Calling all Information Scientists

The more I think I understand the scope of the project, the less interested I become. Is there a need for my computer to "understand" beer? Your example relating Alts, Weissbiers, and IPAs is silly to me. Since we all have the cognitive ability to innately understand that relationship, why would I have to (or want to) quantify and prove it?

podz said:

It's not strictly hierarchical; there can be relations between branches.

For example, Alt would be in the ale branch but related to lager because of how it's made. With an ontology loaded into a semantic reasoner, there would thus be a way to mathematically compute that Alt is closer to Weissbier than IPA is. I mean, as a person with a brain we know this via our innate cognitive abilities but computers have no cognitive abilities - they need ontologies and semantic reasoning algorithms in order to derive relationships and form conclusions.

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Understood.

Computers don't drink beer.

Are we really so confused by beer that we need a formal (impossible?) ontology?

I understand Ars Gratia Artis, but I can't see how this improves my enjoyment of or making of beer.

Sounds like something the Gov. would waste millons on in grant money to prove that all beer has water, yeast hops, and barley. A lot of time to relate beers, that share one or more ingredients are similar, who knew.

podz said:

It's not strictly hierarchical; there can be relations between branches.

For example, Alt would be in the ale branch but related to lager because of how it's made. With an ontology loaded into a semantic reasoner, there would thus be a way to mathematically compute that Alt is closer to Weissbier than IPA is. I mean, as a person with a brain we know this via our innate cognitive abilities but computers have no cognitive abilities - they need ontologies and semantic reasoning algorithms in order to derive relationships and form conclusions.

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Oh, wait, you mean like this:

biochemedic said:

Oh, wait, you mean like this:

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Great there goes the grant money.

Yuri_Rage said:

The more I think I understand the scope of the project, the less interested I become. Is there a need for my computer to "understand" beer? Your example relating Alts, Weissbiers, and IPAs is silly to me. Since we all have the cognitive ability to innately understand that relationship, why would I have to (or want to) quantify and prove it?

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Yeah, I didn't suggest this project, just explained what they are trying to do and gave an example of the tools to use and how to go about getting started.

That said, don't imagine that something is useless just because it's obvious to you and you can't see a use case. I can easily imagine, for example, medicine evolving to the point where we rely less and less on chemicals and a sick person gets a blood test taken and the calculated prescription is to have a weissbier, pomegranate juice, and almonds each day for a month in order to correct such and such dietary deficiencies.

Having ontologies in place just lays the building blocks for further research and gives the ability to interpolate and understand different types of things. Just because you understand beer doesn't mean that you understand fruits, nuts, or nutrition (maybe you do). Somebody might have a need to understand all four of those things while doing geographical and ethnic interpolation in order to figure out why people are sick even though they follow government eating guidelines.

Strictly regarding creating a beer ontology: somebody will do it anyway. And they might even patent it and put heavy restrictions on it's usage. Unless some group does it first and makes it open source. That might be the best reason to be interested in this project.

podz said:

Strictly regarding creating a beer ontology: somebody will do it anyway. And they might even patent it and put heavy restrictions on it's usage. Unless some group does it first and makes it open source. That might be the best reason to be interested in this project.

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In all earnestness, why I should be concerned about somebody patenting a beer ontology? It's not as if there's a right answer here. It'd just be a list of descriptors that some dude decided were important.

Heck, the BeerSmith library format is a (presumably) patented beer ontology. It's not really standing in the way of my doing anything with beer.

beerxml.

end of project.


ontology!!!1

it is impossible. As has been said before. Quantifying a perception is impossible for any but the individual.

TwoRiders said:

it is impossible. As has been said before. Quantifying a perception is impossible for any but the individual.

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OH DEAR GOD, PLEASE DON"T TELL THE BJCP, OR THEY"LL BE OUT OF WORK!!!1111

I keed, I keed,
But in seriousness, it's not impossible (or even highly improbable). With a specific enough framework, it can be done.

