Wednesday, May 18, 2005
concept of standardizing unique definitions for words
communication to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jena-dev/
In reading "The Challenge of Knowledge Soap (Sowa, 2004)
http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/challenge.pdf
I followed a familiar and comfortable path.
What John has done here is to develop the history of ontological modeling with proper roots in Western philosophy and foundations of logic and mathematics. It is unfortunately true that few know this history.
My conclusions are different from John's, in that I focus on the cognitive neuroscience and ask for a minimalist representation of knowledge as experienced. This leads to my viewpoints:
http://www.bcngroup.org/area3/pprueitt/kmbook/Preface.htm
and to the Roadmap for semantic technology adoption:
http://www.bcngroup.org/area1/2005beads/GIF/RoadMap.htm
My work is grounded in scientific realism. Not that my work is perfect, it is not. I have been able to put together a model of computational aids for human knowledge experience.
Unfortunately my work is grounded in a literature that even fewer have learned. The Roadmap is one more attempt to get funding to put together a demonstration of ontological modeling based on minimalist representation of concepts.
The "Second School's" position is that, not even, the minimalist representation should stand in for human reasoning.
Given the experiences of the Halo project (as discussed in the paper) the attempts at semantic web reasoning are close to being without worth.
The minimalist representation should serve only as signs to be experienced. That the signs might symbolize real structure over how things happen to occur is where realism steps in. We want real descriptions of how things really work, not illusions like Aristotle's logic (Aristotle's logic is only an illusion when applied outside of its limited domain of applicability).
Sowa's analogy based reasoning is different than any of the forms of inferential entailments, listed as deduction, induction, and abduction. There is a measurement of similarity that is not any of these, but which must come before deduction, induction, or abduction. Do you agree, John?
Moreover, as James Gibson pointed out (1960s) measurement is part of perception and perception and action are entwined.
Dick (Ballard) what is your take on these issues?