Well, this thread had gotten interesting
A few items related to earlier posts:
Yes... quantitative characteristics are necessary, but not sufficient to fully define a beer style. They get you in the neighborhood, though.
yet you have said literally nothing about which properties of beer you would like to ontologize. There are a handful of quantifications available, but the bulk of a beer's characteristics are highly subjective. This isn't a formal system.
This is the problem space, more or less. We have a set of measured criteria, but the natural language descriptions contain most of the real interesting information. If it was all measurement, then the problem of defining a beer style is closed-world, easy, and boring. But, as you point out, that isn't the case. The question of what properties of beer I want to ontologize is an interesting one, because I don't know. The point is to develop an ontology that attempts to model all the characteristics of a style. Parsing the language and defining the characteristics is very much part of the work.
The BJCP style guide provides a shared vocabulary for description, but beyond that your enthusiasm for classification seems to lack a clear understanding of why classification might be justified. Sometimes, when all you've got is a hammer...
Except they don't... nor does any other beer style guide. Style guides contain the descriptions themselves, not a shared vocabulary for making such descriptions. Aside from that, I have no great love for classification. That's a taxonomist's job, and I very much appreciate the work those folks do... but it ain't me. Ontological modeling is not about classification. It is about defining exactly what is means to be a member of a class, and what your relationships are to things of other classes.
For someone supposedly schooled in the art (or perhaps even science) of information, the OP is having an awfully hard time conveying the same. I would like to see an update, as an academic venture attempting to somehow quantify vague and/or subjective concepts (like sensory perception of beer) is interesting...if that is indeed the intent of the OP.
While I didn't intend for this thread to devolve into an alpha-dog discussion of one's resume and what one is supposedly schooled in (see the hammer comment, above), I am more than happy to follow up on this request. I have actually come into contact with an ontologist(home brewer) and another information scientist (beer geek). We've put together a plan to create an abstract pitch for a presentation at a the semantic technology conference in NYC in October (assuming the conference happens... the last one was relatively sparse).
So, I'm more than happy to start posting on this thread links to the ontologies themselves (or questions about how they should be), links to the website, and various versions of the paper. It's much more productive if we steer this thread back in that direction.
At the end of the day, I suppose I'm creating something that may be of use to everyone or no one. Or, it may fail altogether. But that's the nature of inquiry. If we took everything at face value, there wouldn't be much discovery in the world