Communications on a
National Project
Next-Wave Publishing, Part 3: Revolution in Context –
Seybold Publications Vol 3, Number 23
Posted for Scholarly Review Only
3/12/2004 2:40 PM
Sandy,
Thanks for sharing John Sowa's
comments. (feel free to post this response as well...)
John Sowa seems to imply that any
semantic-form endeavor really boils down to nothing-but-language (hence, his
references to Russell and Wittgenstein and logical positivists -- heck, why not
throw in Godel as well), and that language only gets to precision when it's
"legislated" so.
Philosophical issues are always
worth chewing on. But that last point about agreeing to agree as the basis for
precision is an interesting one. For Sowa, I believe, achieving a rigorous
synthesis and fundamental shared agreement about knowledge representation is
the path forward.
Here, it seems to me that Sowa and
Ballard both agree that something like the Peirce-Sowa-Ballard synthesis should
be (universally) adopted to help anchor ontology endeavors and facilitate their
integration.
Given this framework as the point
of convergence, where's the beef?
From Sowa's perspective, Ballard is doing what John said was possible --
starting from a mutually agreed framework (namely, Sowa's).
Ballard, meanwhile, is applying
this framework and taking the next step to prove empirically the merits of
semantic-form knowledge representation and declarative computing through
engineering rather than philosophical dialectic. In 2-3 years, we'll have the
evidence. I suspect they'll both be happy.
Given "community agreement on
context" (for example process semantics, XML-based standards, etc.), Sandy
Klausner's work demonstrates great promise for unifying the IT process paradigm
all the way down to the hardware, and out across the swarms of network devices
and services. It deserves serious attention. Indeed, I'd be curious what John
Sowa would think about the CoreTalk context computing environment.
As you know, my goal writing the
Seybold series has been to help push semantic technologies towards the
mainstream and from there to stimulate growth of knowledge industries. To this
end, all criticism is helpful. Thank John for me. It's refreshing to be called
"starry-eyed" and taken to task for possibly uttering
"logical" or "linguistic" impossibilities. It is part of
the semantic revolution. We have much to learn from each other.
Mills