New paths for subject identity? RE: [topicmapmail] Making ontologies : RDF vs TM

[Bernard Vatant]

Murray

> ... Early libraries tried to create a whole
> bunch of categories, then assign each book to a category. It was
> rather quickly discovered that these fixed categories didn't work
> very well for the real world, that almost nothing is *about* a
> single subject, that the whole idea of "about" is very context-based.

Very much agreed ...

> So when in computing, say as in RDF, we see "rdf:about", or in Topic
> Maps we see "subjectIndicatorRef", we should be very suspicious, or
> at least very careful. Nothing has or is just one subject. The
> statement of subject-hood is contextual.

Ditto. Along those lines, I've been questioning lately here in an exchange with Lars
Marius the "absolute" relevancy of subject indicators, IOW what are the relevant contexts
in which subject indicators can/should be used for identification?
See http://www.infoloom.com/pipermail/topicmapmail/2004q4/006277.html

Identity in context, or identification as a process, are also the current lines of thought
at
http://universimmedia.blogspot.com/
that I set two months ago to gather reflection about identification issues (independently
of any specific technology).

> This is what I mean when the whole idea of identity has become a
> problem in its own right. If you Google on "nicola guarino identity"
> you'll find a number of important documents [1][2] on the subject,
> written by one of the few people in the field I trust on this topic.

I would also quote Pat Hayes here, with whom quite a while ago, towards the end of the OWL
standardization process, I had some private exchanges where he expressed that the identity
issue was a core question and "sadly overlooked" (by RDF-OWL specification among others).

> And then I'm still not sure he's got it right. It's a really tough
> epistemological problem. I don't know that it's ideally solvable,
> perhaps only pragmatically (and I also mean Pragmatically) solvable.
> The problem is again, what to do about context? It's recursive.

Yes. If identification needs a context, then how do you *identify the context*? Jack Park
pushed to me lately some authors who go as far as to say that, in general, the fact that
two things are identical (read, the identity of a subject) is formally undecidable.
http://universimmedia.blogspot.com/2004/10/more-things-change-more-they-are-same.html

If we follow those tracks, yes, identity can only be established on a pragmatic basis. IOW
there are effective ways to agree on process of identification in a given context, but no
universal way to assert the identity of something (or someone). For example, there are
many contexts in which I can be identified by various identifiers and protocols (email
address, phone number, credit card number, welfare number, passport number ...) but I
figure that none of those, or any other, can pretend to carry "my identity" (not even my
fully decrypted DNA) in *any context*.

<skip/>

> So the only way I can see to deal with this is to simply stop categorizing,
> stop defining, and begin to look at processes of categorizing, processes
> of defining. It's the processes that we need to focus on.

This has been the succesful approach of Quantum Mechanics in Physics: be agnostic about
the existence of entities out there in the physical world, focus on measure protocols.
That's why I've been much impressed by the approach developed lately here by Lutz on
"Subject Identity Measure". See the identification protocols the same way as measure
protocols in certainly the way forward.

Unfortunately no time now to comment further on ...

Cheers

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Bernard Vatant
Senior Consultant
Knowledge Engineering
bernard.vatant@mondeca.com

"Making Sense of Content" :  http://www.mondeca.com
"Everything is a Subject" :  http://universimmedia.blogspot.com

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