[FRIAM] An Overview of Dark Matter – Sasha Manu – Medium

[Gary Schiltz]

My exposure to the term "ontology" was primarily through work on the
overhyped "semantic web" popularized a decade or so ago. As I see it, this
use of the term refers to a means for specifying a distributed schema for
data description, using logic constructs. Early work sponsored by DARPA
resulted in DAML/OIL, which was eventually supplanted by OWL, an effort
supported by W3C. I must admit I drank a fair amount of the semantic web
Kool-Aid in the 2000s at NCGR (it was the most flavorful Kool-Aid available
in Santa Fe when I was looking for a job after the Complexity flavor sort
of ran dry). I had also drank a fair amount of AI Kool-Aid in the 1980s
until that flavor froze in the AI winter. Now, a decade later, I think the
semantic web hype has pretty much died out - I was just reading "Whatever
happened to the semantic web" (
https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html). I find it
interesting that AI (in name, anyway) is making another resurgence. Enough
rambling...

On Thu, Dec 27, 2018 at 3:56 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> I hate that use of the word with as much passion as I hate the (modern)
> use of methodology.  I cringe every time I read some simulation paper or
> see a talk where they use "methodologies".  Ugh.  What in hell's wrong with
> "methods"?  Why do those blasted kids have to abuse language so badly?  Get
> off my lawn!
>
> I get especially annoyed with "ontologies" when the person I'm talking to
> fails to understand their "ontology"  can be automatically translated to
> another "ontology" with things like XSLT.  And when we can
> (semi-automatically) parallax several "ontologies" so as to find out how
> much one covers another or which one is more general than the others, which
> have the same network but different terms, etc. perhaps to land on one
> that's more stable and useful, what are we then _doing_?!?!  What do we
> call that discipline if not _ontology_?!?! [sigh]  But it's directly
> related to the other thread, of course.  Why can't we call both the set of
> concepts *and* statements about the set of concepts by the same name?
>
> On 12/27/18 9:21 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:
> > I was reading a science article which used "ontology" in a way I was not
> > familiar with.
> >
> > https://medium.com/@sasha.manu95/an-overview-of-dark-matter-9aa5d024d65d
> >
> >> One of the oldest projects in science involves constructing a
> fundamental
> >> ontology.
> >
> >
> > So I Googled "ontology" and got a definition along with a graph of usage
> > over time!
> >
> > So apparently their use was the second, the "spanning set" of concepts
> > within a field .. maybe primarily scientific/technical.
>
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
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