeff Rafter" <jeffrafter@d...>
• Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2003 18:22:51 -0500
• References: <3F7742D4.2B8BB5D3@m...>

> - Semantics is constantly changing.  All of life is constantly
> changing.  In fact, change is the only constant.
>
> - Capturing in an ontology constant change would require massive,
> full-time ontology maintenance.

I oddly enough agree and disagree. One could argue that the web is in a
constant state of change. However this is a system-wide overview. The rules
of the web however are what we are trying to encapsulate and that seems
possible or at least plausible in the sense that it is a far narrower
aspect.
The semantic web, it would seem is trying to identify that set of rules, the
search engine is making a guess [1]. The game of the web is that it changes,
it changes in ways we have already listed in this and related threads. But
the change isn't random, per se-- it is caused: by someone changing their
homepage, someone entering a new item into Amazon or eBay, by someone using
blogging software, by a virus writer, by some banner advertisement, etc. All
of these are manageable. Right now the blogging software produces a blog a
la HTML, why couldn't it produce HTML+RDF and allow you to "define" unknown
terms or "search" for them. Identifying, creating and managing the rules at
the point of change (e.g. the cause) increases the amount of work up front
but increases manageability. I wouldn't have guessed that the so many people
would be willing to put forth the effort to produce and maintain the
billions of pages out there as it is-- but the return value was there and
was worth it.

[1] >>[Consider] the game where the child is taught to shout "red" when red
appears and the game where he is to guess the weather... when he shouts
"green" when something read appears, and when he makes the wrong guess about
the weather. In the first case the child has not got hold of the game, he
has offended against the rules; in the second he has made a mistake.<<
-Wittgenstein's Lectures


Cheers,
Jeff Rafter

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