Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Lattice of ontologies
Function/structure descriptions
From the Protégé OWL forum discussion
Hi Paul,
I don't know if I got the point of your post, but it seems like you are issuing some (helpful, imo) philosophical or social claims about the way computer scientists (not only the Protégé community, as far as I understood) organize their lexicon and their work.
Well, I don't realize what exactly this has to do with anonymous individuals, or the way anonymous individuals are defined by W3C.
Anyway, I think it's normal that different communities assign different names to the same entities, or that the same name designates two different entities in the language used by different communities. I don't think it is feasible to universally agree upon names and metaphors. It's just a matter of context, and the world is made of different, independent contexts, you must be aware of. Unfortunately, they are often in disagreement...
Take the definition of "nominal" as an example, but the same applies to the definition of "complexity" you talk about.
In System Dynamics, which had originally more to do with mathematics than with computer science and was brought to computer science only in the 60s by prof. Jay Forrester at MIT, "complex" systems have still another definition than the one you cite in the post about Rosen (though related, if you carefully read the last paragraphs).So, exactly, what's the problem?
Best regards,
Andrea