Thursday, December 08, 2005
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Communication from John Sowa
It is extremely difficult to get any kind of consensus among experts in the ontology field. Trying to do anything at all with volunteers who can't even spell the word "ontology" is worse than useless.
It's been tried with volunteers by the MIT Media Lab, and nothing of any value was obtained. A lot of entries were produced, but the quality was extremely uneven, and there was no way of sifting the good stuff, if any, from the garbage. But even if all the contributions were good, there was no consistency at all in assumptions, formatting, etc.
This is nothing like the SETI project, where the only thing that volunteers had to do was download a program and go to sleep while it ran.
Second, doing anything like this on a 30-day time frame is hopeless. Even if a perfect ontology were available, writing the software to make it work would take years, and many more years to install it around the world in every place where it needs to run.
Third, I was watching a documentary about the problems of monitoring any outbreak of bird flu in Southeast Asia, which is the most likely place for a pandemic to originate.
In Cambodia, for example, the "hot line" for reporting such events is one physician's cell phone. More telephones at the center wouldn't help much, because there are almost no telephones at all in the countryside, where contact with poultry is the highest.
John Sowa