Approach from Tagging

ontology

Ontology is a form of classification which may be thought of as "conceptual" relationships. Whereas in a taxonomy terms may be classified together as "fruit", in an ontology the conceptual relationship may be "fruit which are used in pies" or "growing fruit for sale". Ontological relationships are inherently self-describing. Ontologies are the backbone of the semantic web, as they provide multiple links to data and therefore can support search and insightful navigation. — Source

Problem, I see: The meaning of "fruit which are used in pies" is not accessible to the machine. The machine depends on this kind of "knowledge" given to it, cannot exceed the borders resulting from that kind of knowledge. For short: The machine is unable to determine by itself whether or not a given item belongs to a "fruit which are used in pies" relationship, if nowhere is stated that this is the case. Same for different kinds of thesaurus relationships ("broader term", "narrower term", etc.), which I originally criticised.


I avoided to touch the semantic web attempt, since I feared such a kind of approach. Now, when I had to look up taxonomy, classification, terminology, etc. to avoid to mess them up, I came across the above statement, that the semantic web in fact approaches this way. Sad.

In my opinion, a machine needs a way, to get competence to decide. Knowledge to make the decision on. Knowledge on knowledge. Knowledge on knowledge to get able to verify its own knowledge. As long as there are parts of the machine's knowledge the machine cannot access, it hasn't got a chance to get independent of external minds, e.g. humans.

I don't think that the best approach to achieve that goal is to stack more and more complexity/abstraction layers on the already not-working attempts. Instead, I think, it is necessary to determine a way to make most basic knowledge accessible to the machine, in a way that the machine doesn't have to depend on externally given knowledge. I think, that if that basic goal is achieved, more complex kinds of content/knowledge can be built atop.<<

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Updates: 20070624: Tagged the posting. Updated the posting style (layout) to my current style, such as using blockquotes when appropriate, more precise word picks, better grammar.