Ontologizers All,

I found this quote on a SEMWEB list:

“(_X) tells me that empirical evidence suggests that using a larger number of relationships correlates to poorer ontologies.”

Note that _X reportedly used the descriptive word “relationship”, not the usual suspect “relation”, so the total number of tuples/rows/records in each relation that involves the ontology, summed over all such relations, would seem to capture the intuitive meaning of that phrase.

Is quality really inversely proportional to the number of relation-rows in sum total? That would be an expensive, but easily implemented way to measure the “number of relationships” as suggested by _X. Optimization could then drive the computing cost down to just maintaining a count with each ontology, I suppose.

Also, do others consider this metric validly described as “empirical evidence”? I’m sure there are examples having many duplicated relationships which actually correspond to only a single “essential” relationship.

But what is empirical to one ontologist seems to be the next ontologist’s formal system, and the previous ontologist’s intuitively obvious fact. We each see an ontology distorted through our subjective, focused lenses. Same as we used to see just entities, properties, relationships and domains.