Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Lattice of ontologies
Function/structure descriptions
From the Protégé OWL forum discussion
Andrea,
Thank you for your thoughtful note.
This discussion will not go on for long, so please I hope
everyone who is offended by this please just delete. You have more important things to do.
Here the issue with computer science is that it is the
only community that is defining modern IT.
So a divergence between IT standards, like W3C, and
natural science is not the same as two communities of natural scientists, or
political camps being in disagreement.
Computer science wants to be to modern information theory
like mathematics is to engineering.
But as long as there is a high degree of inflexibility in
how computer science presents itself, then the problem is that the other
communities (like the medical community) is forced to accept what ever is
created. But the inflexibility itself
comes from the foundational issues that Church, Turing and Godel addressed -
and these have to do with representation of completeness of description and
consistency over logical inferences.
Jay Forrester concept of complexity is very close to
Robert Rosen's, in that a natural system and a complex system as "same
as".
I talk about this at:
http://www.bcngroup.org/area3/pprueitt/kmbook/Chapter2.htm
Forrester was into general systems theory and developed a
number of heuristics that opens up the formalism so that computer human
interaction could be complex - because the human was supplying inputs at those
points where the computer would reach a halting condition.
As to the relevance to this notion of natural complexity,
the anonymous individual is one way to put a symbol in place that can allow a
late binding of the meaning to be given that symbol.
right?
Paul