Dear Matthew, David and John,

Matthew wrote:

It is really rather easy to create an ontology of names, what they represent, and who uses them in what context.

The problem isn’t in ease of creation, but in consistent use by multiple people. On this list, we have consistently found that people vehemently disagree on the “proper” way to model concepts with ontologies. Our history of finding agreement indicates that it is very difficult to construct ontologies that many people agree on. Only very, very simple things such as Dublin Core have found widespread usage.

By contrast, David’s example of the policy number, which one would expect to be well understood within the insurance business, by his stated experience, isn’t so well understood. The problem is with the observers of any ontology; we don’t all see the same meaning in a given rendering of concepts.

After a lot of thought, and from years of discussion with well qualified people on this list, I have come to the conclusion that ontology is simply one way of rendering reality. Ontologies have not in general satisfied large groups of observers because every observer has a unique, distinct, and very complex model of those simple concepts which we throw around with variant lexicons.

The problem is that we don’t all have the same experience. It is our individual differences in experience that leads us to think in different sequences with different observations of the same phenomenon. I don’t see how that problem can be solved by monolithic ontological terms.

Instead, problem reduction methods such as top down structured programming, and packaging methods such as object oriented programming and client server architectures have made dramatically effective inroads toward constructing large software systems that mostly work as intended.

I suggest that ontologists should take the same viewpoint because it has worked so well there. Instead of insisting on a singular meaning, a singular ontology, a singular way of doing things, we should be more open to pluralities of ontology as just another art form that is juggled differently by each observer. In Chairman Mao Zedong’s terms, let a million ontologies flourish.

Singular ontology just hasn’t worked out and it looks like it never will.

-Rich

Dear David,

Of course.