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At 09:21 AM 12/18/00 -0700, Uche Ogbuji wrote: >Then again, it depends on what you need from "ontology". If, as I >think Martin Bryan suggests, you want a complete reasoning engine from >first principles, then you'd better be channelling Choamsky and >Wittgenstein and exorcising Deridda because you're gonna need a _lot_ >more firepower than constraints, address _or_ subject identity. Heh. Exorcising Derrida is a lot harder than it seems - too many computing folks seem to forget (or deride) that. I'd love to hear more folks taking the contingent nature of communications, including XML communications, more seriously - as an accepted foundation, not as a problem. There's more going on than just nailed-down semantics and well-understood content, and there always will be in any large-scale project. Local understandings - as Walter Perry has made clear a number of times - really do matter. Maybe it's frightening to people who want something more solid to hold on to, but solid often seems to equal brittle... Fortunately, I think tools will evolve to reflect this more flexible world, even the tools created with 'one true ontology' in mind. Schematron's a fine start! Simon St.Laurent XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed. XHTML: Migrating Toward XML http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books
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