On 18 Jun 2011, at 13:20, Kingsley Idehen wrote: > On 6/18/11 12:16 PM, Kingsley Idehen wrote: >> On 6/18/11 8:58 AM, Henry Story wrote: >>> >>> The recent discussions on this list were very much about how to avoid >>> making distinctions unless you have to (Just-In-Time Distinctions?) So why >>> are the above distinctions needed? Particularly with regard to this >>> conversation. >>> >> >> A root of these conversations lie confusion that results from conflating a >> variety of things. If we separate items into appropriate boxes we stand a >> chance of clarity en route to success. >> >> There are deep unresolved matters that will trigger threads likes these, >> repeatedly. My conflation list is in my last post :-) >> > *At* the root of these conversations lie confusion that results from > conflating a variety of things. If we separate items into appropriate boxes > we stand a chance of clarity en route to success.
Every distinction comes at a cost. Say it takes 20 minutes to explain to someone that where they saw As there are in fact A1s, A2s and A3s . Now say you need to explain that to 1 billion people. That is 333 million hours of time taken to explain that distinction. Of course if there are 2 people, a teacher and a listener that is then 666 million hours taken to explain this at a cost to the economy of 7 billion dollars (if we take the low salary of $10 an hour). So the distinction would need to generate more value that that to be worth growing. Now of course in a computerised world, the teaching part can be automated, so that perhaps after covering engineering costs the whole cost to the general economy is 4 billion dollars. If the distinction then helps make the interactions between all those users more than 4 billion dollars more efficient, especially if this is distributed around to each individual, then the distinction has a chance of spreading that wide. So when people discuss if the distinction between a URI for an object and a URI for a page is worth making, it really depends to whom. Initially it may not be worth trying to teach such a distinction to a very large crowd. If one can get their behaviour to be in tune with the distinction without them needing to be immediately aware of it, one can save oneself a lot of money. It is a question of knowing who needs to be tought what, and in what order. Human beings have managed to get very far on the back of mass ignorance of most things. It is only with the developing technical civilisation that mass literacy had to be brought into place at a huge cost to the state, for clearly even greater benefit. The cost of thinking is great, but most people do learn to use their head, as the advantages provided by it are dramatic. Most people don't know how they think though. So they can think without knowing that much about how they do it. So when creating an ontology one could try to design it in such a way that users of those relations would not need many distinctions to get going. "Like" is a good example of something that simple. It builds on the ability of humans to work out what the appropriate object of a "like" is. When we get to computers reasoning in a low contextual space such as the web we need tools such as those provided by the semantic web. Of all possible ontologies (all possible distinctions) some are going to be more valuable to a larger crowd. Then there may be ways even there of reducing the distinctions needed to teach such a crowd. Using DocumentObject ontologies with relations that reduce the distinctions needed by a user of the ontology to get it right, might if done right not reduce the inferential ability of the system that much whilst reducing the need to teach many people some distinctions. It may be that the subject worth developing is such a psychosocial economics of ontology development, which takes the cost of distinctions into account. Henry > > There are deep unresolved matters that will trigger threads likes these, > repeatedly. My conflation list is in my last post :-) > > -- > > Regards, > > Kingsley Idehen > President& CEO > OpenLink Software > Web: http://www.openlinksw.com > Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen > Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen > > > > > > Social Web Architect http://bblfish.net/
