Hello Philippe, I thought that I would add some thoughts that are probably not concrete enough to be useful, but who knows? The thread that has been running on ontologies is been very interesting, but has seemingly been polarized in two camps. A school of thought that believes in evolutionary growth and the school that contents that central growth is preferable. I did a search on http://www.google.com with the search term of ontology and I received back 154,000 hits. A link that I followed that was pretty good with sorting out some of the differences in the use of the term was http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/kst/what-is-an-ontology.html It seems that a great deal of work has been done in this field, is there no room for two methods of usage? My opinion is that the "correct" answer if there can be a "correct" answer lies in the middle of the domain. Dr. Ho's evolutionary growth mimics the entropy growth found in the open-source movement which mimics other patterns that others very much more observant then I have seen. However, I think that it has an initial-state problem, in the fact that I don't think it can bootstrap from nothing. One of Eric Raymond's (ESR) preconditions for an successful open-source project is that there has to be something that works partially before anyone starts. Please, I know that ESR papers on open-source have nothing to do with ontology development, but I think that some similar principles are at work. He, (ESR) is much more eloquent then I and if I can explore other ideas from some of his frameworks, then I believe I communicate more effectively. On the other hand, Philippe's centrally managed ontology which will start out strong is vulnerable to being too rigid and vulnerable to organizational and political problems. It has been my experience that an organization will modify or bend rules to accommodate certain clinicians. If a planning community is building a ontology then it is possible that they might be contaminated by political bodies or industry groups. Dr. Ho has pointed out that it may be vulnerable to drift effects as well. My thoughts are to try to build a ontology that has a strong core that can be grown evolutionary from that core. A model that would have a built-in "blindness" to other concepts to allow them to be grown on demand. A search query engine that "knows" what is core and what is not and runs different patterns or methods based on that "knowledge" At some point in the future if the core is obscenest then update the core with the latest snapshot that incorporates key features of the grown "outer" material FM-200 system on standby I await the flames. Todd Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
