October 3, 2005
Center of Excellence Proposal
à
Communication to a Semantic
Web standards related e-forum
A focused position statement
on the notions that has been briefly discussed here regarding the artificiality
of semantic web ontologies is at [bead 188 and 189]
An upper ontology, if one were to be developed and then used by many communities, would need to have a broad perspective, and not be viewed as a narrow task.
You seem to be unclear about what you are advocating. In one of your presentations you state:
Ontology and Taxonomy Coordinating Working Group
A working group of the Semantic Interoperability
Community of Practice (SICoP)
To assist in the development and
cross-referencing of Knowledge Classification Systems (Ontologies, taxonomies,
thesauri, graphical knowledge representations) by: maintaining on-line
resources where such efforts can share: data; utilities to help create such
resources; and pilot programs to
demonstrate how to use such knowledge classifications for practical purposes To
adopt and extend, as a community, a higher-level ontology that can serve as the
"defining conceptual vocabulary" adequate to specify the meanings of
the terms used within all of the participating communities, and relate the
community terms to each other precisely.
We feel that the core part of your attempt to advocate a common ontology, or upper ontology, is mis-guided. To communicate why we feel that your notion of upper ontology is misguided; I have characterized how we see your advocacy of a standard upper ontology.
The game is a serious one, since we feel that the direction that you are advocating leads to additional failures of the type that AI and Semantic Web efforts have become well known for. There are other legitimate efforts, attempting to accomplish ontological models. These efforts are ignored because of the power that Mitre and the other IT vendors / “think tanks” exercises over the review and funding process. (see {**} ) These efforts have a deep scholarly literature.
The BCNGroup delineates the similarity and differences between the IT/business approach and a specific and well defined alternative approach. The alternative is well represented in a RoadMap that was developed for US Customs in early 2005, but not adopted by them. Part of the reason why the Roadmap was not adopted, in our opinion, is due to the undue influence of business processes on what is, or should be, a science.
My use of the notion of category theory (“sign” in semiotics) reveals the emergence of natural category as a normal and regular phenomenon. The emergence of natural category is a formative process in natural systems.
One can observe that computer science has done its utmost
to ignore and marginalize the natural science about formative processes – where
emergence is the key phenomenon. (see [192] ). The “?this” in your rhetoric [192] is any
phenomenon that has as a regular feature the emergence of natural
category. The formative processes I
have defined as a property of formative and situational ontology is focused on
this type of phenomenon. Vulnerability
structure and functional treats by real natural systems is an example of
phenomenon that have un-expected emergence of new natural kind.
Paul Prueitt
Taos, New Mexico