On Mar 28, 2009, at 1:54 PM, John F. Madden MD, PhD wrote:
Pat,
I think its fine for the SWeb to include 'weak' semantic links that
don't (yet?) have tight definitions that can support machine
inference, but still convey useful information to users and maybe
even tool developers. (I know saying this runs the risk of opening
the old 'social meaning' can of worms, but those worms aren't going
to go away :-)
If you're willing to run with this a bit, I'd be curious about your
thoughts. Turns out, this theme has been popping up in HCLS a fair
amount recently.
And elsewhere. A few of us spent a whole day discussing it intensely
in Cambridge recently. Increased bandwidth does not however lead to
greater mutual illumination.
Sometimes, it arises in the context of knowledge-capture, viz., how
do you get experts who are not ontology-savvy to disgorge their
knowledge in an ontologically useful way? Here, you might resort to
loose semantics because the skill of the modelers does not support
the precision that is desired. In other words, the knowledge is
actually there and could in principle could be modeled more
elaborately, but demanding precision yields diminishing returns
because amateurish modeling errors proliferate.
Yes, well, you can't expect to get professional results for a whole
ontology this way. But 'loose identity' seems to be a very useful
special case (or maybe cases)
Other times it arises in the context of garden-variety uncertainty:
there is no ripe knowledge to be harvested, just a bunch of hunches
and intuitions. But for a particular community, these hunches and
intuitions might have value. (Usually, they don't have value--and
may even be toxic, in the sense of "large doses may kill you"--for
the world-at-large, because intuitions by their nature rely heavily
on background/contextual understanding.
So, drawing those out is the best way to proceed. Mutual
incomprehension is one way to at least show up such background/
unstated/contextual issues.
guess, is one aspect of 'social meaning'.)
Anyway, the former problem (seems to me) is a human-engineering
problem. If we could figure out cleverer, more assistive modeling
tools and better educational techniques for ontology training, we
might be able to fix it.
Yes, this is what people here call the 'knowledge extraction' game,
getting people experts to say their expertise in a form that it
beginning to be formalizable. We have local experts at this stuff,
they are all psychologists rather than engineers. It is not a fully
automatable skill at present, but they do use software tools to help
them. Also it is _highly_ interactive, done best with teams.
The second problem, I think, could only be helped by keeping these
assertions "inside-the-fence" of the community that had any use for
them. But this is a problem, because the semantic web isn't supposed
to have any fences, i.e. "anybody can say anything about anything".
What to do?
I don't think we need fences around the terminology, just its informal
semantics. But that is easy. So if some community is using
sameProteinAs, and they tell me that it has no formal meaning but they
find it useful, then what's the harm in that? If I can grok their
(informal) semantics, I can maybe use it in ways that they will find
useful, which is fine. We still get the (not especially semantic, but
Webbish) advantages of IRIs being globally unique and providing access
to source documents, etc..
I've been hoping that Named Graphs would solve this problem. I'm
curious if you think NG's can support this use case of segregating
potentially toxic 'knowledge' on the SW.
It would allow one ontology to say explicilty that some other ontology
isn't for public use, or something similar. But in the case we are
talking about, surely we wouldn't have a genuine ontology to say such
bad things about, right?
Pat
The other solution I can think of is the solution that enterprises
use for privacy: set up private webs, intranets, yadda yadda. Which
seems scary.
John
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