{"id":417,"date":"2003-11-10T10:44:39","date_gmt":"2003-11-10T08:44:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.multiplicity.dk\/?p=417"},"modified":"2003-11-10T10:44:39","modified_gmt":"2003-11-10T08:44:39","slug":"semantic-web-syllogisms-global-ontologies-and-blue-eyed-ideals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/krag.be\/index.php\/2003\/11\/10\/semantic-web-syllogisms-global-ontologies-and-blue-eyed-ideals\/","title":{"rendered":"Semantic Web – Syllogisms, Global Ontologies and blue-eyed ideals"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shirky: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview<\/a><\/p>\n

Clay Shirky delivers the most concise, accurate and true criticism of the so-called Semantic Web<\/a>. It’s a very weel-argued criticism, derailing the whole idea of a global ontology, and pointing out that a universal system based on Syllogisms will fail at the really difficult part, namely dealing with uncertainties, generalisations and half-truths. The same uncertainties, generalisations and half-truths that humans base pretty much all our conversations and value-statements on. It’s insightful for anyone who’s been grasped by the ‘sweetness’ of the semantic web vision and confirming for anyone who’s been a sceptic all along. <\/p>\n

Oh, and interesting for anyone who’s never given the sematic web a second thought (much like myself), because it deals with larger issues, i.e, the (un)likeliness of ever coming up with a global, machine-understandable ontology, and the general idea of solving the trivial problems, and ignoring the hard ones, that seems to be a favourite amongst techies everywhere (myself definitely included \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

Any attempt at a global ontology is doomed to fail, because meta-data describes a worldview. The designers of the Soviet library’s cataloging system were making an assertion about the world when they made the first category of books “Works of the classical authors of Marxism-Leninism.” Charles Dewey was making an assertion about the world when he lumped all books about non-Christian religions into a single category, listed last among books about religion. It is not possible to neatly map these two systems onto one another, or onto other classification schemes — they describe different kinds of worlds.<\/p>\n

Because meta-data describes a worldview, incompatibility is an inevitable by-product of vigorous argument. It would be relatively easy, for example, to encode a description of genes in XML, but it would be impossible to get a universal standard for such a description, because biologists are still arguing about what a gene actually is. There are several competing standards for describing genetic information, and the semantic divergence is an artifact of a real conversation among biologists. You can’t get a standard til you have an agreement, and you can’t force an agreement to exist where none actually does.<\/bq><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shirky: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview Clay Shirky delivers the most concise, accurate and true criticism of the so-called Semantic Web. It’s a very weel-argued criticism, derailing the whole idea of a global ontology, and pointing out that a universal system based on Syllogisms will fail at the really difficult part, namely dealing with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[14,1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nSemantic Web - Syllogisms, Global Ontologies and blue-eyed ideals • krag.be<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/krag.be\/index.php\/2003\/11\/10\/semantic-web-syllogisms-global-ontologies-and-blue-eyed-ideals\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Semantic Web - Syllogisms, Global Ontologies and blue-eyed ideals • krag.be\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Shirky: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview Clay Shirky delivers the most concise, accurate and true criticism of the so-called Semantic Web. 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