DISQUS

As much as I hate to agree with Kendall, I must say WOOOOHOOO!!!

Kendall
I've been giving a talk lately called the "Two Towers" where I discuss the issue of the different views of ontology. I pretty strongly reject your contention that every would want sound and complete answers (or consistency) if they could only do it. The whole field of hueristic programming shows that to be untrue - rather there are important problems where it is needed, and important ones where it isn't. Further, the requirements needed to get consistency to be meaningful may be restrictive in many cases.
In the talk I point out that both the traditional logic view and the more "small ontologies near the data" view are producing ROI, and the key is to figure out the appropriate things to use for the applications you are building. Your contention that

"By way of comparison, Linked Data and RDF triple store vendors try to make virtue of their vice—they can’t do consistency checking, so they claim no one would ever want or need to do it. As to this tendency, I blame no one. I’d say the same thing, too!"

strikes me as just throwing more confusion onto the fire, and your last paragraph, which actually makes an important point, does it in a pretty condescending way.

Maybe if you'd like people to stop bad=mouthing logic, you could contribute by making the differences clear (as you're doing) without misrepresenting the alternate view or denigrating the alternate approach. Frankly, I think we all win if we make the different strengths clearer, than if we add further confusion to an already blurred messaging.
-JH
p.s. Feel free to check out the slides of my talk at http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~hendler/presentations/Se...