Today, I read the article: Ontology is Overrated : Categories, Links, and Tags finally, which has been stayed in my book list for more than one week.
"Is ontology overrated ?" It is a problem worthy of discussion. Currently more and more people is getting involved over this point. I find another related article just now: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview (supposed to look into it later). Eventually, whatever the answer is we will make things more clearly . 数据挖掘研究院
1. Ontology vs. classification
Fisrt of all, I think it is a pity that although the aritcile is entitled with "ontology is overratted" and that the ontology is mentioned and defined in the article, much more discussions are done around classification instead of ontology.
1.1. An ontology is not a classification schema 数据挖掘研究院
Yes, ontology and classification has something in common: they make some statements about the world(either the world as a whole a in a particular domain.) But the statements are done in the totally different manners.
The purpose of ontology is to descrbie/explain concepts. while classifcation focused on classificatoin things. (Although sometimes concepts are organized terminologically, which makes people feel that ontology are similar to classification schema.) 数据挖掘实验室
With ontology, we try to explain what a stuff really is, not to build an judging system like classification does. So ontology in fact wants to struggle out of the difficult situations classification met with: no single perfect classificatoin system fit for the whole world.
We have different classification schemas based on different consideratoins(attributes of the realthings). Ontology provides those considerations we can mentioned about, based on which classification schema can be formed dynamically.
To take all kinds of attributes of real things into consideration is an essetial difference between ontology and classification schema.That makes ontology avoid the problem of single classification.
1.2. no perfect ontology for the whole world, too. 数据挖掘研究院
I have mentioned before, ontology is a conceptualization. Does there exists a perfect conceptualization for the whole world? Still the answer is NO. 数据挖掘研究院
So my point is that, the question "Is ontology overrated ?" is worthy of exploring, but the negative answer should not be concluded from the analysis on classification system.
2. ontology vs. tags
Most of the critics on ontology/semantic web comes from the tagging campaign.
Yes, I admit the usefulness and flexibility of tagging. I pay much attention into tagging too. But will tagging be an substitute (ender) of ontology? Of course NO.
what does tagging bring us?
We can′t find an organized web by tagging, which means tagging is not indexing, although we may mis-think it is. To my point of view, tagging is just like the common web pages we browsing everyday. It is information, it links to anywhere, it is semantically ambiguous.
The sparkle point of tagging is: people get evolved in. We can express(to ourselved, to computer, to the others in the world) what we think this article is about. By this kind of expression, 1)virtual communities can be found,and 2)machine need not have to do as much guessing (statistic) work as before. 数据挖掘研究院
But tags mess and we may get a tag-flood too. So tags should be managed. As search engine manages web pages. 数据挖掘研究院
One of many possible problems of tagging is the semantic ambiguous. e.g. How can we know MAC and APPLE has the same meaning? Or, we know they are the same ,but computers put them too far away for us to finding the other.
Someone argues that we just guess the distances based on the pages they tagged. This, just proves what I′ve said that tags should be managed as the webpages. 数据挖掘实验室
But is the guessing-method the only way? Of course we can explain the semantics of tags by ontology.
3. human readable vs. machine readable
It is interesting that recently I begin to thinking that why semantic web get so many suspicion? Because semantic web put more attentions on the machines side instead of the side of human beging. (The target of semantic web is to build an machine readable web, so that we can provid better service to people. ) 数据挖掘研究院
While there are many we can do to provide a better service without machine understadable. Such as tagging and blogging. Tagging pay more attention to people directly.
They will meet somewhere. 数据挖掘实验室
4. Is ontology overrated? 数据挖掘研究院
Ontology makes a beautiful promise, how far can we go?
