[topicmapmail] Making ontologies : RDF vs TM

[Marcel Ferrante]

Ops!! I think I deserve this.
I promisse that I will be quiet in the next two days at least while I
digest this.
Thank you, Marcel

On Thu, 07 Oct 2004 15:14:42 +0100, Murray Altheim <m.altheim@open.ac.uk> w=
rote:
> Marcel Ferrante wrote:
> > To maybe help in the ontology question:
> >
> > Ontology [1]
> >    For Philosophy
> >      Ontology is a discipline of Philosophy that deals with what kinds
> > of things exist -
> >      what entities there are in the universe. It is a branch of
> > metaphysics, the study of first
> >      principles or the essence of things.
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> A rather simplistic and outmoded definition that seems to ignore most
> of the past thirty years or so of philosophical investigation. This
> particular definition also ignores the entire branch of philosophy
> that springs from Wittgenstein, Dewey, Sellars, through to Rorty,
> Derrida, etc., i.e., placing our understanding of reality under
> metaphysics rather than social, psychological, political, linguistic
> studies. Few philosophers today think of ontology as under metaphysics.
> For myself, I tend to agree with people like Rorty and Robert Brandom,
> who consider ontology as a way of people expressing themselves, and
> their relationship with others. A social phenomenon. Richard Rorty
> quotes and expands on some ideas of the physicist Arthur Fine in:
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>    A pragmatist view of contemporary analytic philosophy
>    http://www.stanford.edu/~rrorty/pragmatistview.htm
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> basically suggesting that we stop considering some divide between
> the "hard" and "soft" sciences based on some erroneous notion that
> there is an objective reality on the one hand and not the other, and
> look at all of scientific inquiry as a social and humanist endeavour.
>=20
> One of the few benefits of postmodernism was to at least bring to
> light the typical conflation of ideas in past approaches, instead
> looking towards the realistic chaos of holism. But rather than
> discuss what ontology *is* (since I'm on very thin ice anyway),
> perhaps we should first ask what the problem is that ontology is
> suggested as a solution for. [E.g., will creating a large structure
> of fixed categories and then placing everything into those categories
> work? Hasn't this actually turned into a problem in its own right?]
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> But before we proceed, one of the pieces of this puzzle that is
> missing but always assumed is that we can simply "know", that there
> is no filter between reality and how we decide to represent it. In
> the past few years of research I've found hardly the slightest whiff
> of any consideration for epistemological issues when discussing
> "ontologies" within the field of AI/KR or IT. I've heard repeatedly
> (from sources who I think should know better) that we can discover
> the nature of reality by simply "trying harder", improving existing
> techniques, that the platonic notions of such structures are merely
> there to be grokked if we open our eyes and/or improve our tools.
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> >    For Information Science
> >      Working model of entities and interactions in some particular
> > domain of knowledge or
> >      practices, such as electronic commerce.
> >
> > So, we can see, from the ontology definition of Information Science,
> > that is possible make a ontology with XTM. Also is possible construct:
> > indexex, taxonomies, thesaurus, glossaries and semantics network.
>=20
> Yes, this seems patently obvious, but so what? You can build a house
> with wood. The graph structure of Topic Maps (or XTM by extension)
> can be used as a building material for anything that can be built
> with graphs. Same with GXL and RDF. This leads us back to the earlier
> question: what exactly is it we're really trying to build?
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> > And "topic maps are not about the semantic web, but rather about
> > seamless knowledge "
> > Hum, interesting. So the scope is bigger than web. Let's move the
> > focus instead the macro, as web, to the micro, our PC.
>=20
> I'd suggest to stop centering on technology and think about what
> problem one is trying to solve. "Seamless knowledge" is a solution
> for problems where knowledge is not seamless. Like walking into a
> library and not being able to find the resource, or worse yet, finding
> a thousand resources. Now, if one's PC is a mess, perhaps something
> like a Topic Map-based solution could help. Fair enough. This has
> almost nothing to do with the Semantic Web.
>=20
> > I read that next version of windows, longhorn, will has a new file
> > system, winfs, that will be  "Search and Manage Files Based on
> > Content" [1] as they said. They want use XML in the file system.
> > That's interesting. I don't want thing now what they will do with this
> > and web service in the future. But the analogy comes. Knowledge in own
> > PC, organizing files and information with XTM ? Who knows...
>=20
> Only if one reads marketing copy and believes it.
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> Knowledge is not stored within computers, data is. The only way that
> data becomes information, becomes knowledge, is when it can be put to
> good use in the process of learning and discovery. Having XML in a
> file system is nothing new or particularly revolutionary, except from
> the standpoint of developers who can benefit from it in creating more
> seamless applications. It does nothing directly for end users, and
> probably nothing that can't be done with flat files.
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> As both Pat Hayes and John Sowa have correctly been saying for a long
> time, the mode of storage within the system is pretty irrelevant, it's
> what is done with the data, and that hasn't changed much at all within
> the past thirty years. The Semantic Web is doing a poorer version of
> what AI researchers were doing in the early 1970's, just on the nice
> big grand palette of the Web. That is progress in a sense. But our
> understanding and use of research into computation linguistics and
> related fields has not been altered significantly since even the 1960's
> (just gradual, evolutionary improvements in various algorithms, no
> major breakthroughs). This is why we still see Google ignoring metadata
> and using word placement as its means of categorization documents, not
> any sense of "ontology" or meaning. Google doesn't have any sense of
> the meaning of a document at all, and according to computational
> linguistics experts like Stanford's Geoff Nunberg, we're probably at
> least a decade or more away from being able to effectively use anything
> from CL. We still know comparatively little about human language or
> thinking. This hasn't stopped anyone from bandying about the word
> "knowledge" as if it were something you could put in a cup and drink
> (and yes, the institute I'm studying at is just as guilty as anyone).
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> The Semantic Web is a solution in search of a problem. It probably
> is more fruitful to develop tools to solve specific problems. Topic
> Maps were designed as a tool to solve indexing and categorization
> problems, and we're simply finding that the Swiss Army Knife we ended
> up with had a few more blades than first thought. What that strange
> one with the shiny bent hook is for, I dunno. It won't open a bottle
> of wine, maybe it'll seamlessly integrate all of the world's knowledge
> in a way that all human beings can suddenly grasp mutual understanding
> and end all world conflict, and even uncurl Dick Cheney's lip.
>=20
> Sorry. My caffeine ran out halfway through this message. Time to
> head downstairs for another cup...
>=20
> > References:
> > [1] An evaluation of Topic Maps A Master's Thesis in Computational
> > Linguistics G=F6teborg University May 2002 Anna Carlstedt Mats Nordborg
> > [2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnwinfs/html/winfs03112004.=
asp
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> Murray
>=20
> ......................................................................
> Murray Altheim                    http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
> Knowledge Media Institute
> The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK               .
>=20
>    The Rise of Pseudo Fascism -- David Neiwert
>    Part 1: The Morphing of the Conservative Movement
>      http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2004_09_19_dneiwert_archive.html#109028=
353137888956
>    Part 2: The Architecture of Fascism
>      http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2004_09_26_dneiwert_archive.html#109563=
628314780505
>    Part 3: The Pseudo-Fascist Campaign
>      http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2004_10_03_dneiwert_archive.html#109596=
147171278590
>=20


--=20
Marcel Ferrante Silva
Especialista em Engenharia de Sistemas
(31) 88519069 33789069 ICQ:218148957
MSN: marcelferrante@hotmail.com