Here's why you'd want to do it - A) because you can B) because it's there and C) because it would help provide a framework for the building and judging of beers in a stricter manner, preventing some 'sloppiness' in the formulation of judging and recipe building.

How you do it is by relating certain characteristics to certain styles - e.g. wit- type of: beer made of: wheat malt, barley malt, blah blah blah
has characteristics of: blah blah blah
has components: xyz esters, foo malt profile, bar alcohol content

I'm probably not doing the best job explaining it, but if you approach the problem rigorously, you can form a pretty good ontology. Once you have the framework, you can do fun stuff like: "I want xyz flavor profile". And get an answer like "use foo malt bill, with bar hop schedule, and baz yeast type".

Anyhoo, food (or beer) for thought...

jrubins said:

I'm probably not doing the best job explaining it, but if you approach the problem rigorously, you can form a pretty good ontology. Once you have the framework, you can do fun stuff like: "I want xyz flavor profile". And get an answer like "use foo malt bill, with bar hop schedule, and baz yeast type".

Anyhoo, food (or beer) for thought...

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Here's a much more modest ambition than the one described here: start a thread and see if you can get everyone to agree on a set of terms that describe what Simcoe tastes like -- objectively, unambiguously, and exhaustively.

If you can't do it (and, to be blunt, I'll bet you can't), the sheer insanity of trying to formalize the perception of beer in its entirety should be obvious.

MalFet said:

Here's a much more modest ambition than the one described here: start a thread and see if you can get everyone to agree on a set of terms that describe what Simcoe tastes like -- objectively, unambiguously, and exhaustively.

If you can't do it (and, to be blunt, I'll bet you can't), the sheer insanity of trying to formalize the perception of beer in its entirety should be obvious.

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I think Simcoe smells like a bunch of cats got high and then pissed on a pine tree. Can we put that in the ontology? :cross:

AmandaK said:

I think Simcoe smells like a bunch of cats got high and then pissed on a pine tree. Can we put that in the ontology? :cross:

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Maybe Malfet is wrong, because I agree 100% with that.

I have no clue what any of you people are talking about.

Is there a need for my computer to "understand" beer? Your example relating Alts, Weissbiers, and IPAs is silly to me. Since we all have the cognitive ability to innately understand that relationship, why would I have to (or want to) quantify and prove it?

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Because it is research, and this is how we learn to make new and interesting things. Just because something doesn't seem interesting to you doesn't mean it has no utility.

Oh, wait, you mean like this:

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Nope, that's just a confusing representation of a taxonomy.

beerxml.

end of project.

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Very no... BeerXML is a data interchange standard, but thanks to this comment I have added BeerXML mapping to the project. I'm not a huge fan of how they represented units of measure in the standard, and they do rely a lot on text in tag contents rather than attributes, but those things can be accommodated. A proposed beer ontology could respond to queries in a beerXML way where that makes sense.

I think Simcoe smells like a bunch of cats got high and then pissed on a pine tree. Can we put that in the ontology?

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No facts are invalid

Protege is open source and pretty much the de-facto tool for modeling ontologies. It's written in java, so it runs on any machine. You can export your ontologies for import into semantic reasoners such as Apache Stanbol.

I would roughly start with something like this:


thing -> liquid -> beverage -> grain -> fermented -> (branch) top | bottom -> blah

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I'm very much familiar with protege, but my personal tool of choice is TopBraid Composer. I know a lot of OWL purists dismiss it as being to RDF-y, but I chalk that up to the sectarianism that still runs rampant through the semantic tech community.

For tools, here's what I'm thinking:
1.) TopBraid composer (free edition, not open source) to model and output in TTL formatted OWL2.
2.) Pellet 2.8 reasoner (open source)
3.) Stardog RDF store (closed-source, but I think I can score an open source project license for it).
4.) Surface everything to the public using Semantic Media Wiki.

Using an RDF store at all is debatable, but Stardog has Pellet embedded so you get a twofer.

