[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Beyond Ontologies
From: Roger L. Costello [mailto:costello@m...] >I think it is clear that except for trivial, academic cases RDF Schema >and OWL do not have the robustness to capture the dynamically changing >nature of real-world semantics. To do so, we must go beyond these >ontology languages. Because ontologies do not capture. They **distinguish**. The intelligent observer captures. One reason to create automatons for this (to answer Nicholas), is to make automated agents behave intelligently so that they can act as representatives of their owners, for example, intelligent search 'droids that discover and distinguish resources, then negotiate with them to create a proposal based on the results of the negotiation that can then be presented to the human owner. This is doable but a better understanding of negotiation requires the understanding of domain creation and domain evolution such that the agent can identify the current domain. In short, it manages contexts on behalf of the user and that is a way of saying 'creates and evolves schemas'. Already, tools such as Visual Studio produce schemas on-demand. Ontololgies model. A known means of modeling what you are working on is situational cybernetics using first and second order cybernetic systems. The vital knowledge is that in a dynamic situation, controls are emergent or evolve by negotiation. There is nothing spooky about complex systems, or really, distinctly new. Pipelined systems with negotiated controls are the common approach because of the need for a formal system that enables scope of control (where scope has dimensions such as temporal, spatial, conceptual class, and so on). Formal systems require closure and therefore, never accurately model 'reality', and that is a 'so but so what' statement. Tools is tools. The Golem problem is solved by limiting the authority of the ontology and its operational means. For your work, consider a system that provides a means to parameterize an XSLT that modifies the document be it a chain of XSLTs that modify aspects of a schema or themselves. Even if complex, it is finite (closes). The work on upper level distinctions that can then be used for organizing the classifications efficiently and *distinctly* is the tough work. When you say "beyond ontology", you are repeating an age-old pattern in computer science: shifting the focus from data to process. To understand the world 'as it is', one sees 'being', 'thinging', 'becoming', and so on, the dance of lila, the essence of samsara. But to be in that world, one uses energy to change it, one 'interacts'. As I said, at the end of your investigation, you should have a much greater appreciation for data-driven applications, paticularly, data-driven GUIs. Where is the source for parameters to XSLT scripts? That is the environment interface control. John Sowa makes some important points about ontologies in his work and recent discussions on the CG list: "The upper ontology should be organized around fundamental distinctions, from which the various categories and their placement in the hierarchy can be derived automatically. One of the distinctions is between physical and abstract. That distinction covers representations as well as possible individuals that don't really exist, such as unicorns. All types are abstract, whether types of lions or types of unicorns. All actual lions are physical, and any instance of Unicorn, if it were to exist, would also be physical. Similarly, the information in all representations is abstract, and the encoding in any medium is physical. That is an example of how one distinction, high up in the hierarchy, has implications that ripple down throughout the ontology. Unless the distinctions are located at the proper level, redundant copies of similar but subtly different axioms must be repeated in many disparate sections of the hierarchy. And that brings us to another point that I have been making again and again: we should not start by drawing diagrams, but by listing the relevant distinctions. Then at every stage of ontology development, we can push a button to cause some algorithm, such as FCA, to create a hierarchy of categories that shows where each of them is located in terms of the defining distinctions." - J.F. Sowa Back to topic. A known approach to modeling and evolving system is semiotics. One could model a semiotic processor using XML, XSLT, and the parameterising program as the interface to the environment. One gets a recursive process model. Something from my HumanML notes: "If Peirce's ideas that the universe is a sign producer are applied, then in effect, the model includes the environment as well as all semiotes within it. Schematically: |------------------------------------------------------| |Semiote: Global environment | |------------------------------------------------------| | | | +----------------------------+ | | | | | | v | | | |----------------------------| | | | |Semiote: local environment | | | | sign |----------------------------| | | |---+-->| sign ->--+---+ | | | | | Semiote: member | | | | | | | | Semiote: member | | | | | | | |----------------------------| | | | | | | | | | | | +-------------------------------------+ | | | | | | | | +-------------------------+ | | | | | | | |-----------v----------------| | | | |Semiote: local environment | | | | sign |----------------------------| | | |---+-->| sign ->--+--------+ | | | | Semiote: member | | | | | | Semiote: member | | | | | |----------------------------| | | | | | | | +-------------------------------------+ | | | |------------------------------------------------------- We design a class structure for that which can process the structured messages (signs) that are provided in the form of an XML instance. This would incorporate XML technology such as DOM and possibly XSLT as components of the sign processor which itself may be an XML pipeline augmented with a rule processor such as a Schematron engine." len
|
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|