Richard:Interesting, but I am araid that whenever I see someone report a
project
to collect all the world's knowledge in a nice, centralized format (Cyc,
and Daughters-of-Cyc) I cannot help but think of one of the early
chapters in Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, were Wilkins, Leibnitz and
others are trying to form a universal grammar in which all the world's
facts can be organized in such a way that a (essentially) a thinking
machine can be built.
This is an excellent comment. I had a similar thought - I am reminded of and
recommend here Umberto Eco's The Search for the Perfect Language, which also
deals with Wilkins' and others' attempts to create an ontology for language.
I guess Roget also offers an ontology of sorts. Is there a good book that
covers all these ontologies? There is value in them, but it's also important
to understand why they are all doomed to ultimate failure and rarely gain
acceptance - why there can't be definitive indices. And I don't have a good
philosophical explanation.
P.S. The casual thought that occurs is that perhaps the "A-Z" has become one
kind at least of definitive index, but it has done so by being very
open-to-change, and not a subject or ontological index.
-------------------------------------------
agi
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