(Roger L. Costello) writes:
>The namespace of the elements indicates the Ontology. As I mentioned
>earlier, an Ontology can evolve in a distributed fashion. There need
>not be a centralized committee of experts. Besides, even if there was,
>I would argue that creating a centralized committee to create a logical
>design (i.e., an Ontology), and then allowing (encouraging!) diversity
>of physical expressions ain't a bad way to go!
There's still a centralized set of agreed meanings, frequently meanings
with pretensions to truth. That's useful for some situations, a
nuisance for others.
Personally I find such classifications useful when I'm looking for
something (library cataloging) but far less useful when I'm trying to
understand something. Metadata is great stuff, but it's no more a
cure-all than agreed schemas.
>Naturally, you will most likely want to involve domain experts in
>deciding what are the fundamental terms and their relationships.
Not naturally, no. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. Unfortunately,
experts seem frequently to be people who assume everyone should listen
to them, and ontologists seem to fall into the same trap.
There is - or should be - a lot of room for markup applications without
the "Knowledge Technology" claims piling on.
--
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org
