Re: Typing: was Re: DBpedia as possible project

On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 2:09 AM, Andrew S. Townley <[email protected]> wrote:
> Sometimes the classifications are temporal, sometimes they're physical,
> sometimes there based on shared perspectives, communities or other
> forms of context.  Saying we must choose one or the other seriously limits
> the things we can do with any information set.  I just think that being exact
> requires a bit more than creating a distinction between things like "type"
> and "role type" and that there's a good bit of work to be done (and mistakes
> to be made) trying to nail down exactly what this sort of thing looks like.

So, you're saying ontology work is hard. :)

I think parts of this discussion is the difference between *a* model
and *the* model; there simply are too many ways to model anything, and
so in order to actually be productive (vs. being correct) we make lots
of compromises, hoping that we make just enough to be useful without
overdoing it.

When I look for ontologies, I always go by my gut instinct at several
levels; would this ontology be easy for me to use, easy for my users
to understand, does it "feel" right (ie. match some arbitrary
philosophy in my head about how to model the world), is it much used,
is it made by seemingly smart people, and so on. Every single
evaluation I make is a compromise somewhere, either directly for me or
me doing it for whoever use my systems. It's a lot more organic than
what we like to admit.

But we can take this even further and look at the underlying basics
for all modelling (at least in the TM / RDF world) ; entities and
relationships. There's this thing, and it has properties, and some of
those properties can point to other entities, the recursive
key-value-tree trifecta, the most delicious cake we've had in the last
30 or so years. But is this the good enough to model *our* world?

And what about those pesky subject identifiers? We talk a lot about
them and how we use them. In my early TM days I spoke a lot about how
TM simulates the way the brain works, but that was an adolescent
insight that I now know is quite untrue. How does the brain deal with
any situation? It doesn't have a subject identifier for every object
and concept at all, it deals only in conceptual categories of
familiarities, and derive identity from that. There isn't a subject
identifier each for me and my chair and my computer and the room I'm
in or the lovely beach outside my window, but one identifier for the
whole scene where the whole and parts of it are all merge into this
one big situation concept (or identifier, if you will) in which the
brain recognizes familiarities, and (re)act accordingly.

So the question becomes; can we still rely on our TM way of subject
identification? I'm not so sure. Things change. And here's the catch;
the more you describe that thing, the more you try to pin it down its
definition, the less likely it is for that thing to fit whatever thing
you need in what you're modelling. And the less likely it is that that
model truly represents reality, so there's a whole scale of inherit
dis-ambiguity that you need to have in mind when you knowingly have to
make a million compromises while modelling.

To what degree do we need things to be correct vs. useful? And, in the
end, is it useful that things aren't correct?


Regards,

Alex
-- 
 Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
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