As for the ontology itself, I'll probably propose factoring it into chunks. Since we are talking about one knowledge domain (for now), I also think we can short circuit a lot of stuff so long as we link interesting LOD sources (dbpedia, geonames, etc).

Thoughts?
-b

jrubins said:

OH DEAR GOD, PLEASE DON"T TELL THE BJCP, OR THEY"LL BE OUT OF WORK!!!1111

I keed, I keed,
But in seriousness, it's not impossible (or even highly improbable). With a specific enough framework, it can be done.

Here's why you'd want to do it - A) because you can B) because it's there and C) because it would help provide a framework for the building and judging of beers in a stricter manner, preventing some 'sloppiness' in the formulation of judging and recipe building.

How you do it is by relating certain characteristics to certain styles - e.g. wit- type of: beer made of: wheat malt, barley malt, blah blah blah
has characteristics of: blah blah blah
has components: xyz esters, foo malt profile, bar alcohol content

I'm probably not doing the best job explaining it, but if you approach the problem rigorously, you can form a pretty good ontology. Once you have the framework, you can do fun stuff like: "I want xyz flavor profile". And get an answer like "use foo malt bill, with bar hop schedule, and baz yeast type".

Anyhoo, food (or beer) for thought...

Click to expand...

Beer is to unrestrained and to fluid(pardon the pun) to do something like this with. Wine which is being used as the example has been elitized and is only recently begun to come down to the masses (past 15-20 years or so). SO it has been tightly controlled and quantified using judgement scales that were predetermined by a governing body.

With Beer styles being built and changed on a weekly basis it is almost impossible to do this project unless everything is frozen and the project has a base to start with. Besides the fact the interpretations of beers are dependent on geographic location and water type.

Can it be done? Yes
But it's going to take input from EVERYONE involved in beer creation and judgement as well as some consumers.

SO the scope of the project is MASSIVE, so maybe saying Impossible is harsh but it is a scope of work so large I would just open another homebrew and leave it be.

I'm waiting for the black ipa class to be created.

Or, is it the cascadian black ale?

motobrewer said:

I'm waiting for the black ipa class to be created.

Or, is it the cascadian black ale?

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I want the 'American Sour' category.

Ok Wittgenstein (just kidding).

How about you post a very small example of what you're describing? Doesn't have to be the whole finished work, but a small subset would help everyone visualize what you're working on.

Or, even an example from another field (accessible to those of us not named Russell or Frege) would help. I sense that a lot of us have no way to picture what you're trying to accomplish.

blakelyc said:

Because it is research, and this is how we learn to make new and interesting things. Just because something doesn't seem interesting to you doesn't mean it has no utility.

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Example(s)?

When I first read about your concept, I got the idea that an ontology was a human readable quantification of vague concepts. That would be VERY interesting. Now I think I understand that an ontology is a complicated word for what appears to be a database-type structure. "Reading" it would be an exercise in tedium.

If the utility is to make software capable of "understanding" ingredients and styles, that software would be pretty useless. A computer could certainly be made to create a style-perfect recipe, but homebrew recipes have few enough ingredients that a basic understanding of the process should give the brewer a very good idea of how that recipe will turn out. Computer validation of the concept is unnecessary.

Milan37 said:

How about you post a very small example of what you're describing?

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This, too.

I am with Yuri, I don't know how this differs from a database?

Here's an example of the term "meal" in SUMO (something-or-other Upper Merged Ontology)

http://sigma-01.cim3.net:8080/sigma/Browse.jsp?kb=SUMO&lang=EnglishLanguage&flang=SUO-KIF&term=Meal

and one for beer
http://sigma-01.cim3.net:8080/sigma/Browse.jsp?lang=EnglishLanguage&flang=SUO-KIF&kb=SUMO&term=Beer
(though, the beer one isn't as good an entry as the meal entry)

When I first read about your concept, I got the idea that an ontology was a human readable quantification of vague concepts. That would be VERY interesting. Now I think I understand that an ontology is a complicated word for what appears to be a database-type structure. "Reading" it would be an exercise in tedium.

