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Subject:Looking for Ontologists From:Bruce Conway <bconway -at- ISLAND -dot- NET> Date:Thu, 4 Feb 1999 14:19:28 -0800
I know I'll get over this eventually, but .....
Here's the link to the article I rambled about in the last email. There
are even "private ontologies" and "community ontologies".
I think I might write an article and talk about the "escapilation of
community ontologies". (Escapilation does not exist, so put
the Oxford away). I'm also wondering why "ontologies" is italicized. http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/papers/xml/ascent-of-xml.html
The closest other possible word I can think of, from Linguistics 100 is
"orthography", but that simply means spelling.
Here's a couple of quotes from the article itself. (Are we allowed to snip
out quotes - I didn't see any copyright notice, then again,
ignorance, or being too lazy to check properly, is no defense [defence for
you Brits]).
<start quotes> [I coded this in BML (the Bruce [that's me] Markup
Language)].
<quote numero uno>
XML makes it cost-effective to capture community ontologies as Document
Type Definitions to decentralize the control of specialized markup
languages. The emergence of richly annotated data structures catalyzes new
applications for storing, sharing, and processing ideas.
<quote numero due>
An ontology codifies the concepts that are noteworthy to a community so
that everyone has a common level of understanding upon which future
knowledge exchange can proceed. The reverse phenomenon is equally powerful:
mastery of the jargon confers membership in the community. In this sense,
community recapitulates ontology, but the tools to express private
agreements have been late in coming. Communities are mirrored by ontology:
when a large community has to use a single ontology, its value is diluted
to the least common denominator (as exemplified by HTML itself).
<end quotes>
And here's the eschatocol:
(OK, I'll stop reading the dictionary, as soon as someone hires me to do
something more useful).
Bruce Conway -Technical Writer,
Pacific Online Publishing
Victoria, BC
bconway -at- island -dot- net
