Dear All,  (01)
Although my own team痴 approach to ontology differs strongly from the 
mainstream of Ontolog thought, you may find these ideas relevant to 
this thread:
 1. Making and maintaining the meanings of signs used by people will 
always depend upon human judgement and will always resist mechanical 
standardisation. Hence we should live with that fact and put more 
effort into improving the intelligence of human communities and less 
into creating a generalised mechanical form of artificial intelligence 
while still building limited scale, pseudo-intelligent machines.  (02)
 2. Nevertheless, there does exist a very stable structure across 
cultures and time arising from 双ntological dependency?. We arrived 
at this relationship on the basis of an ontology (= an understanding 
about the nature of reality) that takes into account how people 
construct the world they perceive. One thing depends ontologically 
upon others when it can exist only during their coexistence. (For a 
little more see parts of the two papers on www.rstamper.co.uk .)  (03)
 3. This stable semi-lattice structure, serves as a Semantic Normal 
Form, for a Semantic Temporal DataBase. Each node serves as surrogate 
for perceptual unit with a few essential attributes including a start 
and a finish for its existence and an authority for the start and 
finish, which account for the cultural and temporal variations in 
meaning.  (04)
 4. Wherever other perceiving agents furnish information on which we 
base our understanding of the world around us, each of those agents 
contributes to some degree or other towards the meaning we associate 
with the node. The contribution may be the idiosyncratic choice of an 
individual person or it may be defined by a norm that determines a 
start or a finish (think of copyright law) and a norm distributes the 
authority over the many individuals who supply the observations, 
judgements, etc in the conditional part of the norm.  (05)
 5. Although we cannot standardise meanings, we can track more 
carefully the contributions made by different individuals and 
institutions. The stable SNF schema supports a logical process of 
analysis but that can never be sufficient; analysis of the authorities 
tells us about the power exercised by the people who play their 
various roles in the fine tuning of meanings.  (06)
 [6. an aside: The generic-speicific relationships that play a 
major part in the ontolog style ontologies have nothing to do with 
existence relationships in the ontological dependency sense because 
they are cognitive norms, which are themselves dependent on the 
judgements of certain cultures, institutions or even individuals.]  (07)
 Ronald Stamper  (08)
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