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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Reductionist vs Holistic Semantics
 costello@m... (Roger L. Costello) writes: >[much excellent material on holistic approaches, f-stops] > >There may be untility to treating semantics with a sterilized, >laboratory approach. Certainly if this was the 17th century, where >computers weren't available, then such a static, taxonomy-like approach >would be acceptable. But in today's dynamic, computer-driven world >surely we can do better ... much better. 17th-century taxonomies were simpler than most of the ones we have today - partly because of media limitations (books vs. terabyte graphs) - but the lack of computers itself had a beneficial side-effect. Humans could still look beyond taxonomies, using their own local expectations, and in many ways they had (and have) far more flexibility than computers today have. (That they did so while still claiming to be observing such taxonomies is perhaps more evidence of their flexibility!) In some ways, the skepticism of 18th century philosophers (Hume and Berkeley spring to mind) comes from the mismatches they saw between ways of categorizing and describing the world and their experience of the world. During much of the 19th century that skepticism was replaced by confidence, and that confidence continues at least in Anglo-American philosophy today. A lot of my objections to ontologies and in particular visions of the Semantic Web arise from my concerns about what I see as this sadly naive confidence in "sterilized, laboratory approaches" to semantics. The reliance on first-order logic seems fueled by a belief that if we only had enough assertions, we could make all of these semantics fit together, uh, better... much better. >I believe that Didier and Mike Champion made mention of Google as tool >which provides semantics in a holistic fashion. I found their >statements extremely enlightening I totally agree with them. Yes, I >think that Google is the best semantics tool today. > >While Google provides semantics in a holistic fashion, it is more or >less semantics for eyeballs, i.e., the results it returns is intended >for humans to process. The critical problem is how to create a tool >which provides semantics in a holistic fashion *for computers*. Would >someone care to take a stab at characterizing the nature of such a >tool? For now, though it's not quite the characterization you're seeking, I'd propose that such tools combine the speed, efficiency, and repeatability of computers with the flexibility and unpredictability of humans. That would mean building systems which have humans in the loop, not just on the edges of the system as providers or consumers. I don't think this problem is as simple as computers vs. humans. I think building systems that can effectively work with semantics requires both. That's probably bad news for the folks who want to feed huge amounts of information into a computer (which doesn't receive health benefits) and get results without having to deal with humans (who don't always show up for work). It seems, however, like a much richer approach than the current "reduce it to bits which approximate yesterday's reality and hope the computer recombines them to reflect tomorrow's reality" approach. (I think treating XML as a meeting point between humans and computers is an important ingredient in making that work, though that often seems an unpopular approach with both the humans, for whom "Tags are the Real Enemy" [1] and the folks running the computers, who don't want to have to deal with error-handling when humans create unexpected situations.) [1] - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/10/01/deviant.html -- 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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