John
I wonder if you could expand a little on why you
say this, because it conflicts with my experience:
>
> JS: If you listen to the
philosophers, they will tell you that identity
> conditions are essential
to ontology. But for interoperability, you
> have to *ignore* the
identity conditions. When you're linking your
> DB or KB to the
Amazon.com schema, you *never* want to worry about
> whether a human being
is a 3D or 4D entity or whether a vase is
> identical to the lump of clay
from which it is made.
>
but you do worry which edition,
format or version of the item you are referring to. That is critically
reliant on the uniqueness of identifiers like ISBN or UPC. The sheer volume of
data out there now, and the proliferation and increasing granularity of
media/content/product types and identifier standards (or lack of them)
place growing reliance on supporting metadata to ensure the correct mapping
of identities - which is, ultimately, at the
heart of interoperability, whether we are talking about identities of
people, stuff or of ontological concepts. Try finding all the products by
any one particular "John Smith" (but not the others) on Amazon to see
the centrality of identity management to interoperability.
Integrating personal data from the web is highly prone to inaccuracy
for exactly that reason. I'm talking from
experience of the content industries, but I would be surprised if this tendency
to proliferation and the attendant increased risk of ambiguity is not
mirrored in other domains.
I think the centrality of
identity management is even more obvious with ontological or
linguistic terms, because they lack well-administered standard identifiers: one
of the fundamental problems of interoperability (demonstrated eloquently and
daily in this forum) is of course whether my class "vase" or
"clay" is the same as your class "vase" or "clay": I'd say that
is *all* to do with identity conditions.
But you are quite well aware of this I am sure, so
what am I misunderstanding?
Godfrey
Godfrey Rust
Chief Data
Architect
Rightscom/Ontologyx
Linton House LG01
164/180 Union Street,
London SE1 0LH
www.rightscom.comDirect +20 8579
8655
Rightscom Office +20 7620 4433
Mobile 07967 963674
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