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Not in this case, though I suppose it could be. You can use an ontology for lots of different things, for instance trip advisor uses an ontology to relate concepts together and uses those concepts to determine what are the most relevant reviews for you - e.g. I care about beds at hotels having itchy sheets. That's a specific term for a less specific concept (comfort). That less specific concept can be mapped to a review that says "the beds at hotel Fubar aren't comfortable". Trip advisor takes that info and says that review is about topic = comfort, and I find reviews where topic = comfort to be the most useful reviews.

An ontology is a structured method of representing information, so in that sense it is like a database, and when well done it can be used to 'lookup' information. Unlike a database it can show a variety of different connections between nodes.
E.g
Cat, descendant = kitten, opposite = dog, type of = mammal
Now you can look up mammal and see it's a type of = animal, has characteristics of = warm blooded, hairy, etc
Examples of = cat, dog, monkey, human

So, know you know that cats and humans are warm blooded! Better yet, you're computer can know! So now, if you want to know "hey computer, are dogs warm-blooded" your computer can say "Yes, Dave, they are".

In beer-land that means you can do fun things like asking your computer
"I've got a beer that's pale with a bajillion IBUs, what class is that?" and the computer will say "sounds like an IPA, homeboy".
Or maybe you can say "I want an IPA, what are the characteristics?" and the computer will say "you need light malt flavor, medium to strong alcohol content, and a bajillion IBUs" to which you respond, "sweet, thanks computer. How do I get that bajillion IBUs?" and the computer says "3 pounds of hops". "Great," you say "what if I want those IBUs to come with the flavor of psychedelic cat pee?". The computer will then say "you'll need 3 lbs of Simcoe, Dave".

And there you go.

As for the quantification of psychological phenomena, that certainly *could* be part of this project, but I think what Blakelyc is going for is building the framework, to which you could then add:
Simcoe, type of = hops, bitterness = 3 IBU per oz, AAC = 5%, flavor of = psychedelic cat urine

But the quantification of perceptual phenomenon is a whole 'nother branch of science called Psychometrics or Psychophysics ....

jrubins said:

Here's an example of the term "meal" in SUMO ....

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Those are great examples. The take-away here (for me) is that if you ever want anything to represent "artificial intelligence", you have to be able to parse and classify the question, and this ontology is a way of organizing data to allow the AI to work.

Unfortunately, we all know that we are working our way towards the AI self-realization, when flesh is deprecated for machine. To continue the narrative from above...

"Open the pod bay doors."
"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."​

jrubins said:

An ontology is a structured method of representing information, so in that sense it is like a database, and when well done it can be used to 'lookup' information. Unlike a database it can show a variety of different connections between nodes.
E.g
Cat, descendant = kitten, opposite = dog, type of = mammal
Now you can look up mammal and see it's a type of = animal, has characteristics of = warm blooded, hairy, etc
Examples of = cat, dog, monkey, human

So, know you know that cats and humans are warm blooded! Better yet, you're computer can know! So now, if you want to know "hey computer, are dogs warm-blooded" your computer can say "Yes, Dave, they are".

Click to expand...

Thanks for the examples!

The human experience of semantics doesn't work like this, though, as AI researchers learned very painfully early on. We don't rely on intensional definitions to identify things in the world but rather encounter them as conceptual wholes.

You might go ahead and define a cat as the fuzzy, four-legged, mouse-chasing thing, but it will still be a cat (and it will still be recognizable as a cat to humans) if you shaved it, cut off its legs, and trained it to fear rodents. Likewise, it's nearly impossible to come up with a procedural definition of "chair" that accurately identifies even 80% of chairs. Nevertheless, you can stick any average toddler in a room and he'll show you all the cats and all the chairs without the slightest hesitation.

