Re: Is Identity in the eye of the beholder?

John Black — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 15:08:51 -0000

I think this is true. More and more people are saying this: Identity (and meaning as well) are in Agents[1] and are context dependent. I now think all ontologies are personal and are, in fact, problem specific. I have been trying to think through a system without "class" or "type" - only properties. Any notion of "concept" or "class" or "type" could only be calculated on ad hoc on the basis of a sample of items with similar properties. Such ephemeral "concepts" could be shattered at any moment by the addition of incompatible properties - only to be replaced momentarily with a new set of "classes" that fit the new dataset.

1. http://kashori.com/2004/12/it-takes-agent-to-be...

Re: Dark side of the semantic web

John Black — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 09:12:57 -0000

I agree here with Phil. And I'm glad he spotted those statements in Jim Hendler's article and pointed them out to us.

I believe this is the major problem remaining to be solved for the semantic web. Sure, you can mint any URI, and by definition of the formal system - whatever it is that is denoted by that URI by me shall be the very same concept that is denoted by you. The problem is that it is still necessary for me to communicate to you and our machines, unambiguously if possible, what exactly I intend to denote by that URI. How am I supposed to do that? Our if I am the audience, how am I supposed to know how to interpret that URI so that I understand the same concept you had when you published it?

And its not just a matter of mistakes, carelessness, or incompetence. Nor is it really a failing of URIs or RDF. The real problem is that the world itself does not come neatly divided into conceptual categories. It presents as a very nearly continuous whole, and we each parse it up as best we can, depending on our context, or history, and many other factors. I have posted about this before, It Takes an Agent to be Semantic. Before we can really use that URI to communicate then, we must somehow bring our interpretations into alignment, we must establish a common ground of interpretation. I have proposed an proposed an approach to this in Creating a Common Ground for URI Meaning. Lately I've come to think of common ground as synonymous with utterance (or statement) context and now think that the meaning of a URI is its location in the context of the semantic web

What I'm looking for now is how to represent this context of common ground in OWL. I'm trying to build an ontology of context.

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Re: Is Identity in the eye of the beholder?

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