Calling all Information Scientists

Heya! Sorry for the radio silence... was on vacation for a while, then dealing with some issues around a startup that I was thinking about getting involved with. anyways.....

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.

Click to expand...

They do, in as much as the ontology structure (and individuals) are provably consistent in a DL sense.... Everything need not fit in a nice box because we have the benefit of open-world reasoning. The only problem is computational tractability, and that's easy enough so long as a good inference profile is chosen.

I did have a great meeting with some folks about this the week before I was traveling. I've spun up a website and registered a persistent URL for namespace convenience. Very soon I'll publish all that information here--I haven't had a chance to publish anything to it yet. I've also stubbed out what I think is a reasonably modular ontology structure that should isolate some of the more contentious areas.

I'll get back to it sometime this week and let you all know.

-b

blakelyc said:

They do, in as much as the ontology structure (and individuals) are provably consistent in a DL sense.... Everything need not fit in a nice box because we have the benefit of open-world reasoning. The only problem is computational tractability, and that's easy enough so long as a good inference profile is chosen.

Click to expand...

That's the rub, though, eh? Despite a few centuries of positive scientific interest in the topic, we're nowhere even near "provably consistent".

If you're interested, here's a reasonably balanced article about the state of the art in psychophysics. The author is relatively optimistic about the future, but there's relatively little doubt that the present is pretty dismal.
http://chemse.oxfordjournals.org/content/25/4/429.full