The BJCP guide is vague because it needs to be vague. It is trying to hint at the characteristics of a perceptual whole, not define unambiguous criteria for set membership. If we were to create hard classification rules for beer styles, they would collapse as soon as they hit real world data.

One use for this would be to give a computer the ability to formulate beer recipes for different styles.

You could ask the computer for an IPA, APA, Wheat or what have you and it could give you a reasonable recipe.

The usefulness of this would be beyond the immediate recipe formulation and more into what combinations/permutations of ingredients haven't been tried yet that may produce a good beer.

MalFet said:

The BJCP guide is vague because it needs to be vague. It is trying to hint at the characteristics of a perceptual whole, not define unambiguous criteria for set membership. If we were to create hard classification rules for beer styles, they would collapse as soon as they hit real world data.

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With the wild diversity of life on this planet, you'd think the same would be true of biological classification. Yet, is is done. I would think that beer classification would be much easier, regardless of the sensory perception involved.

ShootsNRoots said:

One use for this would be to give a computer the ability to formulate beer recipes for different styles.

You could ask the computer for an IPA, APA, Wheat or what have you and it could give you a reasonable recipe.

The usefulness of this would be beyond the immediate recipe formulation and more into what combinations/permutations of ingredients haven't been tried yet that may produce a good beer.

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You could take it a step further and it could look at your inventory and give you say 3 different ways to make an APA with what you have.

passedpawn said:

With the wild diversity of life on this planet, you'd think the same would be true of biological classification. Yet, is is done. I would think that beer classification would be much easier, regardless of the sensory perception involved.

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With biological classification, though, we're aided by the remarkable self-categorizing nature of genetics: a horse can't impregnate a grasshopper.

Clearly we can make distinctions, and that's why the BJCP style guide is so useful. But the distinctions are made on the basis of perceptual properties that are deeply uncooperative with formal representation. What does it mean for Saaz to be "spicy"? Could you explain it in terms that a computer could understand?

MalFet said:

With biological classification, though, we're aided by the remarkable self-categorizing nature of genetics: a horse can't impregnate a grasshopper.

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Hybrids and chimera. Gray areas everywhere in the classification process.

Clearly we can make distinctions, and that's why the BJCP style guide is so useful. But the distinctions are made on the basis of perceptual properties that are deeply uncooperative with formal representation. What does it mean for Saaz to be "spicy"? Could you explain it in terms that a computer could understand?

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Right. It's not easy, and even when it's done, there will be semantics that affect the usefulness of it. But I am 100% for the effort (especially because I'm not doing it).

If there isn't a language of sensory perception, then one will need to be created. Given a finite set of terms that describe something, the classification can begin. Perhaps spicy is one of the terms... I don't know.

passedpawn said:

Hybrids and chimera. Gray areas everywhere in the classification process.



Right. It's not easy, and even when it's done, there will be semantics that affect the usefulness of it. But I am 100% for the effort (especially because I'm not doing it).

If there isn't a language of sensory perception, then one will need to be created. Given a finite set of terms that describe something, the classification can begin. Perhaps spicy is one of the terms... I don't know.

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How would your spicy match up to someone else s, how bitter tasting is an IPA to you vs. your wife?
How will perceptions be defined? judging uses multiple judges for this reason no two palates are the same.

smakudwn said:

You could take it a step further and it could look at your inventory and give you say 3 different ways to make an APA with what you have.

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'Zactly!

smakudwn said:

You could take it a step further and it could look at your inventory and give you say 3 different ways to make an APA with what you have.

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I already addressed this in my post. This is certainly an example of what a computer can do, but it does not demonstrate usefulness. I can already easily accomplish that exercise using common sense. Teaching my computer to do it for me might be "neat-o" in an academic sense, but I fail to see real utility.

