Discussion at ONTAC forum

ONTAC stands for Ontology and Taxonomy Coordinating Working Group

It is a working group of

Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP)

Communication from John Sowa regarding participation in the ONTAC working group

(comments in italics)

Paul,

Unfortunately, you are perceived by some people as alienating everybody. I received an offline note, which I have copied below (leaving out the names).

< Note from unnamed person: >

Following is my position:

1. I sympathize with some of the points that you are making, but the way you state them tends to alienate many people who might be sympathetic. (Paul: And how are these points supposed to be made? Where is the forum, if not here? )

2. Although I believe that that the broader goal of a National Project could be valuable, there is no prayer of a hope of anything like that being funded under the Bush administration. (Paul: the planning is long term, started before the Clinton Administration, and will be here after this correct president is gone. However, there is a relationship between what I propose and the scientific notions associated with “intelligent design”. )

3. Meanwhile, the ONTAC group is addressing a problem that is very serious: there are billions of dollars worth of legacy software that needs to communicate across the Semantic Web and related systems, and standards are necessary. (Paul: One of the points is that certain viewpoints that are not productive persist. Specially the notions that the Chair of this working group repeats over and over again regarding having a single large fixed common ontology that acts as a Tsar. I wonder if he is the unnamed person? )

4. Working on that is not going to solve the ultimate problem of understanding intelligence. But it is a practical problem, and working on a serious practical problem is not a lie.

5. Meanwhile, the ONTAC forum is *not* addressing the broader issues of artificial intelligence or anything that even remotely sounds like Cyc. The people who are tuned in to that group mostly regard Cyc as an interesting failure -- much as I do. And further complaints about AI are not going to be considered useful, especially since this group is not really doing AI. (In the very next message, it is suggested that the working group invite Cyc Corp founder, Doug Lenat to receive his guidance. In this message – from Gary Berg-Cross (certain someone of importance in the working group and whom has very excellent contributions to make. I agree that Lenat’s work should be looked at to understand lessons learned.

)

Message from Gary :

The round of topics exposed by the forum discussions since our first meeting have been interesting, but convergence is hard to judge. To help converge towards a consensus based on a focused exploration of the issues I wonder if we can set up a panel (or two) on the issues at the next ONTAC meeting. If I recall right we will have Doug Lenat for a CYC briefing. That might be an opportunity to ask him about hub versus John Sowa’s idea to:

“Shift attention from the unsolvable problem
of building, merging, and coordinating global world views to
the task of developing an open-ended collection of modules
that can be selected, assembled, and tailored for particular
tasks or collections of tasks.”

But in addition to having some focused questions for Doug (and we must get Doug’s agreement and cooperation on this, we don’t want to surprise him in any unfair way), a we might have a follow on panel with John, Barry, West and others who have well formed positions on this and a selected group of related topics such as the role of upper ontologies, lattices, standard vocabulary etc. (if we can constrain this it might help get some consensus, however, we need to be as inclusive as the topic requires).

I'm sorry. I wish I could say something more helpful, but that's the way it is.

John

_______________________________________________

Note from unnamed person:

Now that we have had several postings from Paul Prueitt, it should be clear that he does not intend to make any constructive contributions to our efforts, but to use the list as yet another soapbox for his peculiar views, which he has been proselytizing for years. I am concerned that excessive postings of that kind will lead ONTACWG participants to think that this is normal content for the list, and cause people who could make valuable contributions to drop out in disgust. We have already had several people drop out because of excessive email, though not in the last few days. I think that the best tactic will be to not reply to any of his postings, even if they seem to deal with relevant topics, such as the content of the ontologies we are dealing with.

From what I have seen, the discussion will not be productive. I know it can be very difficult to not respond to assertions that seem misinformed, especially when they deal with topics and projects with which we have been working for a long time.

I just doubt that responses to him will help our project. And I don't think that unchallenged assertions by him will mislead anyone in our group. I am not in any way suggesting that anyone not post comments that they feel may advance our goals.

As an example of the type of content PSP puts on his blog, the following is typical:

http://www.ontologystream.com/beads/nationalDebate/218.htm