Friday, December 09, 2005
(new thread on Emergency Medical Ontology Project planning à [home] )
Alan,
From the semantic web Primer
http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/Primer
we have
<quote>
The semantic web can't define in one document what something means. That's
something you can do in English (or occasionally in math) but when we really
communicate using the concept "title", (such in a library of congress
catalog card or a web page), we rely on a shared concept of "title".
On the semantic web, we share quite precisely by using exactly the same URI for
the concept of title.
<end quote>
This reality is the W3C fundamental reality and is the cause of the interest in anonymous individuals. (This is a claim, which may not take every viewpoint into consideration.)
A Goggle on "anonymous individuals" gives us a few eforum discussions.
http://lists.mindswap.org/pipermail/swoop-devel/2005-June/000213.html
being one of them.
To quote the above discussion
<QUOTE>
* RDF parser generates URI's for anonymous individuals in the form
http://<ontology uri>#genid<number>. I've added a function
OWLIndividual.getAnonId() that returns these URI's (function returns
null if isAnonymous() returns false and getURI() function will still
return null for anoymous individuals).
* OWLOntology use these anonid URI's as the key in its map. So
OWLOntology.getIndividual(URI) can be used to retrieve anon
individuals.
(This is not the best choice but it was the easiest to implement)
<END QUOTE>
What this quote suggests, and shows, is that there are instances when one does NOT want the (distant and commonly enforced) URI definition of something (a concept). The issue impacts the local verses global realization of meaning. It is at that point that cognitive neuroscience and perceptual physics literatures might be consulted.
In the quote above from the semantic web primer, we see that the principles commonly understood in the discipline of linguistics is specially violated by the primary assumption made by the W3C definitions and standards. The core violated principle is called double articulation and refers in part to the production of human sound from a small set of phonemes.
http://www.ontologystream.com/aSLIP/files/stratification.htm
And as was pointed out in a ONTAC WG discussion recently, Gerald Edelman's notion of response degeneracy seems vital to the development of ontology about metabolic and gene expression, as well as (we claim) social and environmental expression when "emergence" is involved.
As I point out at:
http://www.ontologystream.com/beads/healthInformatics/7.htm
distributed and fully engineered Internet environment needs to have precise definitions on all ontology elements in order to have a formal construction on which to build engineered web services (for example).
So, the critic I offer here is not about the engineering of a restricted class of web services that are related to very well defined interactions. It seems that the W3C working groups will achieve structural interoperability in this restricted domain.
Human communication can be mediated by "sets of concepts" formulated in some way, similar to how the OASIS Topic Maps standard has been constructed.
In the Topic Map paradigm, the role of topics NOT in the computational space is up front and primary.