Raw

I just got back from taking Basildog around the reservoir. For my listening pleasure I took the recording of Clay Shirky's presentation Ontology is Overrated. Given some of his material I've read in the past I expected to find a lot to disagree with. He starts by pointing out that library categorization scheme are optimised for organising books. Du-uh. But my prejudice was gradually eroded. It turned out quite the opposite opposite of my expectations, he actually does a very good job of highlighting some of the issues involved in traditional approaches to categorization, taxonomies and ontologies. In defence of my initial assumptions, there were one or two non-sequiturs and a bit of circular reasoning. Also it would be easy to make incorrect extrapolations - for example that ontology languages are incapable of dealing with schemes that are constructed post hoc, or probabilistic data. But most of what he says makes a lot of sense, and there are some really good insights. His title is a little misleading, never judge a book by its cover I guess. Worthy stuff.

When I got back from the walk I discovered another bit of stuff in my inbox. Earlier Jimmy had sung the praises of the univers immedia group blog, and I'd forwarded his comment to Jack Park one the the blog contributors with whom I've had intercourse* in the past. Subsequent intercourse** led to Bernard Vatant pointing to a bit of stuff that deserves contemplation. This is a set of slides The Wheel and the Spoke (PDF). Bernard describes a knowledge representation conundrum, that "Same-ness rules are context-specific". He then proposes a simple approach to synthesis which would allow semantic interoperability. This is the notion of hubjects, where Hub + Subject = Hubject.

Hubjects are hollow

• They do not provide any more semantics
  
  than the representations they are binding
• No specific type, attribute, property or semantic of any kind

- it's a little unfair to quote that out of context, in the slides he's got a lovely binding to Lao Tsu verse. Compelling stuff.

* I nearly said "conversation", but that word's now totally trite, rendered meaningless by the thought leaders of the blogosphere

** whereas this word gets funnier the more you say it

[Danny]