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Re: Roger Costello: My Version of "Why use OWL?"

• To: XML DEV <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Roger Costello: My Version of "Why use OWL?"
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2003 17:45:42 -0400
• In-reply-to: <071101c30c39$a28525d0$b6f5d3ce@L565>

jonathan@o... (Jonathan Borden) writes:
>> Wow.  This is where I really have to wonder if OWL is Karl Popper's
>> revenge on the world, a naive view of useful information as a
>> collection of facts, "objective knowledge".
>
>Revenge? Is this a problem? :-)

It is indeed a problem if you don't share the philosophy of knowledge
underlying this technology.  

>Indeed it is common practice to informally refer to a particular
>collection of triples as a "knowledge base"

People even give presentations on "knowledge technology" and audiences
listen.  I don't know whether the problem lies with the speakers or the
audience, but I try hard to avoid such conversation and consider it
meaningless if not dangerous when I encounter it.

>I expect that any statement that is strictly limited to elements and
>attributes has already been made, or else is a rehash of another
>statement that has already been made, probably originating in the XML
>1.0 rec itself modulo some issues with what really is UNICODE etc...

>From a knowledge technologist's perspective, perhaps.  I don't think
conversation on using markup has even really gotten started, though, and
there's certainly plenty of room for tools development that's barely
been expored.

Given the choice of conversations, I'll stick to the strange little
world of characters and markup rather than striving to build global
meaning.

-- 
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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