Don't get me wrong - I'm all for computers for problem solving. My degree is in computer science. I use computers to solve all kinds of problems/increase efficiency at work and at home. In this instance, though, I fail to see the problem that needs solving. By my perception, this thread is a circular argument that goes something like this:

"What's the problem?"
"We don't have an ontology."
"Why do we need an ontology?"
"Because we don't have one."
"What's an ontology used for?"
"Solving problems."
"So what's the problem?"
"We don't have an ontology."

By the way, the reason I keep following the thread and/or questioning the ideas is that on some level, I think there could be an interesting concept here. I'm just not quite sure what it is yet.

passedpawn said:

Hybrids and chimera. Gray areas everywhere in the classification process.

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At a sub-species level, absolutely...which is why sub-species taxonomies are usually a complete train wreck. The remarkable thing about inter-species hybrids is how rare they actually are and, when it happens, the offspring is generally sterile. To a significant degree, nature imposes its own order; we don't need to.

passedpawn said:

If there isn't a language of sensory perception, then one will need to be created. Given a finite set of terms that describe something, the classification can begin. Perhaps spicy is one of the terms... I don't know.

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Right, that's what I'm saying though: there is a lot of research to suggest that a formal ontology of perception isn't even possible because perceptual phenomena don't have an objective reality in the way that, say, species do. I can't recommend Stan Hieronymus's new book enough, as makes this case far more articulately than I'll ever be able to.

There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of the more straight-forward ones is just physiology. Say there are 1000 olfactory sensors in the human species. The thing is, any given person will have only half of them. You and I could smell the same thing and have physiological responses with literally zero overlap. That would be relatively unlikely, of course, but it's essentially guaranteed that our experiences will overlap only partially.

Throw on top of this the fact that a great deal of smell processing is routed through memory, and the idea that we might produce an formal account of olfactory perception gets interesting (and maybe not in a good way). The goal here is to produce an objective account of an experience, but experience is the thing you need to take away to have objectivity. If you take the experience of smell away from smell, is there anything left?

MalFet said:

Right, that's what I'm saying though: there is a lot of research to suggest that a formal ontology of perception isn't even possible because perceptual phenomena don't have an objective reality in the way that, say, species do. I can't recommend Stan Hieronymus's new book enough, as makes this case far more articulately than I'll ever be able to.

There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of the more straight-forward ones is just physiology. Say there are 1000 olfactory sensors in the human species. The thing is, any given person will have only half of them. You and I could smell the same thing and have physiological responses with literally zero overlap. That would be relatively unlikely, of course, but it's essentially guaranteed that our experiences will overlap only partially.

Throw on top of this the fact that a great deal of smell processing is routed through memory, and the idea that we might produce an formal account of olfactory perception gets interesting (and maybe not in a good way). The goal here is to produce an objective account of an experience, but experience is the thing you need to take away to have objectivity. If you take the experience of smell away from smell, is there anything left?

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I'll check out the hops book. I wasn't a big fan of Brew like a Monk - very messy but entertaining.

I disagree that smell can't be objectively judged by different people. While we might make different associations with that smell based on something deep in our brain, we both smell the same thing. Music is the same way: you and I can listen to the same song, but we might be affected very differently. We still would agree that we heard the same song.

If we put 100 people in a room, blindfolded them, then fed them bananas, how many of them do you think wouldn't recognize that flavor?

My dad is color blind.

passedpawn said:

I'll check out the hops book. I wasn't a big fan of Brew like a Monk - very messy but entertaining.

I disagree that smell can't be objectively judged by different people. While we might make different associations with that smell based on something deep in our brain, we both smell the same thing. Music is the same way: you and I can listen to the same song, but we might be affected very differently. We still would agree that we heard the same song.

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The argument here (and I'm certainly not an expert on the science behind it) is that it's not the same as music because it's not just about association. Unlike with sound, the electrochemical analog to a smelled stimulus is substantially different for different people.

passedpawn said:

If we put 100 people in a room, blindfolded them, then fed them bananas, how many of them do you think wouldn't recognize that flavor?

