Re: [ontolog] Welcome to new members

[MDaconta@aol.com]

In a message dated 10/31/2002 5:21:35 PM US Mountain Standard Time, michael.f.uschold@boeing.com writes:

>   The use of the term "ambiguity" is often confusing when employed by 
> different communities.  What Mike is getting at I think is that, 
> fundamentally, unless one enumerates all the members of a set, or unless 
> the set is an abstract entity such as an equilateral triangle, there will 
> be ambiguity in the set definition.  For any definition, there will always 
> be "boundary cases" which are not clearly in or out of the set.


I think the issue of boundary cases is interesting.  I am not denying the 
presence of ambiguity ... I think it is that very notion that led to 
reification being part of the RDF spec; however, I would argue that there is 
an acceptable threshold of ambiguity.  In other words, if we can get machines
to do useful things with a simple, narrowly defined vocabulary than we can 
ignore boundary cases that fall outside that vocabulary.  And yes, that means 
a robot using this philosophy will stop and scratch its head (probably getting blown
up due to its hesitation ;-)  ).

In fact, I think it is that exact reason of "utility" that we don't really know how
to use reification.  Do we really want to have to process a potentially infinite 
chain of assertions and come up with a "truth" heuristic?  Heck, no.  So, instead 
we assume statements in our knowledge base our facts and put a data-integrity
process in place to protect them.  An example of this is the TAP project ignoring reification 
(see tap.stanford.edu).  On the other side of the coin, Haystack is attempting to 
use reification to attempt to assess "belief".  A tough problem.

Anyone have any good examples of reification in action?

Talk to you soon,

 - Mike
----------------------------------------------------
Michael C. Daconta
Director, Web & Technology Services
www.mcbrad.com