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

• To: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>,"XML DEV" <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: Roger Costello: My Version of "Why use OWL?"
• From: "Danny Ayers" <danny666@v...>
• Date: Sun, 27 Apr 2003 01:57:20 +0200
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <r01050400-1025-6DA06B7F783011D793D60003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]>

> 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.

I doubt whether there are even two people that share the same definition of
the word knowledge, let alone a philosophy. Fortunately you don't have to
share any underlying philosophy to be able to use a 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'm not sure about conversation, but technologies are usually pretty
meaningless and possibly dangerous, until you have an immediate need for
them.

> >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.

Did someone mention unicode?

Cheers,
Danny.

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