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That's the wrong experiment, though, because presumably all of these people have had a banana before. Nobody is disputing that people remember past experiences and can compare them to present ones.

An ontology of perception, on the other hand, would allow you to describe -- perfectly and unambiguously -- what a banana smells and tastes like to somebody who has never had one before. That is a much taller order.

Yuri_Rage said:

"What's the problem?"
"We don't have an ontology."
"Why do we need an ontology?"
"Because we don't have one."
"What's an ontology used for?"
"Solving problems."
"So what's the problem?"
"We don't have an ontology."

By the way, the reason I keep following the thread and/or questioning the ideas is that on some level, I think there could be an interesting concept here. I'm just not quite sure what it is yet.

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Yeah, I just don't quite understand what the point of doing it would be. I'm intrigued, but not certain of the usefulness of it.

MalFet said:

That's the wrong experiment, though, because presumably all of these people have had a banana before. Nobody is disputing that people remember past experiences and can compare them to present ones.

An ontology of perception, on the other hand, would allow you to describe -- perfectly and unambiguously -- what a banana smells and tastes like to somebody who has never had one before. That is a much taller order.

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Yea, that's a really good point. I'll have to think on it. Imagine describing the color red to a blind person.

MalFet said:

An ontology of perception, on the other hand, would allow you to describe -- perfectly and unambiguously -- what a banana smells and tastes like to somebody who has never had one before. That is a much taller order.

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OK, I thought on it.

We don't do that though - we don't expect to describe the flavor or aroma of beer in new terms that were not experienced previously. In fact, we do just the opposite: we use terms that people are familiar with to describe flavors. I.e., we might describe a flavor of a hop as tropical fruit, or mango.

Maybe that doesn't work for whatever-the-hell an ontology is. But for my own classification of (in this example) El Dorado hops, used as a late addition, it would work fine. Even if I never had tasted a beer with El Dorado hops, I'd understand the description when given terms like "mango". (well, maybe, I admit I don't eat much mango).

passedpawn said:

OK, I thought on it.

We don't do that though - we don't expect to describe the flavor or aroma of beer in new terms that were not experienced previously. In fact, we do just the opposite: we use terms that people are familiar with to describe flavors. I.e., we might describe a flavor of a hop as tropical fruit, or mango.

Maybe that doesn't work for whatever-the-hell an ontology is. But for my own classification of (in this example) El Dorado hops, used as a late addition, it would work fine. Even if I never had tasted a beer with El Dorado hops, I'd understand the description when given terms like "mango". (well, maybe, I admit I don't eat much mango).

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Indeed, and that's why things like the BJCP style guide and hops catalogs are useful. Even if people have different physiological responses to the same stimulus, there are broad trends between people (it's not a coincidence that just about everyone likes mangoes) and between substances (cascade is citrusy because it shares some chemical properties with citrus fruit).

But those comparisons are imperfect. A particular hop might remind you of mangoes because there is a high level of some olfactory compound in both, but if I'm not very sensitive to that particular compound I might not find them similar at all. It's like the old quinine experiments they used to do in high school chemistry classes: some people can detect incredibly small concentrations of quinine and find it very bitter, but other people can barely perceive it at all even at high doses.

Does this matter? Precisely to the extent that an ontology is different than a description. Descriptions are tremendously useful, and I certainly don't want to imply that it's impossible to talk meaningfully about how beers are similar or different to each other. Quite the contrary. But, it's inherently imperfect because it attempts to put a subjective experience into objective language. If you were sharing your mango IPA with a friend and he said that he didn't get mango so much as passion fruit, it's not as though he'd be wrong necessarily. You might just be perceiving slightly different things.

But ontologies don't really allow for that. The heart and soul of a formal representation is that it needs to be objective, categorical, and unambiguous. Good approximations don't cut it here, though they're perfectly fine for a good description. Is that a bad thing? I don't think so. I think the fact that a beer cannot be perfectly reduced to an information structure is one of the most wonderful things about the world.