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Writing and Sharing Data Can be Lightened Up

DAM News Staff

Brown Bag Lunch: ‘Structs’: Naïve Data Formats and the ABox AI3:::Adaptive Information.

Writing and Sharing Data Can be Lightened Up

Ever since I first started to learn in earnest aboutontology, something has been gnawing at me. The term seemed to be (shall I say?) an obtuse one whose obscurity was not the result of subtle precision or technicality, but rather one of fuzziness. As I introduced myIntrepid Guide to Ontologytwo years ago, I noted:

The root of the [ontology] term is the Greekontos, orbeingor thenature of things. Literally and in classical philosophy, ontology was used in relation to the study of the nature of being or the world,the nature of existence.Tom Gruber, among others, made the term popular in relation to computer science and artificial intelligenceabout 15 years agowhen he defined ontology as a “formal specification of a conceptualization.”

Since then, I have continued to find ontology one of the hardest concepts to communicate to clients and quite a muddled mess even as used by practitioners. I have come to the conclusion that this problem is not because I have failed to grasp some ephemeral nuance, but because the term as used in practice is indeed fuzzy and imprecise.

What Isn’t an Ontology?

Even two years ago, I noted more than 40 different types of information structure that have at one time or another been labelled as an example of an “ontology”:

Since then, I could add even more terms to this list.

Lack of precision as to what ontology means has meant that it has been sloppily defined. As I haveharpeduponmanytimes regarding semantic Web terminology, this is a sad state of affairs for the semWeb endeavor that hasmeaning at the core of its purpose.

Continues @http://www.mkbergman.com

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