Ontologies, Folksonomies, etc.
January 25, 2006Just seen an article here: The Fish Wrapper » Blog Archive » Knocking down bookshelves about some of the problems with ontologies, and how folksonomies are ‘better’.
One of the main gripes is that ontologies force a rigid way of looking a the world, which obviously doesn’t apply to everyone. In the age of hypertext, a multiplicity of hierarchies is better.
Ok, well I agree….sort of. I think the multiple views is good, but I don’t think we need to throw out ontology. The rigidity comes when you only accept a mono-parental inheritance (because then everything is just ONE thing). Once you accept multiple inheritances, that gets a lot easier.
E.g: In my sort of domain, I want to know about people and their illnesses. So sometimes Mrs. Jones is a woman, sometimes she’s a Cancer Patient, and sometimes she’s someone who lives near the hospital. It depends what I want to know. As long as you define the classes properly, you can use them (in effect) as shorthand for queries.
Of course, you can only do this with poly-inheritance - and to do that manually is error-prone (people from Manchester reckoned on about 10% error rate). That’s where reasoners come in: define the classes, and then let the reasoner classify the classes (and the people) as it sees fit…
An additional point, is that W3C’s approach - with RDF, RDFS and OWL - is fundamentally pluralistic by design. We created a system for multiple independently developed ontologies to be mixed-and-matched according to need and whim. The idea that an ontological approaches forces a single rigid view, … is inaccurate w.r.t. the Web. Also, there are “scruffy” ontologies like SKOS that allow simple hierarchical concept schemes to be reflected into RDF.
Comment by Dan Brickley — February 19, 2007 @ 11:58 pm
These comments have been invaluable to me as is this whole site. I thank you for your comment.
Comment by Annerose — June 3, 2007 @ 1:01 pm